Shakespeare: The Tragedies: New Perspectives ed. by Robert B. Heilman (review)

Book Reviews287 ROBERT B. HEILMAN, ed. Shakespeare: The Tragedies: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 246 p. Heilman describes his anthology as "inevitably a supplement" (1) to Alfred Harbage 's 1964 Twentieth Century Views volume on Shakespeare's tragedies. As a supplement it succeeds, in some respects improving upon its predecessor. All of Heilman's selections were originally written for scholars, whereas Harbage reprinted three general prefaces from various Complete Works as well as the brief Timan chapter from Mark Van Doren's introductory Shakespeare. Heilman points out that five of his sixteen essays are by women, as compared to only one of Harbage 's eighteen. And Heilman is responsible for two useful additions: an expanded chronological table and an index. Understandable if regrettable are omissions of presumably non-essential documentation and of some substantive passages in the texts; but these are the "givens" of such an anthology and are compensated for by the overall high quality of the essays. Generally, those I found most interesting embodied the newest perspectives. James Calderwood's "Romeo and Juliet: A Formal Dwelling" is an innovative reinscription, sometimes tenuous, always suggestive. Calderwood reads Shakespeare metadramatically or self-referentially. Through his depiction of the lovers' situation, Shakespeare despairs over the impossibility of finding public language sufficiently uncorrupted to express private feeling. Shakespeare's plight is that of every writer in every age: "As part of the vulgar tongue the words he would adopt are contaminated by ill usage, by an ever-present epidemic of imprecision , banality, lies, false rhetoric, jargon, true rhetoric, sentimentality, and solecisms, and by more localized historical plagues such as Petrarchanism, Euphuism, inkhorn neologisms, television commercials, social scientese, and beat or hippie nonspeak" (37). In Romeo and Juliet this problem is at last resolved through the stillness of the gold statuary, like the play an artistic form linking public and private worlds. Petrarchanism, which Calderwood interprets as a metaphor for corrupted language, is "unmetaphored" in Othello, according to Rosalie Colie's "Othello: The Problematics of Love." For Colie, Desdemona is the fair, cold lady of the sonnet tradition , Othello the darker lover; Shakespeare takes that literary convention literally in both a physical and moral sense, illuminating the experience of love by turning the stereotypes of sonnetry into psychologically realistic drama. Innovative criticism is equally well represented by a number of other essayists. Stanley Cavell approaches Othello epistemologically. Cavell argues that for Othello to know Desdemona is for him to know his own incompleteness and dependence on her, to know human imperfection, symbolized by sexuality and signified by the scar of defloration. Othello believes lago only because he needs to, because more terrible for Othello than believing lago is knowing that Desdemona is human and forever separate from him. Cavell's philosophic discussion borders on the psychoanalytic, also the concern of Meredith Anne Skura and Norman Rabkin. Skura offers no schematic Freudian reading of Hamlet. Instead, she is content to cite "evidence of the presence of oedipal fantasy material in the play" (92). She concludes, "I am not suggesting that these fantastic reversals and equivalences replace the more rational distinctions which 'really' make up the action but that they enrich and complicate an already ambiguous world" (92-93). Her essay raises provocative questions about Hamlet and also makes an important statement about the uses and abuses of psychoanalytic criticism. Rabkin's reading of Macbeth is as enlightening: Macbeth's motive for killing Duncan is not ambition but unconscious parricidal hatred and rivalry with Malcolm. Rabkin also develops his earlier no- 288Rocky Mountain Review tion of "complementarity," that is, "an approach to experience in which . . . radically opposed and equally total commitments to the meaning of life coexist in a single harmonious vision" (130-31). The nature of tragedy as well as the political and intellectual instability of the English Renaissance help to account for the artist's need to reconcile ever present contradiction. Something like complementarity figures in both Nicholas Brooke's "On Julius Caesar" and Janet Adelman's "Poetry and the Structure of Belief in Antony and Cleopatra." Brooke explains the ambiguity of Julius Caesar as the result of Shakespeare's simultaneously presenting two worlds, in one of which the...