Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorität und Repräsentation im elisabethanischen Theater by Robert Weimann (review)

REVIEWS Robert Weimann. Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorität und Repräsentation im elisabethanischen Theater. [East] Berlin and Weimar : Aufbau-Verlag, 1988. Pp. 370. DM 15.70. This book by the distinguished East German Shakespeare scholar may be regarded both as a spin-off and as a continuation of a series of earlier publications on European Renaissance literature which the Central Institute for Literary History of the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic has put forward in recent years. Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis is a continuation in that certain key concepts— e.g., appropriation ('Aneignung') and Realism—have been developed further and are now being applied to the drama, while the earlier studies were primarily concerned with Renaissance narrative. It is a spin-off because it is an intensely and unabashedly personal work, while some of the earlier books, clearly written under Professor Weimann's direction and inspiration, were quite frankly "official" publications. While Realismus in der Renaissance (ed. Robert Weimann, AufbauVerlag , 1977) described literature as a means of appropriating the "world" (its subtitle is, significantly, Aneignung der Welt in der erzählenden Prosa), Weimann's more recent publications are concerned with the fact that the modes of literary and, more generally, linguistic appropriation themselves have to be "appropriated." While this may sound like over-indulgent subtlety, Weimann gives striking examples of this process both in literary and non-literary discourses. The paradigm for the phenomenon is the "debate and discord" sparked off by the Protestant Reformation which contested the exegetical monopoly of the medieval Church by invoking the general priesthood of all believers. This is the theme of the second chapter. One might expect that such appropriation could well be illustrated in the polemical theater of such Protestant playwrights as John Bale, but instead we are treated to a chapter on "Luther and Shakespeare: The Author-Function in an Age of Abrupt Change [im Umbruch]." The gist of the chapter is that Shakespeare, to establish himself as an author, had to go through a struggle which can at least be compared to the one experienced by Luther. What Weimann has to say on Shakespeare's contemporary reputation is familiar, and the analogy with Luther remains strained. To maintain it, Weimann has to shift his ground considerably. While Luther is concerned to claim authority (of whose legitimacy he is convinced), Shakespeare represents the claiming of authority in his plays and "appropriates" theatrical devices to show off its problematical status. Chief among these devices is the tradition of the Vice, and the interpretation of the Bastard in King John in the light of this tradition and in the context of the problem of authority (p. 118) is most illuminating . His questioning of authority is no doubt more serious and more 270 Reviews271 damaging than that of his predecessors in the late medieval and early Tudor theater. Yet it has little to do with Shakespeare's author-function. In the subtitle of the book "authority" is linked with "representation." The way in which the two notions are intertwined is highly complex and hard to unravel. It does offer important insights, though, as in the interpretation of the Prologues in Henry V: the "authority" of the stage to represent vast stretches of country is no longer taken for granted (as it was, for instance, on the medieval mystery stage). The audience, as it were, is begged to authorize this act of representation by an act of the imagination (chap. 4, pp. 149ff). Chapter 5 discusses the representation of authority on the Elizabethan stage. Here the paradigm is "King Lear as the tragedy of representation." While such a label for Lear may seem to repeat the obvious, Weimann's analysis reveals the pervasiveness of the motif in the tragedy and makes its place in a "post-Reformation context" plausible (p. 199). The central concept of the book, of course, is 'mimesis.' This notion looks back on a long history of discussion in the GDR which Weimann recapitulates in his introductory chapter. His main concern is to free the concept from its overtones of passive mirroring and at the same time to set it off against Derrida's and...