Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (review)

The premise of Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book is very refreshing. At a time when the study of Renaissance literature enthralls itself to the materiality of texts, and fetishistic approaches to books as objects are at the point of reducing interpretation to bibliographic description, Charlotte Scott reminds us that the book is an idea, metaphor, and symbol, rich with meanings that transcend the raw materials, means of production, and facts of ownership on which books depend for their physical existence as things.

"What is the idea of the book?" Scott asks in a conclusion that one would do well to read along with the introduction, before turning to chapters that range across the length and breadth of Shakespeare's corpus (191). Generally speaking, the answer to this question is a deconstructive one. In Scott's reading of Shakespearean drama, the book is a figure for a crisis, fault line, gap, paradox, or tension between different ways of interpreting the subjects to which the plays address themselves: love, suffering, death, authority, faith, learning, wisdom, mind, body, spirit, theater, and world-to name only a few topics raised in this ambitious piece of literary criticism.

The first chapter examines the presence of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline. Scott suggests that for Shakespeare, Ovid's book is less a representation of human experiences than a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting experience that reveals something about the nature of interpretation itself: "The distinction between the book and the written word is that the book provides the dramatic moment of anagnorisis, representing 'story' as a point of mutual cognition beyond the requisites of speech or time, and exposing 'reading' as the cognitive process through which we bear meaning into our lives" (39). In this context, the appearance of the Metamorphoses "forms and reflects the social process of thought in context" (30), but it also exposes the partiality of all contextualization: "The idea that we may 'read' language, body, and symbol points simultaneously to a world of clarity and confusion, for the relations between such things are always in a state of crisis. The power of the book's performance often lies in the characters' ignorance of its significance and, particularly, their lack of awareness of how they read" (34).

The next chapter considers the relationship between the book and the heart, and between the book and the body, in The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Lost, bringing "the pursuit of love" into focus "through the semiotic of the book" (57). Scott argues that "the readiness with which sex can be translated from learning and the book given in exchange for the body exposes the discursive field through which the book moves as it takes in the hand that holds or writes, the eyes that read or desire, the mind that imitates or absorbs, rejects or glosses, and the body that opens or closes" (67). Therefore, reading is a "sexualizing process that marked, through role-play, fantasy and imagination, touch and fetish, the content of the book" (71). Significantly, it is not a solipsistic process, at least in Taming of the Shrew, where reading underscores "the importance of mutuality, since both the pursuit of love and the pursuit of knowledge require the presence of another" (70). In Love's Labor's Lost, however, reading is synonymous with isolation, and "the book is the deficient bridge from love to life that will not and cannot travel the distance, from the court to the park, from the mind to the body, from the Academe to the women, and from asceticism to marriage" (99).

Richard II, the subject of the next chapter, is "the most complicated play in terms of Shakespeare's idea of the book" (103)-no doubt because figurative books such as "the book of life" (Richard II, 1.3.202), "the book of fate" (2 Henry IV, 3.1.45), and "the book of heaven" (Richard II, 4.1.236) play such...