The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time (review)

This is not the book on Shakespeare one might have expected from the founder of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theaters. Except to provide some local color, the theater plays very little part in Brustein’s discussion. Instead, he sets out to present something like an anatomy of Shakespeare’s habits of thought and feeling, in particular, those grubbier aspects of both that we now like to group under the rubric of “prejudice.”

The book consists of a short introduction, six chapters, and a brief afterword. Each chapter takes up one of the prejudices that Brustein wishes to explore: misogyny, “effemiphobia,” machismo, elitism and mobocracy, racialism, and finally “intelligent design,” the last less a prejudice than shorthand for Shakespeare’s metaphysical beliefs in general, and of a proposed midcareer crisis in them in particular. The chapters describe a common arc, beginning with a general reflection on the topic in Shakespeare and early modern England and proceeding to a discussion of particular plays and characters that address or spring from that topic. This plan means that Brustein largely relies on secondary materials for the earlier parts of his chapters, where his sampling of critical opinion is a somewhat mixed bag. He has clearly looked at a quite a lot of recent discussion, some of which he summarizes or engages—his Harvard colleagues Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber are prominent names—but he also falls back on older standbys like Lovejoy and Tillyard. At some points, he seems to have read less deeply: his claim that “effemiphobic prejudice” has been “generally overlooked” (63), for example, suggests that he has neglected a few corners, while his note that “a prime function of Elizabethan drama . . . was to build up confidence in what historians have called the Tudor Myth” (134) does not get us much past Lily B. Campbell. And although a book intended as general criticism should not be held to an historian’s standard, Brustein’s description of the moral character of the Jacobean court uses witnesses such as Anthony Weldon (1650) and Edward Peyton (1652) who, while colorful, are not exactly contemporary or impartial.

The book’s central tension is between an account of Shakespeare as an individual artist with assumptions and preoccupations and an account of “his time”—as the title calls it—as a collection of currents of feeling and opinion. Shakespeare is sometimes blended into this context and sometimes singled out from it, either as its especially vehement exemplar or as an anomaly within it. Chapters that rehearse specific developments in prejudice, such as anticourt satire rebuking courtiers for lax manhood, may also assert a distinctiveness in Shakespeare’s character or temperament that is an alternative engine of poetic production. What relation there might be between these lines of discussion is never really explored, except in declaring Shakespeare to be at once “a creature of his own age” (10) and one who managed “to overcome his preconceptions at times through his special qualities of humanity and compassion” (173). Even the depiction of “his age” is very much ruled by ours, as when Brustein summarizes Shakespeare’s “prejudice towards minorities” as comprehending “women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and slaves” (173), but not Catholics, Puritans, Welshmen, or the French, equally vigorous objects of satire and suspicion in Shakespeare’s day.

Strangely, given Brustein’s lifelong profession, his interest in how Shakespeare’s plays are involved with habits of contemporary prejudice leads him to flatten the dramatic vigor of the plays he discusses, for all that he admires them. Chapter headings provide for extended treatments of exemplary plays, but often these are as much topical summaries as real explorations of prejudice under dramatic scrutiny. Calling Cordelia “a female plain-dealer” and “counterpart of Kent” (114) is a fair starting point and fits her neatly into the chapter (despite its heading of “Machismo”) but isn’t a very interesting way to discuss her role in King Lear; describing Brutus...