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  • Shakespeare and the Culture Wars
  • Jean I. Marsden
Vanessa Cunningham , Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Pp. vii, 231. $90.00.
Reiko Oya , Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pp. xii, 244. $99.00.

Scholarship dedicated to the reception, performance, and critical response to Shakespeare during the eighteenth century has become a growth industry over the past two decades, with books and even conferences devoted to the topic. McGill University, for example, recently sponsored a conference on "Shakespeare and the [End Page 363] Enlightenment," which has itself led to a volume of essays. This wave of scholarship was stimulated, in part, by earlier twentieth-century visions of the eighteenth century as an age of Shakespearean mutations spawned by perverted taste that was rectified only by the superior literary understanding of the Romantic poets. Reiko Oya's Representing Shakespearean Tragedy and Vanessa Cunningham's Shakespeare and Garrick represent in different ways a second generation of scholarship. Both books share an interest in the interlocking histories of the stage and the page, but they are distinguished by very different attitudes toward (although not necessarily use of) the cultural approach that has characterized most recent work on the ways Shakespeare's works were studied and performed in the middle to later eighteenth century.

In Representing Shakespearean Tragedy, Reiko Oya pairs an actor or actors with a Shakespearean tragedy (Garrick with Lear, Kemble and Siddons with Macbeth, and Kean with Hamlet), providing a loose narrative of Shakespearean performance and response by means of a series of vignettes. In many ways, Oya's book is most interesting in what it purports not to do, namely the kind of scholarship that accounts for reception by placing it within a larger cultural context. Her concern is that discussions of Shakespeare's afterlife over the past two decades have "regard[ed] the specific personalities involved in the appropriations as part of a larger historical process that is predominantly anonymous, impersonal and inexorable" (4), in the process ignoring coincidents and accidents. There is some truth to this; the pull of overgeneralization is seductive, as it provides a structure to what can otherwise seem a chaotic collection of facts and events. Singling out Michael Dobson's work on the "shared" perception of Shakespeare as England's national poet (The Making of the National Poet), she decries such contextualization of performance and criticism as impersonal, seeing them ultimately as what she terms "cultural determinism." (Ironically, Dobson's book, even more so than her own, focuses intently on the personal career of David Garrick.) In place of paradigms, she proposes an eclectic "dialogue" between individuals and performances.

The problems that arise from such a defiant emphasis on the individual appear early in the book's first chapter when Oya turns to the literary criticism of the mid-eighteenth century. Rejecting a cultural approach, and with it the implications of context, she incorporates instead essentialist versions of "right" and "wrong," in this case a series of value judgments based on her own interpretation of Shakespeare's tragic genius. This has the effect of suggesting that anyone who does not agree with her is somehow "idiosyncratic" (24, 35), "weak" (23), or as participating more in "rhetorical sophistry than literary criticism" (27). Samuel Johnson in particular emerges throughout the book as the exemplar of "distort[ed]" approaches to Shakespeare. In reference to his response to Joseph Warton, for example, Oya states that "Johnson's treatment of Warton was even less satisfactory" (31); "[he] missed not only the merit of his friend's essays but also the true tragic power of King Lear" (31). In essence, Johnson's writings on Shakespeare are, in her eyes, by and large a "failure" (31, 32).

Yet, despite her attempts to focus on the individual, she herself is driven to making her own general comments, admitting that the stage mirrors the times and that actor and audience represent an interpretive community, not simply an intersection of individual and coincidence. When she addresses Edmund Kean's rise to fame, for example, she accounts for his instant success on the London stage by explaining that "theatre is a collaboration between actors and the...

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