Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, and: Alternative Shakespeares (review)

162 the minnesota review is right when he says that the book has something to offer those who have experienced the importance of theater in their lives. It is a tantalizing introduction to the British and American experience with workers' theater. VALERIE QUINNEY Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. viii + 244 pp. $9.95 (paper); $29.95 (cloth). Alternative Shakespeares edited by John Drakakis. New York: Methuen, 1985. viii + 260 pp. $9.95 (paper); $23 (cloth). The essays in these volumes utilize contemporary theorists in a battle against an entrenched literary tradition, characterized as English, idealist, sometimes New Critical, and always stubborn . Political Shakespeare, for example, insists that no literary text can be treated outside of its social circumstances. An artistic expression, Stephen Greenblatt writes, is neither "perfectly self-contained and abstract, nor can it be derived satisfactorily from the subjective consciousness of an isolated creator" (32). Political Shakespeare grants that the more conservative modes of literary criticism have, at times, of course, taken into account historical facts, but it points out that they have not allowed history to affect their critical practice itself because they believe that "high" culture somehow transcends specific social and material conditions to attain a universal and timeless status. Cultural materialist criticism, by contrast , correctly insists that a literary text is primarily a social and historical document, and that methods of literary analysis should not be considered natural or immutable but the social practices that they are. The first part of Political Shakespeare uncovers in Shakespeare's plays three important factors of the historical and cultural process: "consolidation, subversion, and containment. The first refers, typically, to the ideological means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself, the second to the subversion of that order, the third to the containment of ostensibly subversive pressures" (10). Thus Paul Brown and Greenblatt explore the "production and containment of subversion and disorder" under colonial rule in, respectively, 7"Ae Tempest and the Henry plays, while Jonathan Dollimore argues that sexual transgression in Measure for Measure, seen by several critics as "a real force of social disorder intrinsic to human nature," is in fact "an ideological displacement (and hence misrecognition ) of much deeper fears of the uncontrollable, of being out of control, themselves corresponding to fundamental social problems" (72, 80). And Kathleen McLuskie insists that family relations in King Lear "are seen as fixed and determined, [that] any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of rightful order, [and that] Cordelia's saving love, so much admired by critics, works in the action less as a redemption for womankind than as an example of patriarchy restored" (98-9). Several specific problems about each critic's approach could be raised, but they all seem symptomatic of the strong tendency in cultural materialist criticism to de-literaturize the plays. Greenblatt maintains that "works of art are. . .marked off in our culture from ordinary utterances, but [that] this demarcation is itself a communal event and signals not the effacement of the social but rather its successful absorption into the work by implication or articulation" (33). Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov argued the same point in the 1920s, but we may also recall Paul de Man's warning in "Semiology and Rhetoric" (1979) not to move too rapidly "beyond formalism" and forget that we are yet far from having a firm grasp on the formal features of the text. New Criticism's attempt to exclude the world from the text, and efforts like Victor Shklovsky's in "Art as Technique" (1917) to separate artistic language from ordinary language by defining it in terms of its formal devices were (most will agree) extreme and ill-fated. But formalism's positive achievement—its insistence on what Dollimore demeaningly labels "textual integrity" (10)—is, in my opinion, too casually reviews 163 brushed aside when Greenblatt summarily lumps together those features which separate the text from ordinary utterances in the vague category of communal demarcations. The Bakhtin group shows a much greater awareness of the specificity of "literature" as a distinct practice that interacts with and is affected by other ideologies...