Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare: “Thou Art the Thing Itself” by Margherita Pascucci (review)

Terry Eagleton once wrote tongue-in-cheek of the unfair advantage possessed by professional philosophers over their brethren in English departments when they write about literary theory, as they had actually formally studied the philosophies behind the theories being discussed.¹ Margherita Pascucci has precisely that advantage. She has produced a truly interdisciplinary study, one that constantly dialogues between philosophy and four plays of William Shakespeare. The book does not make for easy reading (especially in its introduction and first chapter), but it builds momentum starting with the concrete interpretation of Macbeth in the middle of chapter 3 and carries over until the end. Readers who persevere in reading will be rewarded with an illuminating discussion of Macbeth and King Lear and an absolutely path-breaking reading of Timon of Athens. The conclusion is a luminous defense of Shakespeare, literature, and art in general as “the voice of an ontological revolution. … It is the ultimate expression of life’s intensity. Literature and poetry, or any work of art, express what people cannot at times express: the shadows of events, the projection of desire. … Literature captures the warp and weft, the folds of the fabric of reality, as its matter” (209). These important claims, reasserting philosophical humanism in sophisticated theoretical terms, conclude a set of carefully argued analyses and propositions that makes the book well worth the effort and concentration.

Few Shakespeare specialists will be familiar with the range of Pascucci’s references. Ideally, its readers should be deeply conversant with “The Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of Walter Benjamin’s 1928 Origin of German Tragic Drama and be open to an ontological interpretation of the theory of allegory begun there. A good general knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition is desirable, and the reader needs a good background in Spinoza, especially as interpreted by Gilles Deleuze. Knowledge of Foucault and of Marx and of the marxisant side of contemporary Shakespeare studies would be a strong plus as well, especially for the book’s second, more accessible half. Of course, readers should have familiarity with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Timon of Athens.

Many of the work’s problems come in the opening fifty pages. Rather than gradually inducting its readers into the book’s mental framework, the author effectively plunges us in medias res. There is a glossary of key terms, but it does not really go beyond or behind what the text provides. Repetition of key words and phrases in differing contexts rather than elucidation is one of the book’s chief rhetorical strategies—and weaknesses. It often seems to assume we have already read later portions of the book in its beginnings, for example, by repeatedly referring in the introduction and in the discussion of Hamlet to points on King Lear not made until much later in the book.

But by the end, readers will be rewarded with the intuitions necessary to understand the introduction when reread. In addition, the second half of the book is considerably clearer and more accessible. If it were not for the illuminating discussion of Macbeth in the first half (57–71), I would recommend that most Shakespeare critics simply begin the book with chapter 4, the beginning of the second half.

To be sure, the book does make arguments for its own unity, both at the beginning and in the conclusion, but there is a hammered-together quality to these claims. The author states early on that the four plays chosen for extended analysis (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Timon of Athens) represent “four different images of the same crystal” (4), and she goes on to define the “crystal” as “a codified knowledge of the self, of the human being, of life, in its essence, nature and accidents, a codified knowledge of property and its appearances.” (4). The four are “the self (Hamlet), affect (Lear), imagination / power (Macbeth), and money (Timon)” (4). In practice, Hamlet and Macbeth...