Shakespeare after Theory (review)

Shakespeare after Theory. By David Scott Kastan. New York: Routledge, 1999. 264 pp.

This volume deserves to be placed at the forefront of some of the most promising developments in today's Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. After the recent upheaval in the field has made porous a good many traditional boundaries between textual scholarship and historical criticism, David Scott Kastan, a distinguished participant in this project, now proceeds toward new perspectives on both its gains and its losses. His previous work uniquely qualifies him not just to raise the question "Where are we now?" but to submit answers that lead us beyond certain liabilities in the theoretically charged work of the recent past. As coeditor of A New History of Early English Drama (1997), editor of A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), and general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, Kastan has made an unequaled contribution to what, for want of a better word, may be called a post-poststructuralist approach to the Elizabethan theater.

But if the book's title (un)ambiguously accentuates the new departure, it also may for some readers invite misunderstandings. Rather than postulate a new approach after the end of theory, Kastan--deeply committed to materialist thought and method--redefines the ends and means by which theory can more effectively serve the study of literary and theater history. In this view, theory per se is not "bad"; it is not "sucking the life from common sense, intelligibility, and objectivity," and, of course, it "cannot be held responsible for the demise of literature" (24). That the conservative critique of theory "is, for the most part, disingenuous and inaccurate," however, must no longer obscure the fact that "another critique of theory is possible and indeed necessary at this time" (25-26). Such a critique aims at theory's imperial, somehow idealistic project to "offer convincing alternatives" to the "necessary specification of [what Louis Montrose calls] 'the processes by which meaning and value are produced and grounded'" in social and cultural history (28). "Theory's suggestive claim . . . cannot be demonstrated at the level of theory" (32). What is wanted, then, is not history without theory but its Aufhebung, its suspension in and by a renewed primary attention to historical text and circumstance.

The volume is arranged in three major sections. The first and shortest, "Demanding History" (23-55), serves as a prospectus addressing crucial questions of method and approach in the critical paradigm that is most articulate in today's Shakespeare studies. Pointing at the precariousness, or the absence, of the concept of Shakespearean authorship, Kastan invokes multiple "histories and significations that in fact extend beyond the text's verbal structure" (40). Historical scholarship "at once disperses and reconstitutes Shakespeare, revealing him to be something more than a product of the text and something less than its exclusive producer" (38). In this admirably balanced reconsideration, authorship in the Elizabethan theater is restored to both its enabling and its inhibiting conditions.

The second section, "The Text in History" (57-106), assembles three studies that reexamine the transmission of the plays, through print and editing, under the circumstances of their mediation and reception, including a case study of the "reformed" text of 1 Henry IV. Although too brief to offer a perfectly sustained summa of the vast field in question, this section absorbingly conveys why in these times editing has become "a hot topic (arguably the hot topic in Shakespeare studies) to debate" (59). As against the lingering notion, upheld by the Oxford editors, that Shakespeare's text suffers from corruption, even "is diseased," ¹ Kastan unravels the questionable premises on which Shakespeare editors for so long have postulated, at least by implication, an untainted original. According to the traditional procedure, "the manuscript is reconstructed or, more accurately, imagined by reference to an imperfect printed text whose imperfections are discovered in relation to the hypothesized manuscript" (62). As against the morally tinged notion of "corruption" or "disease," Kastan soundly recalls that "plays as written are rarely identical with plays as...