- Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots by Barbara L. Estrin
In Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction, Barbara L. Estrin makes innovative connections between Shakespeare and some recent novels that deal with separated families and collective trauma, largely in relation to what she calls the “lyric” or “Petrarchan” and “foundling” plots. For her, the lyric plot is the unhappy lover’s parthenogenetic self-creation as a poet and his substitution of artistic creativity for the creation of children; the foundling plot involves the child raised by substitute parents who discovers his true aristocratic origins when he is old enough to marry. However, Estrin often extends the meaning of these terms beyond their literal meaning. Self-creation can be good, especially if it is a refusal of the foundling plot or if it does not involve the imaginative fixing of women in a static representation. She prefaces her book by evoking the global problem of bloodline-based nationalism becoming xenophobia directed against immigrants; she associates it not only with the blood-based foundling plot but also with lyric poetry, because of the race and class specificity of the beauty praised, manifested early on in Petrarch’s attack on “Teutonic barbarians” (xviii). From contemporary novelistic revisions, most obviously of the foundling plot, Estrin moves to chapters on Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice and an afterword that begins with All’s Well That Ends Well (focusing on the relationship between the Countess and Helena) and moves on to videos by Mona Hatoum and Mieke Bal of women in Lebanon, Serbia, Tunisia, Iran, and Turkey and their separated adult children.
The first contemporary novel discussed, Caryl Phillips’s 1997 The Nature of Blood, links the two halves of Estrin’s book. Although Phillips’s book is set mainly during the Holocaust and its aftermath, some of his novel is placed in early modern Venice, Othello is one of its characters, and it treats early modern anti-Semitism (although Shylock does not appear). While one would expect from Estrin’s introduction that she would analyze Venetian blood-based hostility to Othello, a frequent theme in Phillips’s novel, she gives only brief attention to it, instead stressing Philips’ revisionary presentation of an Othello who has left behind an African wife and child in order to gain acceptance in Venice. Thus, Estrin’s Othello follows the lyric plot in both his abandonment of his original family and his possessive view of Desdemona.
The author’s discussion of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) examines the problems of a hero stuck in the foundling plot, as the protagonist attempts to find parents who disappeared during World War II. By contrast, Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby (1998), a novel with elements of science fiction and historical fiction, revises the foundling plot because the hero discovers his father is a morally superior monkey (!). His adoptive father rejects him after this discovery but later softens. Ark Baby and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1998) and The Winter Vault (2009), two [End Page 492] novels that deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust, alter the foundling and lyric plots by valorizing metaphorical adoption between lovers. In all of these chapters, not just the one on The Nature of Blood, Estrin makes a host of comparisons between plot elements in the novels and plot elements in Shakespeare’s plays.
Her chapters on Shakespeare, like the earlier ones, take a feminist-psychoanalytic approach, drawing especially on recent writings of Luce Irigaray. In each of the plays, Estrin finds some revisionary moments to applaud, although she maintains that the plays all return to a more fixed version of her two plots. For Estrin, The Merchant of Venice pits the lyric plot against the foundling plot, and the foundling plot wins. When Shylock compares his creation of interest to Jacob using a magic wand to make sheep bear “‘parti-coloured lambs’” (137), he takes on the energy of the lyric plot as he “invents...