Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (review)

The title is promising. Shakespeare Matters suggests both a statement and an interrogation, both triumph and doubt. The matter of Shakespeare, we expect, will be addressed in terms of materialist criticism, in light of textual conundrums, in homage to popular culture, and in the service of both undermining and reaffirming Shakespeare's status. We look for reasons why Shakespeare should or should not matter in the academy; we wonder if the materiality of texts undermines the way in which Shakespeare matters; we speculate on the people to whom and the situations in which Shakespeare matters; and we even contemplate the grammatical positioning of such matters.

Admittedly, this is a lot to expect from any one text, let alone a title. To our delight and wonderment, however, some of the essays in this volume deliver the material goods. Simon C. Estok argues for a more sophisticated ecocritical theory that deals with texts other than those classified as "nature writing" (180) and which might be useful to a development of "ecocritical Shakespeares" (186). Kim Walker discusses the multiple resonances of "wrangling pedantry" in different stage and film versions of The Taming of the Shrew (191); Barbara Bowen tries to take us "beyond Shakespearean exceptionalism" by theorizing the difference that Aemilia Lanyer's text makes to Shakespeare, rather than the more typical glance in the opposite direction (209); Richard Madelaine focuses less on the exploitation of the boy-actor or the gender blurring enabled by boys playing female roles and more on the "different dynamics between player, persona, and the male disguise adopted by female characters" (234); while Lloyd Davis argues that in All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram's "adultery" is little more than the private rendition of a socialized desire, which makes his sexual transgression "ironically normative" (100). These essays attempt to intervene theoretically in the field of Shakespeare studies and are book-ended by perhaps the two most successful instances of such intervention: Jean E. Howard's "Material Shakespeare/Materialist Shakespeare" and Ron Bedford's "The Case of the Rouged Corpse: Shakespeare, Malone, and the Modern Subject."

Howard's essay presents the historical trajectory by which material readings of Shakespeare have come to hold sway in the field, discussing what she labels the "'thingafication' of the critical scene" (34). Howard notes that "[t]his trend is partly a reaction to poststructuralism's hypertextuality. After more than a decade's fascination with langue, parole, discourse, and ideology, there is something reassuringly solid about turning to the study of woodcuts, joint stools, and ruffs" (34). Her essay concludes with an impassioned plea for a materialist as opposed to a simply material Shakespeare that "can be produced with the help of historical materialism" (42). This call to materialist arms pivots on "the interarticulation of feminist and Marxist paradigms" (39), as Howard suggests that more rather than less history is the future of materialist Shakespeare studies. Bedford's essay riskily disagrees with that proposition. Commenting on what he sees as the general trend of Shakespeare studies today, Bedford suggests that "we might want to resist, or at least question, the fundamental assumption that the most important item of knowledge about, say, a Shakespeare play is its historical origin" (255). By laying out the political and ideological stakes in editorial debates designed to give us Shakespeare "verbatim," debates that have been in circulation at least since the time of Malone, Bedford argues that historicizing and universalizing impulses may not be that far apart; such a blurring of historicism's boundaries may lead us toward less rather than more history as the future of Shakespeare studies.

Howard's and Bedford's essays thus point in opposite directions but nonetheless attempt an engagement both with the title of the volume and the state of the field. Such an engagement seems sadly missing from the rest of the collection, with the exception of the few essays noted above. One of the reasons for this gap between desire and its fulfillment...