Metatheater: The Example of Shakespeare (review)

Reviews419 choanalytic thought: "Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur." A few lines later, in a complete sentence she suggests less the incompleteness of thought but the strangeness that is her subject: "Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder" (p. 1). This technique of incomplete and complete sentences and thought is creatively reinforced by her recurrent use of elliptic punctuation (. . .) to suggest the incompleteness ofeven the grammatically complete statement. Again the reader is asked to supply what the analyst—critical or psychological—cannot supply. Throughout, she speaks of the double—an image suited to her techniques and views of incomplete and complete: ". . . an alien double, uncanny and demonical. In this instance the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self: it protects itself by substituting for the image of a benevolent double that used to be enough to shelter it the image of a malevolent double into which it expels the share of destruction it cannot contain" (pp. 183-84). In what might recall Ong's masks, Kristeva herself writes of the foreigner as the philosopher's "double, his mask" (p. 134). Her references throughout the work to such other concepts as the abyss (see pp. 18, 59, and 187, for example), chaos (pp. 9, 56, 69), ambiguity (p. 70), and secret (p. 132) reinforce her view of the foreigner's existence both within and without our beings. In Chapter Eight, speaking of Freud, she gives us a summary reflective of this rich study: "By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not talk about them" (p. 192). Whitman CollegeMichael McClintick Metatheater: The Example ofShakespeare, by Judd D. Hubert ; 161 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991, $25.00. This is a remarkable first foray into Shakespearean criticism by an established scholar of French literature, whose first book, Essai d'exégèse racinienne, was published in 1956. Not only are the expectations of French neoclassical drama very different from those of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but the commentary about each makes up two virtually discrete sets, and much has 420Philosophy and Literature changed in both fields in the last forty years. Hubert does not try to fit Shakespeare to French neoclassical expectations, though he occasionally draws illuminating parallels with Racine and Molière. Moreover, he shows an admirable awareness ofrecent Shakespearean criticism, belying his pleasandy modest hope that "some of my comments may here and there suggest an interpretation that perchance has escaped the notice of specialists" (p. 132). Among Shakespearean specialists, "Metatheater" immediately suggestsJames Calderwood, who has made a career of reading Shakespearean drama provocatively as if it were about drama. Hubert acknowledges Calderwood without actually engaging him and moves in quite a different direction. He uses "performative " metaphorically, thus sidestepping literal performance criticism as well, and adopts a series of "deconstructive strategies" that are "Burkean more than Derridean" (p. 3), placing him "midway between a 'new criticism' shorn of organicism and an unorthodox offshoot of poststructuralism" (p. 4). For Hubert, a play is "a fugai interplay between illusion and elusion," a phrase that occurs repeatedly in the book and describes a simultaneous focus on two "cleavages " (a word also oft repeated): between mimesis and performance ("illusion") and between a character's assigned part and actual performance ("elusion"). Hamlet's delay in killing Claudius is a prime instance of elusion—"a star performer , dissatisfied with his assignment, who reluctantly consents to participate in the action, but only on his own terms" (p. 88). IfHubert's neoclassical interests appear anywhere, they do so in the formalism of his approach. He eschews new historicism (p. 4) as well as Shakespeare's histories, focusing on three comedies (Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure), two tragedies (Othello and Hamlet), and one romance (The Winter's Tale). Metadramatic critics and new historicists have been drawn to...