A Little Touch of Shakespeare in Our Time

Review Article A Little Touch of Shakespeare in Our Time JILL L. LEVENSON Joseph H. Summers. Dreams of Love and Power: On Shakespeare's Plays Oxford: Clarendon Press '984. xi, 161. $37.50 Richard A. Levin. Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Content Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1985. 203. us $24-.50 David M. Bergeron. Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1985. xiv, 257. us $25.00 William C. Carroll. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. X, 292. us $28.00 Michael Goldman. Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. X, 182, US $20.00 Jean E. Howard. Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press '984. x, 212. us $16.95 Philip C. McGuire. Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1985. xxvii, 191. US $22.00 James R. Siemon. Shakespearean Iconoclasm Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1985. xii, 307. us $28.50 Harriett Hawkins. The Devi!,s Party: Critical Counter-interpretations of Shakespearian Drama Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985- ix, 196. $37.50 During 1984 and 1985, the University of Toronto Quarterly accumulated for review nine books about Shakespearean drama. These constitute only a tiny fraction of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1987/ 8 322 JILL L. LEVENSON publications on the subject over that two-year span: the annual World Bibliographies in Shakespeare Quarterly list 3,747 items for 1984 and 3,871 items for 1985. In their number, as well as their methods and general quality, the review volumes give readers a mere glimpse of this enormous academic industry. The Shakespeare business has grown so large now that book reviewers customarily take its measure before attempting to evaluate the critical impact of individual works. So Keith Brown introduced his overview in the TLS, 22 August 1986, with a sum: Last April, fifteen new book-length contributions to Shakespeare studies were reviewed in the TLS in a round-up by Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank. Since then, ... the present reviewer has read twenty more - and now autumn will soon be upon us, with yet another harvest. Cui bono? (P 917) More optimistically, Terence Hawkes drew a conclusion - rather than a questionfrom the statistics: 'The news that the current output of writings about the Bard may stand as high as 8.8 articles or books aday confirms him and all his works as one ofthe crucial battlegrounds in the struggle for cultural meaning' (TLS, 10 April 1987, P 390). In almost all cases, reviewers survey the establishment after measuring it, and they express their findings in metaphors - a battleground, Shakespeare Park, a landscape, waves - appropriate to their impressions of critical trends. Robert M. Adams makes informative use of the wave metaphor, explaining that 'the general shape of the twentieth-century critical changes ... is that of successive, increasingly rapid waves of opinion' (New York Review of Books, 6 November 1986, p 50), Over the past few years, opinion has gravitated in theoreticaldirections which Coppelia Kahn describes as 'psychological, social and historical, feminist, deconstructive' in her Introduction to Shakespeare's 'Rough Magic': Renaissance Essays in Honor ofC.L. Barber (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1985), p "5. Deadpan, Terry Eagleton makes a similar point in the Preface to his book William Shakespeare (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell 1986), pp ix- x: 'Though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida.' Yet the nine books under consideration here show very few signs of this theoretical current, a factor which has influenced the organization of their review. Since they manifest earlier 'waves of opinion,' they appear roughly in the order of their succession. This overview therefore begins with Joseph H. Summers, who offers an appreciation of several plays; continues with Richard A. Levin, David M. Bergeron, and William C. Carroll, who root their arguments...