Wonder in Shakespeare (review)

Adam Cohen acknowledges his “wondrous triumph” (x) in being able to write this book despite the ravages of a brain tumor that eventually took his life in January 2010. The moving introduction recounts his loss of vision in 2008, the discovery of the cancer, and the debilitating “biotechnical invasions” (6) of modern medicine employed in an effort to save his life. Cohen’s lucid, unadorned prose—“I lost my ability to read. This was very frustrating” (3)—is as remarkable as his ability to interpret the illness through a Shakespearean lens. Undergoing his fateful MRI, he “was laid prone on a hard flat slab (like Juliet’s)” (5), and he likens his loss of a stable sense of identity to that of Lear and others. There are deficiencies in Wonder in Shakespeare, to be sure, but they are those of an author who did not live to revise what appears to be an early and unfledged, but still compelling, draft.

Unfortunately, most of Cohen’s chapters are too brief for the kind of rigorous argument needed to substantiate his claims, yet he nonetheless offers some real contributions. His work follows a number of studies on wonderment, most notably T. G. Bishop’s Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (1996). The book is divided into two halves, with Cohen’s text, at just over one hundred pages (and untouched by the editors), followed by “Six Responses to Wonder in Shakespeare” from literary and theater scholars. The editors’ decision to devote virtually half the book to responses was unnecessary, as Cohen’s work stands on its own as a compelling short monograph, while the responses are uneven in quality and, as a result, add less than could be hoped.

Cohen’s first chapter, his most derivative, traces in New Critical fashion uses of the related words wonder, admiration, and marvelous in The Tempest. He adopts the view of Stephen Greenblatt and others “that Shakespearean theatrical wonder offered an alternative, a substitute, and in some sense even a replacement for the venues of religious wonder that were eliminated under Elizabeth” (10). To his credit, and following in the unacknowledged footsteps of Jeffrey Knapp (Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England [2002]), Cohen also recognizes that theatrical wonder can also “supplement” (80)—not just evacuate—the religious, a topic he turns to in his second chapter.

Cohen is most provocative when discussing what he calls Shakespeare’s pseudoresurrections: “the raising of those thought to be dead but not actually dead, or the apparent raising—in the form of a ghost, for instance—of the actual dead” (17–18). The onset of Cohen’s illness in 2008 coincided with a number of treatments of pseudoresurrection, including Beatrice Grove’s Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (2007), which he mentions, as well as Sarah Beckwith’s Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (2011), among other recent works, none of which he could have known. Had Cohen’s book been published sans responses after its completion in late 2009, it would have been better positioned to join the conversation. Still, Cohen maintains that pseudoresurrections were Shakespeare’s artistic accommodation to Elizabeth’s suppression of the staging of religious matters. As intriguing as this idea is, it is unlikely that Shakespeare would have opted for stage resurrections in the absence of state prohibitions. Cohen concedes as much when he writes of the “aesthetic tastes” (27) of the London audiences, not to mention Shakespeare’s own pervasive but reflexively subtle treatment of the religious.

Cohen’s most original suggestion concerns Shakespeare’s turning to his advantage the necessity of using flesh-and-blood actors to portray the ghosts of Old Hamlet and Banquo. What Shakespeare did, Cohen argues, was to “cloud” the distinction “between a spirit or ghost on one hand and a revivified dead body on another” (45). Although he spends too much time documenting the Christian belief...