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  • Book Review
  • Jared Johnson
Shakespeare Translated: Derivatives on Film and TV. By H. R. Coursen. Studies in Shakespeare, Vol. 15. Robert F. Willson, Jr., General Editor. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

In a 1995 review of his then-recently published book on small-screen adaptations of Shakespeare, Watching Shakespeare on Television, Sidney Gottleib wrote of Coursen: "It is clear throughout [the book] that H. R. Coursen loves the stage and the page but has at best a qualified and somewhat grudging respect for the screen" (469). More than a decade later, in addition to "dumb[ed] down" (Coursen 1) TV Shakespeares, the veteran Air Force pilot, novelist, poet, Shakespeare scholar, and self-described "aging New Critic" (8) takes aim at multiple bogeys in the midst of this broadly-researched history of film and television "translations" of four of Shakespeare's most mass-mediated plays. Such targets include "the jargonization of Shakespeare" (1), American "narcissism" (4), commerce (23), and, unmistakably, Dubya and company. In Shakespeare Translated, Coursen embarks on nothing less than a full-scale assault on the corrupting powers of capital waged through what he considers the over-commercialized and, thus, debased icon of Shakespeare.

Though I know Coursen would have my hide for committing the great taboo of New Criticism—the intentional fallacy—I think it's safe to assume that the author, writing in the spring of 2004, sensed the impending doom of serving under Pharaoh's yoke for another term as a feeling of political and social frustration permeates the text. Coursen unburdens his prophetic soul at the end of his Introduction and reflects gloomily, "I predict that Shakespeare will become more and more the servant of commerce, if not condemned outright as heretical and banned from production, that is, unless accommodated to reinforcement of the powers-that-be" (23). The powers-that-be, Coursen later suggests, are only partially culpable for "Amurca's" deterioration; the other problem according to him is willful cultural and critical illiteracy. He remarks that Americans can no longer process verbal irony and cites the irreparable discord "between word and action, between an espousal of 'freedom' and its suppression, between a President who associates himself with a 'culture of life,' but whose adopted state brims to overflowing along its death row and who exports 'shock and awe' to people [End Page 41] who, he says, 'hate us for our freedoms'" (7). In Shakespeare Translated, Coursen expresses his bewilderment at a culture that cannot close-read itself.

Similarly, Coursen gleans from his study of big- and small-screen quotations of Shakespeare that in post-postmodern, hypercapitalist American mass media, Shakespeare can be consumed, but the plays cannot be "read," at least not in any way that observes the nuances of the texts. Coursen seems to be confronting the reader with two "counterfeit presentments," of Shakespeare: like Hamlet's violent confrontation with Gertrude to argue Old Hamlet's virtue against the debased Claudius, Coursen forces his book in front of our eyes so that we can marvel at the theoretical distance between the sharp and sophisticated cultural critic, revealed to us by Marxist scholars, who "consistently deconstructs simple-minded attitudes" and the blunt servant of the late 20th and early 21st century glazed-eyed, ever-buying masses. Because commercial success determines which media projects are produced, Coursen concludes that "Shakespeare is permitted to show us very little these days, except how to sell products. Shakespeare as subversive, as 'oppositional,' has disappeared" (11). Instead of providing an index into ontological hypocrisy in the form of "idolatry" as early modern Protestant texts tended to do, twenty-first century media Shakespeares embody that very hypocrisy; they commit the Protestant sin of idolatry, what David Hawkes has called "the autonomy of representation" (Hawkes 4–5). Screen Shakespeares are Shakespeare in name only. Post-postmodern translations of Shakespeare are like the Denmark Corporation of Almereyda's Hamlet: vast intangible bodies that, in the words of Hawkes, "do not sell material products so much as 'brands,' which is to say, images" (5).

Coursen's book illustrates that Shakespeare is both produced and consumed in a narcissistic fashion, which the critic finds deeply troubling. Like Coursen's example of...

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