How to Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays (review)

Its title echo of J. L. Austin notwithstanding, How to Do Things with Shakespeare has nothing to do with speech-act theory. As for the precise things the collection does do with Shakespeare, they fall into the usual categories of teaching and research, with the usual emphasis upon the latter over the former. The volume’s essays are grouped under five subject headings, addressing topics in source studies, historical research, textual studies, animal studies, and Rezeptionsgeschichte. The editor provides a three-page general introduction to the collection as a whole, along with comparably brief introductions to each of the five subject sections. Beyond this, each contributor supplies a rationale for his or her essay, “a short autobiographical introduction which sets the essay in the context of his or her interrogative thoughts, needs, or practices” (2).

In section 1, on source studies, Richard Scholar revisits and slightly enlarges upon the material covered in his 2005 book The “Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi” in Early Modern Europe. Tanya Pollard studies Cymbeline’s indebtedness to Greek romance, particularly the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. Julie Maxwell examines Shakespeare’s habits of quotation, positing an early modern culture of quotation in which creative inaccuracy was prized over sterile exactitude. The second section, on historical approaches to Shakespeare, consists of two essays: a piece by Chris R. Kyle that reads Henry VIII as a reflection of Jacobean concerns about courtly factionalism and the rise of favorites, and one by Gillian Woods that presents the oath-breaking of Navarre and his followers in Love’s Labor’s Lost as a comic echo of Henri de Navarre’s conversion to Catholicism in 1593. In the third section, devoted to textual studies, Tiffany Stern undertakes an absorbing survey of the interrelation between reading, writing, and performance, arguing that “the practise of reading critically in the theater was melded with the practise of watching critically” (137); Anthony B. Dawson conducts a survey of issues in current Shakespearean editorial practice. In one of the two essays comprising the book’s section on animal studies, Erica Fudge argues that Lance’s dog Crab in Two Gentlemen of Verona represents “nature as the uncivilized that stands against the rational civility that is understood to be truly human” (194) and that in this capacity the dog implicitly parallels other breakdowns of civility and humanity in the play. In the second animal-studies piece, Paul Yachnin presents The Winter’s Tale as a play that “interprets human psychology, value, and destiny in the terms of ovine life” (216). Finally, the section on appropriation history offers three essays: one by Georgia Brown, arguing that Shakespeare’s Sonnets are “a reflection of, and a reflection on, the nature of time” (247); one by A. E. B. Coldiron, which discovers in the criticism of Jean François de La Harpe a Shakespeare devalued on the basis of “some of the very factors that [in other circumstances] favor Shakespeare’s longevity and apparently ‘universal’ transnational appeal” (273); and one by Emma Smith, which finds that performance criticism “has fetishized the material traces of the theater” (293).

Like most collections, How to Do Things with Shakespeare includes contributions of varying focus and aim. Their quality, dare I say it, varies as well. To my taste, the strongest pieces include the two on animal studies, which complement each other nicely. Fudge offers a characteristically thoughtful take on Two Gentlemen, arguing (against my own reading of that play) that Crab represents the absence of “those very concepts that form identity” (198) in the Aristotelian discourse of species. Paul Yachnin’s discussion of The Winter’s Tale supplies an equally thoughtful, if implicit, rejoinder: true, early modern thinking often posited the animal as the antithesis of selfhood, but just as often it took the animal as a template for the very selfhood it was elsewhere understood to negate. As Fudge herself has shown in Brutal Reasoning (2006), the early modern...