Pop Goes The Bard

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Modern Culture
random house publishing
The National Post

Marjorie Garber writes that Prospero's "our revels now are ended" speech in The Tempest is "one of the passages in Shakespeare that I find real difficulty in reading aloud without a noticeable catch in my throat.

She isn't the only one, but it's heartening to find an academic critic (Garber is a professor of literature and chair of environmental studies at Harvard, as well as being the author of a dozen books) expressing such enthusiasm and exposing such vulnerability. The very idea of a professor reading Shakespeare aloud is an encouraging one, made all the more heart-warming by the fact that Garber's own prose -- fast, witty and aware -- both invites and survives the reading-aloud test. There isn't a page of Shakespeare and Modern Culture that I didn't enjoy. Which makes it frustrating that the book as a whole is so disappointing. It starts from the uncontroversial proposition that Shakespeare's plays have insinuated themselves into just about every aspect of modern life, including some apparently incongruous ones, and that this has in turn affected the way we respond to the work itself.

She attempts to trace the relationship between 10 of the plays and their later analogues, "modern" in her sense stretching back into the 19th century and forward into the 21st. It's a field she's equipped to explore; it's rare to find an author, especially a scholarly one, who can treat both traditional and pop culture without condescending to either. But it's also a vast area, one that invites catalogues rather than conclusions. Too often, you come to the end of a chapter wondering what the author was trying to prove.

To each of her chosen plays she affixes a keyword, denoting a concept that later ages are said, not always persuasively, to have found especially attractive. To The Tempest, first in her book as it was in the First Folio, she assigns the word "Man," which can mean just about anything. She starts with an account of a Kentucky prison whose Shakespeare performance group has never, despite all colonialist theories, cast a black prisoner as Caliban; that's fascinating but she never goes back to it.

Her chosen theme for The Merchant of Venice is "Intention" -- the never-ending search to determine whether Shakespeare agreed with us about Shylock. Critics, especially modern ones, have decried the idea of "intention," but consider this: Almost every rehearsal of a play, whatever the theorizing behind it, inevitably becomes an attempt to discover what the author meant. The Merchant is a case whose problems might be summarized by two facts: It was a favourite play of the Nazis, and Jewish actors have always clamoured to play it. There are whole books about its history, and Garber adds little to them except a lively style.

Her best chapter is on Romeo and Juliet ("Youth"). Here she's able to zero in on two co-existing yet contradictory phenomena. One is that Romeo's name has entered the language with an identity precisely opposite to its namesake's in the play; instead of a lover faithful unto death, he's a boy too dishy to confine himself to one girl. (Remember Petula Clark's hit song “Romeo”, which begins "I studied Shakespeare when I was at school" and ends, "are you mine, or just only my Romeo?") The other is the way in which each young generation adopts (and adapts) the play as its own image of romantic revolt against social and familial intolerance. Garber has a lot to say about West Side Story, a show that's influenced all subsequent productions of Romeo and Juliet; something, too, about Tom Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, a movie that, wittily and movingly, affirms R&J as "the normative love story of our time," and knows in advance that we will agree.

Stoppard also figures largely in the chapter on Hamlet ("Character"), which provides a brilliant commentary on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, though not quite as brilliant as the commentary that the play itself provides on Hamlet.

It also has some of the best of the (mainly) New Yorker cartoons with which Garber sprinkles her pages, as a neat way of reinforcing Shakespeare's omnipresence (subway commuter: "If it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all").

Also fun: Her referencing business-instruction manuals that cite Henry V ("exemplarity") as a leadership model, Henry's willingness to execute his friends being cited by one such book as "the ultimate pink slip," which, Garber gently points out, rather misses the play's complexities.

You might say the same for the constant invocations of Lady Macbeth ("Interpretation") by journalists writing about Hillary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, which they could surely only do by disregarding marital context. (Bill as Macbeth might be possible casting, but Denis?) Garber has a soft spot for Mac-Bird, a forgotten satire on LBJ, whose idea of parody was to name Adlai Stevenson as the Egg of Head; this may or may not be fair to Stevenson, but it certainly isn't fair to Shakespeare, whose jokes were much cleverer.

As are Garber's: This book is probably just a pendant to her magnum opus, Shakespeare After All, which I passed up reading a year ago (I opted for A. D. Nuttall's brilliant Shakespeare the Thinker) but up with which I now intend to catch. It may, I fancy, say more in passing about Shakespeare's modernity and modernity's Shakespeare than this one does by concentrating on them.