Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds by Simon Palfrey (review)

Most would agree that the resources of Shakespeare’s playtexts are inexhaustible, but not that traditional literary criticism has limited their tapping. In Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds, Simon Palfrey suspends such critical staples as character, plot, theme, context, genre, even style to look instead for less recognized forms of “playlife” (3). “Enter the life in anything,” he urges—a broad mandate that requires a vastly enlarged critical scope (4). Palfrey coins the term “formactions” (12, passim) to categorize the teeming playtextual details that await critical attention. Some, like metaphor and rhyme, are familiar, but others are rare—cues, entrances, midline breaks, onstage silences. “There is no detail unworthy of our attention” (4), Palfrey insists, and the results of his expansive and intensive attention can be breathtaking.

In the pun of Gloucester’s opening admission that Edmond “‘hath been at my charge’” (21), Palfrey detects an admission of not only Gloucester’s financial and moral responsibility for the bastard but also the “bullish headlong violence” (21) of his conception. When Claudius dreads exposure at Judgment Day, “‘Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults’” (193), Palfrey sees a “monstrous” “hologram” (195) of Claudius’s sins: “aggressive bone, the kind that bites or butts” (196). Macbeth’s resolution to die “‘with Harnesse on our backe’” breathes a “whisper of georgic redemption” (320), as if Macbeth were gearing up to plow rather than to battle. Florizel’s wish that Perdita were “‘a wave o’th Sea’” is ominously steeped in “the osmotic, permeable ontology” (266) of the storm of sixteen years past, when the sea devoured the maritime agents of the babe’s deliverance.

Palfrey is a master finder-out of playlife in the unspoken, too, as in Perdita’s silence in response to her mother’s three fraught questions. So, too, he probes the gaps between a character’s exit and reentrance: what happens, for example, to Edgar between his self-effacement (“Edgar I nothing am”) and his discovery as Poor Tom? Or more disturbingly, to Marina after she is “‘seiz’d’” (300) by rapacious pirates and delivered to the brothel? Once out of sight, should characters be out of mind? There is life, too, to be discovered in spoken words that go unnoticed, like the cues awaited by actors but that pass unheeded by audiences. These are familiar from Shakespeare in Parts (2007), the cue-based analysis Palfrey has coauthored with Tiffany Stern, though here the focus is on cues given to actors to die before the stage direction pronounces them dead. By Palfrey’s tally there are “about ten intra-speech-action cues” (351) requiring that Othello renew his smothering of Desdemona. There is pathos here, to be sure, and perhaps a metacritical nod to the inconclusivity of all staged deaths. But in the book’s consummate last chapter, the repeated death cue is given metaphysical charge. In response to the book’s opening and driving question, “where is the life in Shakespeare’s playworlds?” (3), comes a final possibility: life in death . . . and not only onstage.

As this culling of formactions should highlight, a “technically informed imagination” (10) is at work throughout this book. Repeatedly Palfrey calls attention to the centrality of the imagination to Shakespeare’s art as well as to our critical practices. One chapter consists of a series of “imaginative apostrophes” (316), ostensibly intended to cultivate that very faculty in readers by casting them not as dramatis personae but as this and that formaction: “You are cue,” “You are aside,” “You are rhyme,” and, more plausibly, “You are spectator” (124, 136, 138, 145). These exercises are designed to extend to all formactions the hopes and fears traditionally reserved for characters. Palfrey’s theory of formactions depends on an extensive anthropomorphism or, perhaps more immediately, on today’s prevalent vitalism, predicating life to the inanimate, technical, and mechanical: “There are points of life everywhere” (3).

Qualitatively equal, formactions are also myriad, like “the spawn of fish or frog, the rhizomes in the...