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  • Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost
  • Richard C. McCoy (bio)
Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost. By Edward Pechter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. x + 238. $85.00 cloth.

Edward Pechter’s Shakespeare’s Studies Today certainly merits its title. His book is an informed, judicious, and lively survey of current Shakespeare scholarship. [End Page 280] Nevertheless, for all its liveliness, Pechter’s report from the field is gloomy. He argues persuasively that Shakespeare studies have reached an impasse, aggravated by the “absence of any firm critical conviction” and a condition of “bad faith” deriving from what he calls “materialist discontent” (56). In his view, new historicism and cultural materialism have run their course and devolved into a reflexive reaction against the suspect “‘idealism’” of traditional literary studies (61). Pechter’s subtitle, Romanticism Lost, provides a diagnosis and potential cure for this dead end. He contends that the great Romantic poets and critics—Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt—“invented Shakespeare Studies” (1), and the renunciation of these founders has led to our current decline. The Romantics have been rejected for succumbing to bardolatry, a form of veneration for the Bard of Avon that practically deified Shakespeare as a transcendent genius and treated his work as a sacred text. Yet postmodern disenchantment has now gone so far that even critics who once promoted it are unhappy with the results. Pechter singles out Stephen Greenblatt as a notably influential example. Having objected to the “relentlessly celebratory character” of literary criticism in his earlier work, Greenblatt is now dismayed that his “profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power.”1 In Pechter’s droll summary, contemporary Shakespeareans are bound by a “love that dare not speak its name” (46), and he proposes to return to the Romantics’ bolder and more ardent affection for Shakespeare’s works.

Pechter gives a shrewd and generally sympathetic account of materialist criticism, ranging from a focus on the history of the book to the social practices of performance, and he shows how these efforts aim to move beyond mystification of a solitary sovereign genius by shifting attention to the elusive and chimerical quality of early modern texts and the collective and demotic nature of early modern theater. He cites Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass’s seminal article “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” claiming that full recognition of the multiplicity of Shakespeare texts introduces a radical principle of uncertainty in our understanding of the plays (58). Pechter also charts the shift from the discredited editorial practices of the old New Bibliography to the more indeterminate approach of a postmodern new textualism. If followed to its logical conclusion, he writes, the agnosticism professed by many contemporary editors would culminate in “terminal nescience” (136), but this does not prevent them from opting for copy texts that they deem “more accurate” (139). As for the focus on collective practices, Pechter contends that the Romantics are no less [End Page 281] committed to their value. Coleridge writes that “‘all genius exists in a participation of a common spirit—in joy individuality is lost,’” and Pechter adds that the “Romantics were not ‘looking for the author behind the text,’ but looking in front of it for audiences capable of engaging—spontaneously, inventively—with” the play before them (183).

Pechter admits to the Romantic tendency toward bardolatry, but in his account their regard is based not on a valorization of the play as an autonomous formal artwork but on a reception theory of audience engagement. The Romantics were fascinated by the “power of Shakespearean drama to generate an intense affective interest in its dramatic characters,” as well as “the quality and intensity of an interpretive engagement largely independent of the textual object” (7, 8). What Coleridge famously defined as “‘that willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith’” (40) is an internal mental experience for the viewer or reader. It leads Pechter to conclude that “it is on this ‘mental experience’ which Coleridgean literary study is founded, the intense interest and strenuous imaginative activity with which readers engage with textual energy— in short, on the beholder’s share” (71). This Romantic fascination with audience and reader response continued...

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