Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (review)

166 Reviews Hall, when he knows that many of the Earl of Leicester's MSS. entered the Bodleian Library in the nineteen-sixties and seventies? What is 'Cod. Cod. 2723' in the National Library of Austria? The collection of essays constitutes, nevertheless, a significant advance in our knowledge of bilingual lexicons, and I recommend its purchase not only by individual medievalists but also by libraries concerned with medieval texts. K. V Sinclair Canberra A.C.T. Hawkes, Terence, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (New Accents), 1996 London and N e w York, Routledge, 1996; paper; pp. xii, 294; R.R.P. US$17.95, £9.99. The ten essays in this second volume of Alternative Shakespeares exhibit t range of issues with which Shakespearean scholarship in the 'nineties is concerned: body, mind, text, sexuality, gender, race, cultural difference, the gaze. Anyone in search of that phantasmatic entity 'the plays themselves' is told sternly at the outset, 'the aesthetic analysis of literary texts' can no longer constitute an appropriate project for literary criticism, particularly of Shakespeare' (p. 10). Instead these essays interpret Shakespeare's works as part of 'an ensemble of signifying practices', aiming to locate them 'in the context of the larger material social process' (p. 7). The bias towards Renaissance material culture yields much that is of interest except a sense of Shakespeare as the author of discrete, performable plays. The absence of any discussion of Shakespeare on stage or screen means that the volume as a whole bears out Keir Elam's comment on Shakespearean 'corporeal criticism', that it 'is altogether removed from our o w n theatrical culture' (p. 160). Individual essays impress by their breadth of learning. In her essay 'Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Descartes' Margreta De Grazia traces in fascinating detail the way that gendered metaphors of mental generation structured the 'reproductive technology' (p. 94) of the printing press. Shakespeare 's language provides 'examples' of 'the way the mechanics of the imprint . . . worked itself into the semantics of the period' (p. 82). De Grazia's analysis of this discursive alchemy is dazzling: she demonstrates the conflation of sexual and textual generation in the Western literary and technological traditions. The centrality of Shakespeare to her argument is debatable: might not the writing of Middleton or Milton yield equally rich results? Philip Armstrong also investigates metaphors of imprinting in his essay 'Watching Hamlet watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage'. Here the metaphor of imprinting or impressing describes the two-way transaction between the Elizabethan theatre and its audience, a relationship in which the Reviews 167 theatre is no mere passive reflector but an active agent of society, and of the individuals that society comprises, having the power to 'form, inform and reform identity and behaviour' (p. 220). Armstrong illustrates that for both Elizabethan and post-modern audiences the process of watching drama involves the risk of participation: 'theatre . . . perpetually contaminates the position of pure spectatorship, precipitating its audience into (the) action' (p. 229). The beauty of his approach is that it lends itself equally well to the dassroom as to the highbrow terrain of the symbolic and imaginary registers and 'the problem of the real' (p. 237). The idea that plays engage their spectators with issues of human motivation and response is echoed in Alan Sinfield's suggestion that w e read Elizabethan playtexts as 'opening out unresolved faultlines, inviting spectators to explore imaginatively the different possibilities' (p. 136). Sinfield does this in his readings of The Merchant ofVenice andTwelfth Night, readings informed by the widely currrent argument that the Renaissance notion of friendship encompassed what w e call homoeroticism. He wittily suggests that 'Antonio need not appear at the end of Twelfth Night as the defeated and melancholy outsider that critics have supposed; a director might even show him delighted with his boyfriend's lucky break' (p. 137). At one point Sinfield aptly observes: 'the ordinary currency of [Elizabethan] culture is replete with erotic interactions that strike strange chords today' (p. 139). This does not mean that Shakespeare 'was a sexual radical' (p. 139). Rather it demonstrates the process of interpretation: Shakespeare's plays 'strike' or play upon us just as much as w e decipher...