Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (review)

Derek Cohen's book Searching Shakespeare is a collection of nine essays, several of which have been published elsewhere in recent years. At the end of a brief introduction, Cohen writes that "the theme that unites this book is the idea of the boundary, that literal, imagined, constructed, or figurative extreme of the Shakespeare experience, where life at its richest and most intense is made almost to seem normal" (xv). A clearer sense of focus does not emerge beyond this statement, so unfortunately, although Searching Shakespeare contains interesting ideas in many of the chapters, it fails to articulate a specific objective.

The most thematically connected portion of the book is part 2, which deals with the role of memory in Othello, Lear, and Macbeth. Cohen looks at how characters construct their identities by alluding to past events, thus giving the sense of a history that precedes the drama's opening scene. He notes that, in Othello, such detail allows for the protagonist's complex definition of himself as a man caught between two worlds. In Lear, on the other hand, the past lives of the characters seem all but lost, which Cohen convincingly reads not just in terms of the primitivism in the play, but as part of the reason for the tragedy itself. Macbeth denies and erases any sense of his past life as he becomes ever more deeply steeped in blood, trapped in a situation that will not allow him to look back, but only forward. In this regard Macbeth has less history than anyone in the play, for even Lady Macbeth could not bring herself to murder the sleeping Duncan because the old man resembled her father. Although these chapters on the role of memory provide useful discussions of the individual plays, Cohen does not engage in a broader discussion regarding the function of memory in relation to Shakespearean tragedy.

The first part of the book contains four essays that are united only by a common interest in "history, historiography, and the politics that lie beneath the surface of the narrative dramas that are always the first causes of the plays" (xi). The first two chapters of this section concern nationalism and history as related to Othello and the second tetralogy. More provocative are the latter two chapters of this section, which discuss Caliban, Ariel, and Shylock. Chapter 3 is an attempt to correct standard postcolonial readings of The Tempest in order to suggest that "Caliban and Ariel are more than colonial subjects: they are actual slaves between whom and colonized subjects there is a sharp and significant difference" (xiii). Using Hegel's theory of the relationship between slaves and slave-owners, Cohen does provide some poignant insights about the island's slave culture, but he too readily dismisses the relationship between colonization and slavery, assuming that they are easily distinguishable categories and that slavery has a much older history.

While chapter 3 ("Slave Voices") does locate the plays in a firmly Jacobean context, chapter 4 ("The Scapegoat Mechanism") takes a different direction by suggesting that "today it is difficult, and even morally problematic, to read Shakespeare's Jew and his Slave [Caliban] as though the concentration camps and the institution of slavery never happened" (xiii). This is a powerful argument, and a potentially fruitful one, but Cohen stops short of developing a less morally problematic reading of The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice. Furthermore, because this is the only chapter in which he makes this claim (essentially, that we need to think critically beyond the New Historicist method), it is difficult to connect such suggestions to the other issues raised in this book. In addition, Cohen's use of the term scapegoating here is a bit puzzling; he acknowledges in the introduction that René Girard is his inspiration for this idea, but he quotes Violence and the Sacred only once and never fully employs the range of Girard's theories on this subject...