Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth (review)

David Bevington has been a vital influence on our understanding of English Renaissance drama and Shakespeare for over forty years. His latest work, Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth, is part of the Blackwell Great Minds Series, dedicated to providing readers with “fundamental” understanding of great Western thinkers. This mandate immediately begs the question: to which “great mind” is the book devoted, Shakespeare or Bevington? Not surprisingly, the book is a solid introduction to both. Bevington’s project is a search for a Shakespearean philosophy based on text, rather than biography or legend. Shakespeare left no lectures or treatises, no criticisms or book forewords, no real point of entry into a “philosophy”; all we know of the man as thinker comes from the voices of his characters. But which characters do we consider and at what point in their dramatized lives? Bevington hypothesizes possibilities by “asking what the plays and poems suggest in continual debate about an array of topics” (10). He organizes his discussion into six main sections, each focusing on what he considers to have been significant issues for Shakespeare and his surrounding culture: sex and gender; politics and political theory; writing and acting; religious controversy; philosophy; and what Bevington calls “closure”—Shakespeare’s ideas about retirement and death. In all these areas, Bevington argues that Shakespeare’s philosophy progressively moves toward the modern, continually advancing through the progression of his texts and the development of his characters.

At a time when so much Shakespeare scholarship pursues the unknowable and the biographical, I found Bevington’s close reading of the texts in search of a Shakespearean philosophy both refreshing and old-fashioned, simultaneously startling in its scope while comforting in its familiarity. Bevington lays bare the intellectual issues at stake and the risks inherent in the decisions that theatre practitioners must necessarily make. He reminds the reader of the basics: understanding Shakespeare is critical to understanding our culture and its development. Further, our assumptions about Shakespeare have real consequences for theatrical productions. He cautions naive readers and directors not to assume that our favorite Shakespearean characters are personal expressions of the Bard himself, or that they exist in textual isolation. For Bevington, “Shakespeare” is a body of work that reveals a philosophy rather than a biography, an evolution of thought and intellect rather than a quotidian totality.

Bevington begins in a challenging though predictable place, a chapter he calls “Lust in Action: Shakespeare’s Ideas on Sex and Gender.” For me, this was the least-satisfying chapter, perhaps because there already exists much more adventurous theorizing about sexuality and gender in Shakespeare’s time than is offered here. Nevertheless, Bevington clearly, if briefly, lays out the cultural and religious issues affecting the diverse population of the period and thus the theatrical representations of sexuality. Here, he argues that Shakespeare’s theatrical practices were steadfastly middle-of-the-road compared to the transgressive and avant-garde boys’ companies. Their patrons, more “affluent and sophisticated,” were interested in political satire and “trendy views on sexual mores” (16–17).

Indeed, although they had been successful during the previous two decades, boys’ companies were closed for much of the 1590s for offending public opinion. This crackdown on satire and sex was, in part, a result of the Puritan-driven, highly political Marprelate controversy. Shakespeare evaded censure and financial setback by catering to his audience’s preference for bawdiness over transgression. Comparing Shakespeare’s plays—particularly The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night—with their sources, Bevington points out that Shakespeare almost always diluted the sexual content and controversy to make the plays more commercially palatable. This is not to say, argues the author, that Shakespeare’s ideas about gender and sexuality were not progressive: Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Merry Wives of Windsor all work to undo the cultural notion that men “own” women. Although these ideas and examples will...