What Was Shakespeare: Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice by Edward Pechter (review)

200 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 with the realities of scholarly production these days, but Pechter makes connections withvirtuosity and wit, occasionally going so far as to provide arguments contributors might have made to align their materials with key .issues. As the volume suggests, theory has transformed the scenebut by no means resolved all the issues. W.B. Worthen's conc1udingessayshows how the 'stage vs. page' divide in the Shakespearecommunityhasbeenredrawn since the New eriticism, with theatre practitioners now the ones embracing a 'hermeneutics of transcendence' and New Historicist readers a 'hermeneutics of suspicion.' Pechter speculates that such faultlines are on the whole productive for intellectual work. A substantial and worthwhile collection, Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare leaves us reflecting on the complex diversity of our 'Shakespearean engagements.' But-at least people are speaking across their differences. (LYNNE MAGNUSSON) Edward Pechter. What Was Slu:lkespeare: Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice Cornell University Press 1995. xi, 200. $18.30 Edward Pechter's What Was Shakespeare invalidates this review. If I say I like the book (which I do), it is because itspeaks my language, confirms my ideological investments. So it is quite impossible, Pechter would say, to claim that this book is 'good,' since there is simply no objective foundation for such a claim. What I will argue, then, is that this book is useful, and everyone concerned with the current fracturing of the critical scene should read it, though many will be offended by it. For embattled liberal humanists , Pechter's acceptance of all the tenets of postmodern anti-essentialism and relativism may look like (as it is) an attack on them. For New Historicist critics, Pechter's insistence that they are neither entirely new nor internally consistent will no doubt seem hostile. Yet after all these spirited attacks on the left and the right Pechter offers neither cynical despair nor another compensatory master-narrative. Rather, he divorces the important constructivist insights of recent critics from their accompanying neoMarxist assumptions about the will to power to argue that a humbling relativism can be entirely compatible with social benevolence and textual pleasure, qualities the book itself exemplifi~s. Since neither benevolence nor pleasure gets top critical billing these days, Pechter's claim is a daring one. And it is coupled with a sustained attackonthe darlings ofcontemporaryShakespearecriticism. Newer critics have not 'got theory,' he tells us in one of his more outrageous momentsthey have just got a different theory, one that looks right to them because of the lenses they wear. And getting it 'right/ as Pechter points out, has by no means gone out of fashion - one need only look at the strident claims made by Drakakis and Dollimore, Tillyardians in fancy dress. Since we as HUMANITIES 201 critics construct not only texts but also ideas of criticism, we retain false notions of old criticism as monolithic and moribund, just as we construct ideas of newer criticism as more divisive and theoretically informed than it is. In the former, unity was good; in the latter, conflict is good - each assumes its version of Shakespeare and criticism to be the right one, but neither claim can rest on an unassailable foundation of truth, since belief systems are just belief systems. Ideology is everywhere. Pechter, too, is inside ideology and he knows it - most of the time. Since definitive, objective judgment is impossible, Pechter argues for a rhetoric of 'pragmatic profitability.' New Criticism is reborn as theoretically and even sOcially responsible, conscious of its own contingencies. That's why it's worrying midway through the book when Pechter champions hedonistic critical J grasshoppers' for whom 'interpretation is located in the power of the text or rather in a random responsiveness that allows texts to turn into experiences of energy, freedom, and pleasure.' This sounds suspiciously like those paeans to 'literature itself' and the autonomous reader which he debunks so thoroughly elsewhere. And the early modern grasshoppers with whom Pechter aligns himself are unreliable witnesses to the transformative power of theatre: Orazio Busino, the aristocratic Venetian who records his response to a performance of The Duchess ofMalfi in 1617, quickly reverts to Catholic outrage after a brief spell of aesthetic approval, while Cluistopher S1y continues to...