The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time (review)
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Robert Brustein's latest work, The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time, explores passages in Shakespeare's works that critics have found particularly problematic. Identifying embedded prejudices and presumptions as "imposthumed" moments, where what lies hidden and festering may break forth into outward signs of pain, prejudice, or even creativity, Brustein biopsies these imposthumes to determine whether specific characters' unhealthy fixations are a general condition of early modern England or are particular to Shakespeare.
Brustein's great strength is his historical approach to Shakespeare, and his study is indebted to New Historicism, with its commitment to understanding [End Page 300] authors within their cultural moment. Even so, he accuses New Historicism of insisting on context over content. Instead, Brustein wants to return to a close and determined reading of Shakespeare's texts, studying these works in relation to one another and within a larger intertextual network of his contemporaries' works to identify and excavate six of the most prevalent prejudices within Shakespeare's canon: misogyny, "effemiphobia," machismo, elitism and mobocracy, racialism, and "intelligent design." Brustein highlights how these anachronistic terms, the titles for each proceeding chapter, force us to consider these prejudices outside of our own contemporary framework and within Shakespeare's time.
Most importantly, however, Brustein creates nuanced close readings of Shakespeare himself, refusing recent configurations of the playwright as either liberal "postmodern pioneer" or "irrelevant patriarchal white man" (10). This book, therefore, builds upon and responds to the recent resurgence in biographical and psychological readings of Shakespeare's works. Duly noting that the evidence for such readings is quite limited and circumstantial, Brustein nonetheless makes a compelling, albeit controversial argument for reading certain prejudices as held not just in Shakespeare's time, but specifically by Shakespeare himself. There are problems with this type of polemic, such as his insistence that Shakespeare was "probably born Catholic" or that the sonnets are the "most autobiographical of his writings" (10, 19); both assertions are highly speculative and debated among scholars, given the lack of definitive biographical evidence to support them. The evidence for prejudices in the early modern period, however, is abundant, and Brustein takes advantage of the wealth of Renaissance sources on these topics.
In his first chapter, "Misogyny: The Hamlet Obsession," Brustein admits that Shakespeare creates stirring heroines, but points out that he also creates male characters who engage in cruel and often unfounded attacks on female virtue, citing, for example, Lear, Leontes, Othello, and Posthumus. Beginning with Hamlet's cruelty toward Ophelia, Brustein notes how Hamlet's vitriolic attack incriminates not just Ophelia, but all of womankind, considering the play within a larger framework of Renaissance misogynistic tracts. Shakespeare may express an especially vehement attitude toward female characters, Brustein avers, but he tempers it with the loving father-daughter relationships that appear in his later works.
The second chapter, "Effemiphobia: The Osric Courtier," finds a simultaneous desire for and disgust at Italianate courtly customs in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in early modern culture. Brustein deftly surveys the detested "carpet knight" or "effeminate upstart courtier" character (Hamlet's Osric, King Lear's Oswald, 1 Henry IV's foppish messenger), noting that the character type is sometimes equated with homosexuality. The effeminate courtier provides Brustein with an opening to discuss Shakespeare's contested sexual preferences. Shakespeare's courtier, as Brustein notes, is more detested for his self-serving attitude and his deceptively sycophantic speeches than his sexual partners.
The following chapter, "Machismo: The Hotspur Model," brilliantly explores a specific recurring character-type in Shakespeare's works who is "almost invariably contrasted with" the previously introduced courtier figure (93). Because of the dearth of literary precedents for this "plain-dealer," Brustein is at liberty to create a nuanced close reading of Shakespeare's inventive paragon of masculinity: his military prowess, his blunt honesty, his roughness and simplicity, and his general manliness. After exploring this admired and idealized Englishman, Brustein moves into the darker...
