Shakespeare's Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment by Richard van Oort (review)

Richard van Oort's approach to Shakespearean tragedy aspires to offer an alternative to historicist criticism of Shakespeare, one that, like romantic criticism, will allow us to engage more effectively with "Shakespeare's contribution to human self-understanding." The book's argument is guided by the anthropology of Eric Gans, for whom the deferral of innate desire for authority by cultural injunction produces a linguistic and aesthetic oscillation between object of desire and prohibition. The oscillation becomes, for van Oort, the condition of tragic plot, as resentful deferral cannot permanently forestall the periphery's violent drive to displace the big man who has come to occupy the once-sacred centre.

Gans's anthropology is itself a reworking of Rene Girard's theory of the sacrificial regulation of mimetic desire, and van Oort's readings of Shakespeare will appeal most to those sympathetic to Girardian theory. The strength of van Oort's anti-historicist approach comes in its ability to register affective structures of profound ambivalence. In the midst of resentment, protagonists find themselves aware of the vulnerability of the centre they seek to occupy, a condition van Oort calls the "neoclassical aesthetic," which he finds key to their inwardness and often ironic expressiveness.

Shakespeare's Big Men offers five central chapters on Shakespeare's tragedies. Julius Caesar is presented as a preliminary exploration of the tragedy of resentment. Brutus is tempted by Cassius to envy Caesar, but he obscures this envy in the language of honour. Shakespeare is unable to elaborate Brutus's ambivalence, but, in Hamlet, the deep ambivalence of the prince, expressed aesthetically in language and self-reflective revenge plot, becomes the driving force of the play. Van Oort emphasizes Claudius's admirable qualities, so as to help us grasp Hamlet's ambivalent resentment. The prince's ironized desire drives him to reiterate representations of murder, which are themselves deferrals of a violence with which he cannot feel comfortable. Othello then provides van Oort an opportunity to dwell at length on the structures of mimetic desire operating in the tragic theatre. This chapter argues that the play thematizes and metatheatricalizes the role of the periphery in the destruction of the centre; Iago steers the audience's resentment along with Roderigo's. Othello is especially vulnerable as a big man who cannot conceive of the power of resentment until, ironically, he is persuaded that mimetic desire has shunted him out of the sacred centre.

For van Oort, Macbeth is the tragedy most concerned with the consequences of violence. Macbeth is haunted by guilt that drives his imagination to generate horrifying visions of violence, which Macbeth tries to erase through further violent action. Macbeth is cursed to recognize the inescapability of resentful ambition to occupy a centre that is marked by "its openness to all humanity." The final full chapter of Shakespeare's Big Men examines Coriolanus as a figure whose imagination is especially fired by fear that the centre is dependent on its periphery. The chapter argues that Coriolanus makes a moral advance as he comes to recognize that his very name is a communal gift, a recognition paradoxically expressed through his desire for vengeance on Rome, but which enables the protagonist's final submission to love. In the end, Coriolanus recognizes that he is a sacrificial victim of the interdependence of centre and periphery.

Shakespeare's Big Men inventively links the particulars of important moments of dramatic expression to larger thematic patterns. Van Oort's strategy of comparing the structural significance and experiences of characters from play to play energizes and strengthens his claims. The book is especially intriguing for its compelling exploration of tragic metatheatricality as a sign of the frightening and stimulating openness of the early modern centre. At the same time, van Oort's terminology is excessively fluid. Resentment itself shifts identity; it is at one time envy, at another fear, and at yet another it seems to be guilt. Centre and periphery...