Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, and: Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (review)

Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, by Linda Rozmovits; pp. xi + 166. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, $29.95, £21.39.

Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean, by Richard W. Schoch; pp. xiv + 208. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £40.00, $54.95.

The performance of Shakespeare in the Victorian period is now receiving the sort of attention undreamt of a generation ago, when, apart from the occasional serious study, the standard response was a cluck-clucking of editorial and critical tongues about textual cuts and bowdlerization, and the alleged degradation of play and action by gaudy spectacle. Today it is all different: the two books under review are characteristic of what is now de rigueur--careful and cogent argumentation, locating of subject matter in a variety of contemporary and theoretical contexts, and meticulous examination of the social and intellectual culture in which the performance was embedded. The authors are, indeed, just as much cultural as theatrical historians and critics of Shakespeare--in the case of Linda Rozmovits even more so.

The focus of Rozmovits's book is The Merchant of Venice, including Henry Irving's 1879 production, which ran an extraordinary (for Shakespeare) 250 performances. She begins, however, by tracing the development of bardolatry, which culminated in the late-Victorian period with a virtual equation between the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare: Shakespeare as the word of God. This was the case even in daily life outside intellectual circles: my father, born in 1892, remembered an old man who continually read and re-read Shakespeare and the Bible. "I shall find the meaning of life here," he told my father, "if it is not here it is nowhere." Before moving to a consideration of The Merchant, Rozmovits outlines the interest aroused in the nineteenth century by Shakespeare's female characters, such as the construction for them of fictional lives outside the plays by Mary Cowden Clarke in The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850-52), and the amount of material about Shakespeare's women appearing in the popular late-Victorian magazine, The Girl's Own Paper.

At the center of the book are Portia and Shylock, not so much as characters acted on stage (although some attention is paid to Irving's Shylock) but as cultural artifacts. This seems a problem with both books: they are concerned with the drama and the stage, yet, for both, Shakespeare in the nineteenth century is a springboard into social and cultural theory; theatre and play can be pushed into the background. It is Rozmovits's thesis that the late Victorians used Portia to control female ambition: "[T]he imposition of a prescriptive framework for female experience based on the authority of Shakespeare as supreme arbiter of the human condition was simply one of the many strategies employed to mitigate the influence of women, who were making incursions into the public sphere in increasing numbers" (57). Portia, the beautiful heiress of Belmont in love with Bassanio, was a feminine ideal and no trouble to anyone, but Portia, the feisty courtroom lawyer, was a threat to conservative values and attitudes toward appropriate social roles for women.

The safe compartmentalization of a potentially edgy feminism in Portia-- certainly not played in any feminist way by Ellen Terry--was echoed, according to Rozmovits, by Irving's sanitizing operation on the Jewishness of Shylock. She points to late-century anxieties in Victorian society about increasing Jewish immigration from Europe as well as about the success of increasing numbers of Jews in entrepreneurial capitalism, anxieties that might have provided an unsettling subtext for any performance of Shylock or any reading of the character. Such anxieties certainly existed, and it is equally...