Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (review)

This book is disappointing, given the distinguished career of its author. Indeed, Jonathan Hart goes to great pains in the acknowledgments—which read like a Who’s Who of late twentieth-century literary criticism—to establish a network of scholars, librarians, foundations, and university administrators who can vouch for his high profile. However, one of the things that becomes apparent immediately is that many of the persons singled out for thanks are dead. Perhaps this is an indication that the process of finishing a book has taken too long.

The author himself states in the preface that this volume is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous individual studies gathered together over the course of thirty years. It is somewhat unclear how much material here is new, since six different entities are thanked for permission to republish (the total number of chapters is eight), but specific permissions to reprint are scattered throughout the notes. In all, the text consists of three chapters on individual dramatists, two on specific genres, two on intersections of theory and practice, and one on “England and Empire.” The purpose of the work appears to be an effort to situate Shakespeare within a broader European context, both geographically and chronologically. This scholar very deliberately rejects most current literary theory, citing instead the work of Northrop Frye and other New Critics to supplement his own observations. The transitions between chapters are clumsy, as we would expect from a project that does not really hang together (an example would be, “This chapter has been about many writers in England and beyond and the next two chapters will be about writers whose works Shakespeare knew, used and echoed” [33]).

The book is enormously erudite but would have benefited from some rigorous editing. In places it reads like a laundry list of obscure treatises, interspersed with close readings of Shakespeare plays and other canonical texts. The worst problem is simply with the grammar. There are so many sentence fragments, subject/verb agreement errors, apostrophes pointing in the wrong direction, et cetera, that the mistakes become distracting and prevent the book from being a pleasurable read. Even when there are not out-and-out mistakes, uncomfortable redundancies occur, as, for example, “Humphrey Gilbert took an active interest in reviving interest in discovering that route to Asia” (19) and “It takes the rest of the play to play out the tale as well as the play” (122). The reader finds herself longing for a thesaurus. Put these instances together with such curious understatements as “A clash occurred between England and Spain in 1588” (18), and one has to ask whether the copy editor was asleep. When the author declares in the preface, “This book has been slow and wayward” (xiii), one can only sympathize as well as lament its simultaneously belated but premature birth.

The introduction declares boldly that the book will “center on Shakespeare while decentering him” (1). This is a fine start. Considering most Shakespeare professors’ (and by extension, most English departments’) blithe oblivion regarding Spain, Italy, and France at this time, here is a comparatist offering a salutary corrective to their egregious omissions. He notes, “In looking back from a time in which English is a global language, it is easy but unwise to project this situation from the past and provide a kind of teleology that did not take into account the tentative and precarious situation of England and English before greater states and languages” (9). Bravo! He goes on to narrow the same argument by saying, “Shakespeare was not the great poet of an imperial language in a preeminent power or empire” (10). This is all fair enough. But Hart evidently suffers from the classic Achilles’ heel of comparatists in that he himself often cites translations rather than the original languages. He seems considerably more comfortable in French than in Spanish, a pattern unfortunately all too familiar among professors in the humanities. Spain remains largely unknown and ignored.

But we digress. This volume’s interpretive enterprise is fundamentally New...