Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World (review)

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World is an ambitious, learned, and wide-ranging book that delivers a daunting amount of commentary and information about the Columbian encounter with the New World, the afterlife of Columbus himself, and "the 'sexing' of America" (81ff), in addition to engaging in a spirited and informed discussion of the intersections of colonialism, postcolonialism, and cultural appropriation. The book, however, delivers considerably less of what may be accounted "new light" on Shakespeare's implication in these subjects, restricting itself to a single, fairly predictable chapter on Shakespeare's Tempest. Indeed, Hart's chapter on The Tempest is remarkably, even avowedly, unpointed. It provides what Hart calls an explication de texte that too often operates at the level of plot summary, revisits the evidence for the play's competing New World and Mediterranean applications, and effectively concludes by advising us to accept and savor the play's plurality of significations. As Hart writes:

Contradiction is dramatic; so is ambivalence, which is very close to dramatic irony. Messiness may be another critical metaphor but I am using it because of the rage for order in comedy and in allegory. One of the things I am saying is that sometimes there is unresolved friction and that something does not quite fit in an interpretation, including in my own reading. This unfit or unfitted reading allows some room to breathe.

(144)

While I welcome Hart's refreshingly candid resistance to closure and single-minded argumentation, his reluctance to do more than rehearse familiar themes of Tempest criticism, without developing a clear position on them or actively engaging Shakespeare with figures in whom Hart is more interested (including Jean de Léry, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Michel de Montaigne), may lead one to wonder what "Shakespeare's Island" (the chapter's title) is doing here in the first place.

A related problem with the Tempest chapter is Hart's failure to engage directly with the work of dozens of scholars whose publications he cites in his voluminous notes (but whose names seldom surface in his erratically assembled index) and his apparent lack of acquaintance with the influential work of scholars such as Harry Berger Jr. (whose 1968 essay on the play, "Miraculous Harp," provides exactly the kind of deeply resonant close reading that is missing here). I would make less of these absences in Hart's Tempest chapter were they not so regrettably "present" throughout the book, particularly in the chapter titled "Columbus and the Natives" (which, again, rehearses without engaging previous discussions by Peter Hulme and Tzvetan Todorov). Considerably more enlightening are the fifty-two densely-written pages that comprise Hart's third chapter, "After Columbus." This is one of the places that Hart's book achieves sustained scholarly realization, another being his comparatively free-standing last chapter on cultural appropriation. Hart's take on the literary, iconographic, monumental, and cultural aspects of the Columbian afterlife is literally encyclopedic. I, for one, am grateful for almost every piece of information Hart transmits here, particularly for his documentation of repeated references to Columbus in private correspondence and journals in post-Civil War America and his sustained commentary on the virtual appropriation of Columbus as founding father throughout the later nineteenth century, culminating in the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While there is, as Hart notes, something decidedly amiss in Columbus's being "read back through the history of the United States, as if millions escaped religious persecution to Brazil or New Spain, when this does not seem to have been the case," there is something even more intriguing in the fact that "Columbus becomes appropriated politically and culturally in a teleology of progress, as if he could have embodied or predicted the United States" (60, emphasis added). And though Hart does not say so himself, the repeated association of Columbus with progress and...