Being and Having in Shakespeare by Katharine Eisaman Maus (review)

How essential is the connection between what we have and who we are? The turn toward cultural materialism in Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century prominently cited plays such as King Lear to illustrate the contention that “objects constitute subjects” and that, “looked at closely, ‘subjectivity’ itself is simply a hubristic illusion.” Perhaps consciousness was merely the residue of “things”: if we took the value of those objects away, scholars asked, was anything left? This remarkable book, based on her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, is a splendid adjunct to Maus’s classic Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Here she presents a more complex assessment of what emerges as a negative dialectic of “identity” and “possession” in Shakespeare’s plays, pointing out that, even though Shakespeare periodically aligns identity with role-playing and possession as cognates, he also exhibits a fascination with the concept of “inwardness” that resists any simple reduction of the self to its possessions. In the case of Richard II, for instance, Maus observes that the self-deposed sovereign becomes most himself only when deprived of the ostensible roles and trappings through which he had previously defined who he was. “Richard’s subjectivity,” she writes, “is predicated not upon possession, but upon loss of possession.” Yet the irony of his tragic self-realization, she continues, is that, although he attempts to renounce the very idea of material possession, his imagination continues to be structured by “the property regime it needs to forsake.” In the case of this self-betrayed king, she concludes—isolating a central paradox of being—that “the conditions of self-realization are also the conditions in which the self cannot, apparently, exist.”