Shakespeare and I ed. by William McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou (review)

Shakespeare and I offers scholars’ meditations on what has been most meaningful or powerful in their own theatergoing or reading of Shakespeare. This appealing idea—encouraging writers whose scholarship is often directed at impersonal ends to identify and reveal the source of Shakespeare’s hold on them, combining critical and personal content—yields some revelatory and moving essays. However, the book frequently disappoints, not living up to its editors’ hopes that it will “breathe new life into the forms and goals, as well as the themes, of contemporary literary criticism” (13).

In their polemical introduction, William McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou propose that formally experimental work centering on critics’ own encounters with literature does far more than acknowledge “the importance and irresistibility of self-expression” (3). In addition, they argue, such work redresses central, fatal deficits in criticism as it has evolved to marginalize personal expression. Their language is strong on these deficits; they believe that criticism that does not reflect its authors’ dynamic relationships to literature ultimately “precludes an honest, genuine engagement with literature and with the world” (3). McKenzie and Papadopoulou move readily from wishing to enliven “the familiar stylistic decorum and professionalized idiom of literary criticism” to a repeated premise that criticism ought to resemble literature instead of being so “dispiritingly unpoetic” and to off-putting pronouncements that their lack of interest in the bulk of current criticism means that most critics don’t care about their own work: “We are convinced . . . that the only texts that will interest the reader will be those that have interested its writer” (1, 2, 14). Since McKenzie and Papadopoulou’s interest in the pleasure and complexity of reading and writing is one nearly all scholars share, their attacks on current criticism and their defensive tone feel misplaced. Their call for new representational modes and more personal subject matter would be strengthened without questioning the sincerity of other critics’ investments.

McKenzie and Papadopoulou’s model for criticism aims at stylistic innovation and modal shifts; they solicit writing that “shimmer[s] creatively at the edge of literature, criticism and philosophy” (14). They cite “Montaigne, Proust, Sartre, Barthes [and] Hazlitt” (14) as exemplary figures. This is a high bar. Burdened by the responsibility of representing an improved approach to criticism in general and simultaneously called on for reconceived style and structure, contributors’ essays struggle more often than not.

Even the most able and exciting scholars have difficulty negotiating requirements of lyric experimentation, personal revelation, and significant critical contribution. I had looked forward to Julia Reinhard Lupton’s essay, which in the fictive persona of “Mrs. Polonius” promises an “effort at crafting a link between Shakespeare and me that might operate at the level of objects rather than minds. [Mrs. Polonius] reveals not my rational soul so much as my vegetative one” (147). The persona in question, however, offers an unexpectedly directionless mixture of sass and apothegms on psychology and religion through readings of furniture. The focus on furniture seemed promising, capitalizing on several valuable strands of Lupton’s life: her past and future criticism, as well as the volumes on design that she has written with her sister. And yet, why Mrs. Polonius? The character appears to have no ties to Hamlet. Why not Mrs. Snug, given the character’s interest in chairs and joining? Why is she given just two pages of monologue? Why does the monologue have so few ties to Lupton’s subsequent rangy meditations on housekeeping, hospitality, and the stresses of a working, full life at home? Lupton’s brief treatment of the physical and social labor of servants and Capulet when hosting in Romeo and Juliet is more successful and compelling.

Others of the experimental essays are unnecessarily hard going, such as Richard Wilson’s look back at his education, a startlingly compressed romp of names, attitudes, movements, and anecdotes that was hard to parse without apparatus (maybe just for an American?), and hence less rewarding than...