Afterlives

—They order, said I, this matter better in Germany—

Rezeptionstheorie flourishes there. Here in the Anglo-American world we have a different conception of literary afterlives. Our scholars have long examined the reception of great works of art; even in the heyday of old-fashioned philology, source-and-analogue study was widespread. In the early 1970s Walter Jackson Bate's Burden of the Past and the English Poet and Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence offered new models for thinking about the way major works and authors play out in the culture over the course of decades and centuries. But we lack a theoretically informed model to discuss how cultural phenomena ripple through time. Not so in Germany, the nation that gave us Friedrich Nietzsche, whose "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie" ("On the Uses and Abuses of History") was a central document in nineteenth-century historiography. Germany also gave us Hans Robert Jauss, whose Theorie der Rezeption serves as a foundation of much modern literary history. It is telling that words like Rezeptionsgeschichte and Nachleben are often left untranslated in English texts—our words reception history and afterlife simply do not carry the same connotations.We in the English-speaking world are never quite sure what we talk about when we talk about reception.

This may not be a bad thing. The lack of a unified theoretical tradition has meant that Anglo-American reception histories have been extremely eclectic — sometimes, perhaps, to the point of incoherence. But that eclecticism often turns out to be productive. The four books under review, all on the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century reception of Shakespeare, together show some of the diversity that modern critics bring to investigating literary afterlives. They are unmistakably a product of Anglo-American training, even if one of the authors, Stuart Sillars, teaches in Norway, and another, Reiko Oya, in Japan.

If the books can be said to share a thesis, it is that figures not usually classified among the critics—actors, painters, illustrators—were engaging in their own versions of literary criticism all along, achieving insights that rivaled those of the literary critics, but doing so in different media. In surveying Shakespeare's reception from Rowe's edition through the Romantic era, the three authors under review make the case that critics, editors, and other scholars did not have a critical monopoly on the plays. The shared thesis is clearest in one of Stuart Sillars's subtitles: The Artist as Critic.

Of the four books, Vanessa Cunningham's is the most conventional, though it is none the worse for that. The scope is clearly delineated in the title—Shakespeare and Garrick—and its methods and thesis are similarly well defined. While her statement that "Garrick is only a marginal figure in the scholarly world of Shakespeare studies" (5) requires plenty of qualification, her argument, that Garrick deserves attention not only as a performer of texts but as a producer of them, should be taken seriously. Cunningham notes two long-standing ways of thinking about the actor's relationship with the playwright: "The first hails Garrick as the great restorer to the stage of plays not seen in their original forms since Shakespeare's day; the second, paradoxically, condemns him for choosing to stage travesties when he could have presented what Shakespeare actually wrote" (7). It will be no surprise that she finds both accounts too simplistic. Cunningham's book is an exercise in blurring the line between editing and adaptation, traditionally kept distinct, with virtuous and scholarly editors striving to recover Shakespeare's real words, and reckless and egotistical performers sullying his masterpieces. Cunningham reminds us that this is a...