Shakespeare and European Politics (review)

This volume presents the latest snapshot of the swelling scene that is "European Shakespeare." The current wave of research into the interaction between the Bard and the Continent-monikers skeptically revisited by the researchers themselves-began in 1990, with a conference in Antwerp on translations of Shakespeare in the Romantic Age. The title of that conference and its published proceedings was European Shakespeares (1993), at once a nod to British attempts in the 1980s to pluralize views of the writer and his work and a rebuke to the limitations of those attempts. For while they briefly acknowledged emerging work on Shakespeare and colonialism, the editors of European Shakespeares complained that "in essence, the new paradigm is based on monolingual and monocultural models." ¹ Now, fifteen years and five essay collections later, the European research group has successfully expanded across both the European Union and the Channel: besides chapters on France, Germany, and the Low Countries, the present volume includes contributions from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, and Ireland, as well as from several British writers-two of whom, one notes with amusement, were specifically marked in Antwerp as leaders of the "new paradigm" of the 1980s. For reasons worth a meta-critical essay of its own, "European Shakespeare" has managed to charm the narrow seas, fostering intellectual exchange from Dublin to the Danube and beyond.

The aim of this volume is to connect "Shakespeare" with "European politics," but how do the contributors deploy these terms? Over the course of twenty essays, a general introduction, and four prefaces to thematic groups, the key concepts signify quite variously, but some general observations are still in order. First, the Shakespeare at issue here is exclusively the writer of plays; the volume ignores whatever politics might attach to the Sonnets or the narrative poems. (This is the single respect in which progress has not been made since Antwerp, where the absence of the Sonnets from the presentations arose at a roundtable discussion. Since the present volume raises the politics of gender and empire in the plays, an account of works like The Rape of Lucrece is sorely missed.) Instead, the textual focus is predictably on the fortunes of the English histories and Roman plays, as well as Hamlet, which shares tantalizing affinities with both groups. Happily, there are exceptions, such as a fine pair of views on Measure for Measure. But elsewhere in the collection, "Shakespeare" functions less as a corpus of texts than as a cultural icon, a cornerstone of arts and research institutions, and a spearhead for propaganda campaigns. This reminder of Shakespeare's occasional role in state ideologies and policies brings us to the meanings of "European politics" in the volume. For coeditor Dirk Delabastita, the phrase may denote either "politics in Europe" or "the politics of Europe" (343). The former, more established rubric comprises studies of nationhood in European translations, productions, or criticism of Shakespeare, while the latter examines the place of Shakespeare in an inchoate pan-European literary and cultural identity. Delabastita's division may be too strict, however, since some of the collection's best essays offer Shakespearean case studies that may at first appear nation specific, but in fact shed light on the cultural prehistory of the European political experiment.

To whom does Shakespeare belong? This fundamental question is raised by the volume's first group of essays under the heading "Geography, History, and Politics." For Joep Leerssen, the playwright is "one of the contested heirlooms" (36) to which Europeans, most ingeniously nineteenth-century Germans, have laid claim. This is not to say that English-speaking countries have rested secure in their ownership of the playwright: as Terence Hawkes shows in his bracing analysis of two living monuments-the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC-Britain and the United States have worked hard to provide Shakespeare with a cultural "home"; to find out what this has to do with Zionism and...