Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (review)

The remarkable extent and profundity of French poststructuralism’s influence on Anglo-American Shakespeare studies demand explanation. So does its duration. The groundbreaking work of Foucault and Derrida is now forty years old, and epochal changes have occurred in the world since it was written. But many twenty-first-century critics of Renaissance literature still feel compelled to insist upon analogies between the academic theories of the postwar rive gauche and the literary productions of Elizabethan London. A critic who can show that a phrase from Shakespeare is reminiscent of some concept elaborated by Deleuze or Lacan—however tenuous, slight, or inconsequential the similarity—often feels entitled to bask in vindication. It is frequently presented as politically progressive, sometimes even as ethically admirable, to allege kinship between the speeches of Hamlet or Lear and what one recent critic has unkindly termed “scratchings from Foucault’s armpit.”¹

Sometimes such claims advance beyond the positing of affinities, and Shakespeare is said to have inspired, or even invented, the theories of mid-twentieth-century French philosophy. As Richard Wilson puts it in this timely and gripping book, the contention that “this Elizabethan generated our own post-modern thought” (1) is unlikely enough to require considerable justification. Readers will ask what were the similarities of circumstance or temperament, the parallels in historical or cultural location, that link such ostensibly divergent bodies of literature. Shakespeare in French Theory is a fascinating attempt to answer that question. Its central thesis is that while the English have generally thought of Shakespeare as “a man of the monarchy,” the French have always regarded him as “the man of the mob,” so that “under the bridges of Paris he has always been recognised as the people’s whore” (4). This is an intriguing contention, and Wilson supports it with copious evidence, drawn from a huge variety of sources and backed up by literally hundreds of footnotes.

Wilson also makes the difficult case for “the uncanny idea that literary theory shadows Shakespearean theatre” (1) with passion and conviction. The concept of the “uncanny” is central to his argument. He imposes a heavy weight of philosophical and psychoanalytic baggage on the term, which he employs in several different registers. Julius Caesar alone “anticipat[es] the ‘uncanny thinking’ about time and contretemps of Jacques Derrida” (167) and features “uncanny repetitions of Roman history” (184); the play exhibits an “uncanny coincidence” (186) that reveals “the uncanny proximity of history and histrionics” (186) and an “uncannily ‘Christian’ sermon” (187). This is in addition to an “uncanny ‘to-effect’” (196) and an “uncanny Eucharistic coincidence between the lives and deaths of Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar,” which Wilson terms “the uncanniest of all the anachronisms which disrupt the temporal logic” of the play (197).

Shakespeare’s allegedly numerous anticipations of Foucault’s panopticon are especially uncanny, and Wilson demonstrates their relevance to The Tempest in a dense, deep, close reading. Within a single page he argues that the “disciplinary order” of the Enlightenment is “exactly like this colonial governer’s Panopticon” (109), that “Prospero’s circle exactly prefigures Bentham’s circus” (109), that Prospero demonstrates “the marvel of panopticism” (109), and that “like the Panopticon, his labour camp is a privileged space for experiments on his citizens” (109). A few pages later, he concludes that “a Foucauldian interpretation will stress how Shakespeare’s chiaroscuro is a shadow-play, which throws into relief the sinister implications of the panopticism symbolised in the sovereign’s cloak of eyes” (116).

Of course, no Foucauldian reading can entirely evade the master’s preoccupation with torture and flagellation, but Wilson spends rather more time than might have been wished in “the famous Drowning Cell” (83), “the infamous Bridewell Whipping Room” (85), and sundry other venues of bloodthirsty sadism. This book’s more delicate readers could surely have been spared some of the graphic accounts of atrocious violence that supposedly reflect an affinity between Shakespeare and Foucault or, as Wilson calls them, “the...