Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (review)

The elements in Heather Dubrow's title precisely describe her book's main concerns. At the center of her study is a "preoccupation with loss in its many forms that is as fundamental to Shakespeare's plays and poems as it is to poststructuralist theory" (1). This early reference to poststructuralist theory—as at once something with deep affinities both to Shakespeare and to her own method—initiates a prolonged effort to draw on that body of theory as well as to resist it. Dubrow sees the poststructuralist preoccupation with loss as the key to its usefulness in exploring Shakespeare but also as its chief limitation, a key to what is lost when we deploy poststructuralist methods in an effort to understand the rich Shakespearean texts. Though her book is about loss, Dubrow as a critic is broadly recuperative; she deliberately makes use of competing contemporary methodologies and, in some instances, earlier forms of criticism supplanted by poststructuralist theory. She is particularly concerned to employ the resources of feminist and historicist criticism without using either to disable the insights of the other.

What this produces in her readings is a methodological eclecticism that comes together around a trope from ophthalmology. Monovision is the technique whereby the lens for one eye corrects for distance vision and the other lens corrects for close-up focus, with the happy result that the viewer so bespectacled sees everything better. In Dubrow's readings this trope describes her inclination to focus closely on sharply delineated passages or historical moments while "the other eye gazes at a whole era" (9). More generally, her "dual focus" accompanies consistent efforts to contextualize highly detailed readings of plays and poems with respect to historical, methodological, and genre considerations.

Dubrow focuses on domestic loss because of its intrinsic importance in Shakespeare, because it enables her to bring Shakespeare's preoccupation with loss under control, and because domestic considerations in Shakespeare are so basic that they point to the much broader dimensions of loss saturating the texts. Home and family are her characteristic starting points. Chapter 2, "'The forfended place': burglary," looks at homes invaded or robbed, the inhabitants of which may also be invaded or penetrated by others, robbed of identity or life. Chapter 3, "'No place to fly to': loss of dwellings," explores situations in which the home itself is lost, by conquest or fire, its inhabitants displaced to struggle to find themselves apart from the domestic surroundings that have shaped their sense of life. Chapter 4 is called "'I fear there will a worse come in his place': the early death of parents." Here Dubrow studies the many characters who come to terms early with a world in which they have lost those who have shielded them from struggle while preparing them for it. "Parental death," she observes, "scripts dramas of substitution" (151): the competition for the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the orphaned Helen's pursuit of fatherless Bertram, and the king's vexed paternal role for both, in All's Well That Ends Well; the ill-fated princes under the care of their lord protector in Richard III; Hamlet's tormented grief for his father; the return in the late romances of "the effects of parental death, one of the most persistent of Shakespeare's revenants" (193). These revenants haunt the plays, across the genres, as they haunted a society in which women frequently died in childbirth and in which "about one-third to one-half of the population had witnessed the death of one parent, or even both, by the time they themselves married" (162).

These themes in Shakespeare, she notes, have deep roots in his own experience, or that of anyone growing up and living in his times. England, Dubrow writes, was "a nation of mourners," and it did its mourning in ways that were distinctive to it (2). "One reason loss is...