the great shakespeareans
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This article was downloaded by: [201.235.12.117]On: 11 December 2013, At: 20:21Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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The Great ShakespeareansB.J. Sokol aa University of London, Goldsmiths College , London , UKPublished online: 02 Aug 2012.
To cite this article: B.J. Sokol (2012) The Great Shakespeareans, Shakespeare, 8:3, 338-351, DOI:10.1080/17450918.2012.696275
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2012.696275
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‘‘God’s Plenty’’: Review of The Great Shakespeareans, vols. 1�9, general editors Peter
Holland and Adrian Poole, London: Continuum, 2010�2011, set 1: 896 pp., £300.00
(hardback), ISBN 9781441157874, set 2: 1120 pp., £375.00 (hardback), ISBN
9781441149237
The first nine volumes (comprising the first two series) of the collection Great
Shakespeareans are produced in a handsome format by Continuum, now part of the
Bloomsbury publishing group. Between them they contain nine Introductions and
35 essays. Each essay has a different author or authors, but some of the volume
editors contribute both an Introduction and an essay. The 35 ‘‘great Shakespeareans’’
discussed include editors, critics, poets, novelists, actors, actor-managers, lecturers,
philosophers, and one philanthropic book collector.The naming of single figures at the head of each essay need not alarm those phobic
about ‘‘elitism’’ or ‘‘individualism’’. For in no case is the artist, performer or thinker in
question viewed as a Promethean hero, or out of the contexts of their collaborators,
rivals, publics, or cultural moments. Many essays also consider economic circumstances
(for instance, of the theatre industry, or the academic or tourist ones), and many pay
almost as extensive attention to, for instance, the controversies or other persons
surrounding their named subjects as they do to her or his activity or productions.
The named figures discussed span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, lived
in several different countries, and had widely diverse professions, social positions,
aspirations and outlooks. In consequence, many sorts of expertise apply in these
essays, and among them is also seen a wide variety in presentation, organisation and
argument. Some excel in quality and in general all these essays are informative,
stimulating and accessible. Needless to say, confirming the accuracy of the many
claims made in such a wide-ranging collection far exceeds my expertise.
Although the ‘‘Great Shakespeareans’’ treated in many individual volumes are
diverse chronologically, linguistically or nationally, each volume does group together
figures having certain affinities. Thus the first volume groups four early pioneers of
Shakespeare criticism or editing. These uniformly excellent essays on John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone reveal that literary politics
was a distinct feature of those distant times, although it was sometimes less
combative than after the emergence of the academic profession of English Literature.
Thus Harold Love finds that although Dryden was politically conservative and
narrowly neo-classicist in his outlook, he never dismissed contrary opinions out of
hand, and never damned or derided those who possessed them. Rather ‘‘[T]he
imaginary room in which [Dryden as a critic] speaks to us contains readers of many
different persuasions, united only in their enthusiasm for the quintessentially urban
activity of debate’’. In this way ‘‘Dryden fashioned a critical manner which is that of
a genial and undogmatic disputant’’ (I.64).According to Freya Johnston, a similar tolerance, based on respect for his readers
and for holders of dissenting points of view, characterised both the criticism and the
Shakespeare
Vol. 8, No. 3, September 2012, 338�351
ISSN 1745-0918 print/ISSN 1745-0926 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2012.696275
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editorial practices of Johnson. In Johnson’s case this was linked with abiding
tendencies toward self-questioning and self revision: ‘‘As always in his work there is
a prevailing sense of human weakness and error . . . the critic’s evident susceptibility
to the faults he identifies in Shakespeare is meant to underline, as do his many
exasperated notes on the spats of previous editors, that ‘we are all men / In our own
natures frail, and capable / Of frailty’’’ (I.136).
Contrastingly, in the account given by Simon Jarvis of Pope’s work on
Shakespeare theologically underpinned doubt and self-doubt does not shine out.
Jarvis rather demonstrates Pope’s savage and combative attacks on scholarly critics
of his edition, damning them as grubs and dunces insensitive to all but piddling
philological details. Jarvis also argues that Pope’s own trenchant poetry owed much
to a sensibility unconsciously learned from Shakespeare, while Pope’s own poetic
sensibility was often the basis of his emendations of Shakespeare.
Thus the guiding light of Pope’s Shakespeare editing was his own sensibility and
taste, which Jarvis finds ranging from the brilliantly refined to nearly blind with
prejudice. Also, says Jarvis, Pope saw little virtue in justifying, explaining, or even
consistently identifying his alterations of the orthography, grammar, syntax,
lineation, and even literal contents of Shakespeare texts; to do so was beneath his
conception of a gentlemanly scholar. Moreover, although Pope did pay some
attention to early texts as well as to more recent editions, he did not attribute
particular authority to the former, and according to Jarvis this arose from his
snobbish disdain for the social standing and abilities of Shakespeare’s fellow actors.
Such a Pope might seem far from genial, and distant from the Enlightenment
tendencies to openness described above. But despite his snobbism, and his anti-
intellectualism based on a certainty about his poetic ‘‘ear’’, Jarvis’ Pope was also
drawn ‘‘to a philosophical Shakespeare’’ who demonstrated ‘‘that the bounty of high
art is not coincident with the giving of certainties’’ (I.111). Jarvis thinks that Pope’s
own best poetic work learned this lesson well: ‘‘Shakespeare feeds that aspect of
Pope’s verse thinking � the aspect which makes him a sublime, as well as a delicious,
elegant and clever poet � by which technical virtuosity thinks against, rather than
merely decorating, illustrating or otherwise reinforcing, the larger arguments
proposed to it’’ (I.113). That sort of poetic ‘‘scepticism’’, as Jarvis calls it, implies
a more tolerant openness to contraries and alternatives than the self-assured and
combative wittiness of Pope as a poet and editor might otherwise seem to imply.
The last of the four pioneers treated in the first volume of the series is Malone,
who as an editor strove to test and correct the presumptions of many of his
predecessors by means of scrupulous logic, extensive historical research and
laborious care. He did that so well that much of what he determined is still of
fundamental value in Shakespeare studies, and the model of his methods is or ought
to be in English studies generally. For it is impossible to believe that Shakespeare
scholarship based on scrupulous and laborious documentary research, as pioneered
by Malone, is merely one among other culturally inflected positionalities to be
indifferently valued with the others. Or so Marcus Walsh seems to conclude,
although he does not put the debate in quite such stark terms: ‘‘Malone’s work lies
within, and is a signal triumph of, an enlightenment methodology and discourse,
characterised especially by rational textual criticism and textual explication under-
written by the precise application of extensive historical scholarship’’.
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It is fascinating that both Pope’s intuitive and sometimes inspired grasp of
Shakespearean verse thinking and verse textures, and Malone’s closely reasoned
rationales for textual emendation, ‘‘still mark the shape of what ‘Shakespeare’ is for
us today’’ (I.113�14, on Pope’s Shakespeare). Our profession is peculiar in that
products of such contrasting modalities remain valued and valuable.
The next volume in the series treats the contexts, lives and careers of the actors oractor-managers David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and Edmund
Kean. Garrick, we learn from Peter Holland, was naturalistic, psychological and
brisk in his studied Shakespearean characterisation. Michael Dobson explains that
the artistically and politically conservative J.P. Kemble (who flourished during the
age of Revolution) was inclined to a formal monumentalism often bearing a gothic
(gloomy, violent or fated) cast. Russ McDonald tells us that Sarah Siddons, Kemble’s
sister and frequent co-star, also pursued a style of monumentalism and grandeur.
The pair were praised for their meticulous treatment of texts, their inventiveness and
freshness of approach to articulation, and their unbombastic although dignified
styles of recitation. Both followed Garrick, and surpassed him, in the direction of
making it more possible for a member of the theatrical profession to be seen as
respectable in social terms, as well as to be respected as a genuine artist.
Such achievements were seen almost in an inverted form in the meteoric but
soon tragic career of Kean, as described by Peter Thomson. Kean, an uneducated
and illegitimate theatre brat, and maybe half-Jewish, came from ‘‘nowhere’’ when
he took the London stage by storm in 1814. His huge celebrity lasted a brief six
seasons, the duration of the ‘‘craze’’ for his wildly emotional Shakespeareperformances (especially of Shylock, Richard III and Othello, but also of Lear
and Hamlet). Kean then went back to nowhere, that is into self-immolating
dissipation.
Kean’s performances were cavalier with texts, illogical, spectacular, and reportedly
electrifying. The man himself, small-statured, athletic and pugilistic, self-destructive
and paranoiac, presented an anti-hero avant la lettre. Living in the age of Revolution,
he was greatly admired by Lord Byron and William Hazlitt, and was painted by
Eugene Delacroix. Peter Thompson sees him as akin to John Keats in impetuousness,
and near to a model for Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
The third volume of the series takes us to the Continent for three chapters on
Shakespeare’s reception abroad, and then back to England in a fourth chapter. I had
a great deal to learn about how Shakespeare appeared to Voltaire, and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and in particular how his
European reception related to the cross currents of debate between Neo-classicism
and Romanticism. Yet the highlight of the volume for me was in Reginald Foakes’
dense, brilliantly calibrated, and deeply pondered essay on Coleridge’s responses toShakespeare. Of course much has been written about that before, but in a relatively
brief scope Foakes astutely sifts and synthesises the issues. His tightly reasoned and
finely balanced essay should put to rest for good the canard that Coleridge was a
plagiarist. A particular benefit of this volume in the series is that its essays on the
continental reception of Shakespeare provide a rich context for Foakes’s discussion
of Coleridge’s originality.
The next volume considers responses to Shakespeare of the Romantics Charles
Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats. It begins with Felicity James’s essay on Lamb, which
asserts repetitively but somewhat diffusely that Lamb’s recorded responses to
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Shakespeare reflect only a fraction of a lifelong unrecorded conversation between
good friends (and brother and sister). That Lamb was sociable and genial is without
question. Yet, on the basis of evidence not noted by James (although she does
mention his early poetry), Lamb was also capable of taking personal offence (he was
bitter when Coleridge improved his poems before publication, without permission).
Moreover, it seems to me impossible to prove that Lamb’s very lively social life fed
directly into his critical writings. It is also dubious to analyse a fictional work inorder to describe Lamb’s ‘‘co-dependency’’, as James puts it, with his sister (IV.62).
James’s essay ends with accounts of several latter-day imaginative reconstructions of
the peculiarities of the Lamb household; as interesting as these may be, I would reject
in the contexts of scholarship their modes of taking liberties with evidence. Another
problem I have with James’s essay is that it appears to associate an emphasis on
individual sensibility or interiority with political conservatism. However well that
may accord with certain views of our own time, I think it runs exactly contrary to the
views of Romanticism and the age of Revolution.
Uttara Natarajan’s essay on Hazlitt comes next in the same volume. It is so
sharply focused, so crisply expressed, and so tightly organised as to evidence the kind
of ‘‘gusto’’ that was much admired by Hazlitt himself (for instance, in Kean’s
performances). Valuable clarity of argument is found also in Beth Law’s essay on
Keats, which illuminates profundities, but also some limitations and obsessions, in
the poet’s response to Shakespeare. Law, however, unlike Natarajan, partly hobbles
her essay by excessive uses of repetitive-seeming forward or backward self-
referencing, and by offering frequent accounts of what other critics have proposed
without offering any extensions, assent or dissent.All three of the essays in the volume, although varying in style, address similar
enigmas. Among these are that all of the three Romantic Shakespeareans discussed
claimed to prefer the page to the stage (and in the case of Keats, just snippets from
the page), but all were in fact avid and appreciative theatregoers. Another is that
although all three found Shakespeare exceptionally non-egotistical (as Keats
famously put it, possessing ‘‘negative capability’’), they all in various ways lauded
individualist gusto, or personal perspective or inwardness in art. It is notable that
the three essays address similar paradoxes with similar insight, if with varying
degrees of ease or pleasure for readers. I should emphasise that these degrees are
relative, and all three essays are readable and informative, although (perhaps
‘‘unfairly’’ to the others) one stands out in terms of clarity and energy of expression.
The next volume treats four great novelists, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens,
George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Three of them also wrote poetry, but much less is
made of that than of their prose fiction. Hardy’s poetry receives a bit more attention
than the others’, which it deserves (yet a wry remark is still passed that ‘‘no-one ever
wished [The Dynasts] longer than it is’’ (V.149)).All four novelists are said to have been deeply influenced by Shakespeare. Yet all
four essayists acknowledge that this cannot be proven by their knowledge of,
quotation of, or even immersion in Shakespeare texts, for these were constant
features of nineteenth-century British culture, found everywhere. Indeed we might
remark that, as argued in these essays, the four novelists were influenced by several
different Shakespeares.
John Rignall’s subtle essay is notably successful in ‘‘showing how George Eliot
exploits and adapts Shakespearean material for her own ends’’ (V.131), for with
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clarity and fluency he expounds on Eliot’s intricate responses to Shakespeare’s own
treatments of complexity and multiplicity. Rignall wisely avails himself of Eliot’s own
remarks on these matters, remarks evidencing her shining and courageous
intelligence.
The other essays in the volume argue respectively for an analogy between
Scott’s now-depreciated but once universally lauded massive oeuvre and Shake-speare’s energy and national pride, a connection between Dickens’s celebration of the
grotesque vitality of humanity and Shakespeare’s unbounded sense of hu-
mour, and (most surprisingly) an affinity between Hardy’s outlook and Shake-
speare’s purported finding of a counterpoise to an uncaring universe in the
unquenchable qualities of human hope and especially erotic desire.
Peter Holbrook’s essay on Hardy is the most energetic in the volume, the one
most determined to prove its unusual proposals. Among these is a description of an
optimistic, if backward-looking, Hardy. In one small way I must disagree with
Holbrook, for he denies to Shakespeare a specific interest (as seen in Hardy) in the
laws of marriage (V.152). Here he misses out on recognising an important subfield of
Shakespeare studies.
I will next consider volume eight, which in a similar manner to the British-writers-
centred volume five just discussed considers the impact of Shakespeare on the four
American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Herman Melville and JohnBerryman. The Introduction to this volume contains some carelessness which is not at
all characteristic of the collection overall. This includes a jarring and pointless
repetition within two adjacent paragraphs of one identical quotation (VIII.2); it seems
that two drafts of the essay have been conflated without editorial care. Even more
careless is that the footnotes identifying the source of those two identical quotations
(notes 6 and 9), although naming the same source document, assign different page
references to them. Perhaps this lapse evaded oversight because it appears in the work
of an editor (although copy editing should not have been his sole responsibility). Very
jarring too, in the same Introduction, are a claim that ‘‘a substantial proportion of
available Shakespeare manuscripts’’ [italics mine, but sic] were acquired by ‘‘American
libraries’’ (VIII.3), and also a dropped-in politicised slur, not in the least supported in
tone or detail by the relevant essay, that America was ‘‘culturally grasping’’ (VIII.10).
This crudeness aside, the articles in the volume do vary in their tendencies to
criticise the United States’ cultural scene, but none simply assumes superiority or
a licence to ridicule. Much more finely discriminating, for example, is the explanation
by Alex Calder of why Melville added his name to the signers of an open letterdeploring the New York mob’s mistreatment in 1849 of the visiting English actor
W.C. Macready. The background was that in 1846 the American actor Edwin
Forrest, the darling of a down-market, nationalistic, Broadway theatre audience,
suffered a poor reception during his tour of England as Macbeth. It was rumoured
that this connected with the scandal occasioned when Forrest stood up and hissed
one of the gestures Macready made when he was playing Hamlet (in Edinburgh).
That affair was widely discussed in the American and British press. Then, in 1849,
when Macready attempted to play Macbeth in New York’s ‘‘kid-glove’’ Astor Place
Opera House, Forrest’s supporters came out in force to jeer, pelt and riot, so that the
performance had to be abandoned. On the very same evening Forrest opened as
Macbeth on Broadway and his delivery of ‘‘‘What rhubarb, senna or what purgative
drug will drive these English hence’ brought the house down’’ (VIII.57). The letter
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signed by Melville and 46 others persuaded Macready to try again to perform
Macbeth, but before that began ‘‘10000 blue-collar workers’’ intent on destroying the
hated Opera House collided with the armed National Guard and in consequence 61
rioters were shot and 22 killed (VIII.56).
Melville lending his name in support of Macready might seem paradoxical, says
Calder, for Melville’s books had been ‘‘notable for their anti-racist . . . pro-native,pro-working class sentiments’’ (VIII.58). But, as Calder points out, the very mob
that had wrecked Macready’s opening night went on later in the same night to attack
an abolitionist meeting. In fact, although Calder does not point this out, a very
similar anti-abolitionist mob caused enormous damage in New York City in 1863,
killing among others inhabitants of a black orphanage.
I will briefly pause in a serial consideration of the essays just now, because this
first of several mentions of the 1849 Astor Place Shakespeare riot in the series
provides an occasion to mention that I have a couple of global complaints about the
series. One is that there is no cross-index supplied of topics that are discussed in
multiple volumes; indeed, there is very little indexing of subjects at all, as opposed to
of names or titles. Such cross-indexing would have revealed, for instance, differences
in the numbers cited as killed in 1849 (VI.47 and VIII.56 say 22 were killed, VI.166
says 25, and VIII.56 alone indicates there were conflicting reports about this
number). Neither is an index supplied of the Shakespeare passages discussed in or
across volumes, and this too would have been valuable. In the absence of these aids Ioften had to resort to visual memories of pages when checking again on what I had
read. A further irritation is that all the notes to the three or four essays in each
volume are concatenated at the end of that volume, but not numbered in a single
sequence. Rather, the numbering of the endnotes to each essay begins anew with ‘‘1’’,
and so there is no way of telling at a glance which of the several notes numbered ‘‘5’’,
for example, gathered at the end of a volume belongs to which essay in that volume.
One either has to shuffle through all the notes to trace the one sought, or else read
while holding fingers or pieces of paper in different parts of a book. Running page
heads can be provided easily using today’s book-production technology, and in
general a better apparatus would have made the series seem more like a working tool
for students and scholars.
Melville’s stand in a nineteenth-century Anglo-American Shakespeare war may
make seem only cerebral and tame the tensions described by David Greenham in
Emerson’s views on Shakespeare and America. But these tensions are still very
interesting; Emerson was torn between a typical nineteenth-century worshipful
attitude toward Shakespeare, amplified by his own Transcendentalism, and theconviction that American civilisation was fated to produce a poet able to surpass
Shakespeare.
Peter Rawlings finds James’s attitudes to Shakespeare even more ambiguous.
If I grasp Rawlings’ tightly wound-up sentences correctly, James is said to mock
straining after an authentic account of Shakespeare’s real life because ‘‘Shakespeare
occupies . . . a position beyond ascertainable and verifiable facts and, in the end,
beyond the reach of fiction’’ (VIII.123). Rawlings connects ‘‘James’s contempt for
facts’’ with how ‘‘in the tradition of [Washington] Irving and [P.T.] Barnum, with Delia
Bacon as an unlikely mediator, . . . such scepticism can be put to use within the context
of an American commodification of the bard’’ (VIII.123). I can see how allowing the
fictional to overtake the actual is shared by Barnum and James, despite their clear
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distinctness (at least to me), but for me the liveliest and most amusing account of such
complexities is given by Rawlings’s report of the fabulation by the anti-Stratfordian
Mark Twain of how Barnum was said to have tricked the British public into yielding
up to him London Zoo’s beloved elephant ‘‘Jumbo’’ by purchasing and holding as
hostage the Shakespeare birthplace house (112�13).
Similar hilarity is not found in the elegant account by John Roe of the long anddeep engagement of the poet Berryman with Shakespeare, especially with Hamlet
and King Lear. Berryman in life, like Hamlet in fiction, is found by Roe to have had a
father killed in ambiguous circumstances, perhaps involving an adulterous mother.
The awfulness of that parallel possibly influenced Berryman’s chaotic love-life, his
breakdowns, and eventual suicide. And King Lear, according to Roe, represented for
Berryman an ultimate model for the true poet’s only subject: intense suffering
suffused with gaiety or comedy.
Moreover, inspired by W.W. Greg, and in correspondence with him, Berryman
laboured for years to produce a critical edition of King Lear. His aim was to address
the play’s spiritual and textual riddles with a poet’s sensibility, but this project, like
his abortive Shakespeare biography, was never completed. Yet, according to Roe,
these efforts contributed greatly to the growth of Berryman’s own poetic practice.
In support of such views Roe’s commentary provides close readings of selected verses
from Shakespeare and Berryman. In this and other ways Roe’s essay differs markedly
from most of the others that trace Shakespeare’s impact on creative writers. Forinstance, in contrast with the other treatments of American writers in the same
volume, Roe’s essay does not pursue mismatches or tensions between American and
British literary-cultural outlooks. Instead, other tensions are discussed by Roe �especially that between a Modernist promotion of the disinterested author and the
contrary aesthetic of a passionate poet. Representative figures are on one hand T.S.
Eliot, James Joyce (at least in his avowals) and the critical school of R.P. Blackmur
and Cleanth Brooks, and on the other hand Berryman’s beloved Walt Whitman,
W. B. Yeats, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. There is no Jamesian
‘‘international theme’’ here, for the participants in this literary divide are situated
indifferently on either side of the Atlantic. It might be said that this simply reflects
the foundation of a transatlantic cultural scene, for after all Berryman himself was
educated in New York and Cambridge, England, and Eliot in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and Oxford, England. But it also makes clear that the central focus
of Roe’s essay is on aesthetic and literary matters, rather than on national or political
ones. As for manners, although Roe appears to favour the school of feeling he is
never in the least judgmental or culturally snide. Overall, I found his essay gripping.Volume six treats the actors or actor-managers William Macready, Edwin Booth,
Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, and their impacts on the nineteenth-century British
stage and theatrical profession.
Edward Ziter says ‘‘Macready devoted his career to disproving the assertion that
spectacle interrupted sympathetic engagement with the mind of the [Shakespeare]
character’’ (VI.21). Macready also reverted to more authentic versions of Shake-
speare’s texts than the adaptations long in use, although he allowed the excision of
lines that offended prudish sensibilities. Thus his striving for the authenticity of high
art was tempered by strong desires to enhance the status of the theatre and actors.
Macready also sought to enlarge his audiences by presenting Shakespeare in very
elaborate researched historical settings. A sad and comic measure of a falling short in
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his efforts is seen in Ziter’s remark that Macready’s Shakespeare productions did not
attract Queen Victoria, who chose to patronise rather one of his hated arch rivals:
‘‘the Queen repeatedly attended Isaac van Amburgh’s lion show at Drury Lane’’
(VI.45). However, despite his aims to raise the nation’s tastes, and with that his
profession’s standing, Macready’s ‘‘legacy’’ is seen by Ziter as a feeding into ‘‘The
popularisation of Shakespeare [as] an industrial project’’ where ‘‘every industry seeks
to maximise profits and the Shakespeare industry proved no exception’’ (VI.56).Gary Jay Williams’ essay on Booth does not, like Ziter’s on Macready, attempt
to survey widely the man and his contexts, but rather hinges on the particular
circumstances surrounding Booth’s famous performances of Hamlet. In doing this
Williams takes to task Charles H. Shattuck, a Booth scholar, for not having given the
attention due to the personal contexts of those performances (for instance, Booth’s
mental instability, his alcoholism, his bereavements, his grief following his brother’s
assassination of Abraham Lincoln). Yet Williams also praises and relies heavily on
Shattuck’s researches. The issue in question is one of methodology; I sense that
Shattuck may have been set up as something of a straw man for Williams’s argument
that merely aesthetic readings of artistic work are inadequate. In any case, Williams’s
scattered references to terms borrowed from cognitive science do not, for me, greatly
enhance the account he gives of Booth not merely playing, but rather becoming,
Hamlet. There are also a couple of points in this essay where a verbal carelessness
unusual in the collection appears. For example, a comment on a ‘‘close relationship
between critic James Oakley and Edwin Forrest from which issued, of course, adifferent kind of branding’’ (VI.74) requires, for the sake of comprehension,
knowledge that is not supplied by the text; Oakley is not listed in the index, and is
not named in Williams’ appended note.
The volume’s final two essays, by Gail Marshall and Richard Schoch, concern the
two late Victorian titans of the Lyceum Theatre, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.
Marshall’s essay is given a strange edge when it aligns the huge popularity of Terry’s
‘‘charm’’ as a female actress with the voyeuristic ‘‘prurient crudity’’ of her male
audiences and fans (passim and VI.119�20). These reactions, it is implied or
suggested, connected with knowledge that was carefully concealed in Terry’s
autobiographical writings of her unusually numerous ‘‘various romantic relation-
ships’’ (122).
Terry lived on until the twentieth century, lecturing and writing about
Shakespeare. Marshall seems to suggest that because she had so closely identified
herself with many Shakespearean roles, Terry’s own identity became weakened as she
slid toward final dementia. A later essay in the series (mentioned below) offersa different explanation, and here again a general index could have linked these.
Richard Schoch treats Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight, as a holdout
against the New Drama arising at the end of the century. Irving resisted also,
according to Schoch, electric lighting, automobiles, telephones and photography.
Nonetheless, Schoch praises Irving’s provision of a total theatrical experience at the
Lyceum where, by employing enormous numbers of staff and celebrated visual
artists, he contrived integrated artistic effects involving elaborate three-dimensional
sets, sumptuous costumes, subtle lighting effects and innovative blocking. In fact
Schoch sees Irving’s masterful creation of a total theatrical space � one which
subordinates actors, acting, historical accuracy of settings, and dramatic texts to an
overall conception of ‘‘beauty’’ � as of a piece with the New Theatrical work
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(although that was far more spare) of his one-time protege Gordon Craig
(who was Ellen Terry’s son).
Yet, when detailing the Irving and Terry Shakespeare productions at the Lyceum,
Schoch describes many near failures or weak successes; this leaves me wondering
why those shows ran for so long and were ‘‘must-see’’ experiences in their era.
Irving certainly did have his detractors, notably George Bernard Shaw, and Schochsuggests that being controversial contributed to his fame. However, a widely
controversial aspect would seem to contradict in some sense the thrust of the last
section of Schoch’s essay, which claims that ‘‘Shakespeare’’ as produced at Irving’s
Lyceum and as publicly worshipped as a saint by Irving signified (not just in
puffery) the distillation of a monolithic late Victorian Anglo-American Cultural
Imperialism.
The next volume, seven, discusses four women who gained livelihood and fame
thanks to the nineteenth-century craze for Shakespeare. These were the British
writers Anna Jameson and Mary Cowden Clarke, the British actress and writer
Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble, and the American actress Charlotte Cushman.
The author Jameson is portrayed by Cheri Hoeckley as brilliant in her book-
length analysis of Shakespeare’s female roles, and as a powerful advocate for
extending women’s legal rights and for improved female education. Hoeckley also
describes connections between Jameson’s intellectual work on Shakespeare and herfriendships with several women in the Kemble dynasty, and discovers connections
between Jameson’s work on Shakespeare and aspects of her other published works on
art and culture.
Gail Marshall’s and Ann Thompson’s account of Clarke treats its subject with an
exceptional degree of sympathy and generosity. These seem appropriate in a
treatment of Clarke, whose professional and personal life are described as
overflowing with generous impulses and acts. For instance, entirely on her own,
Clarke devoted the massive effort required for the compiling of the first-ever
concordance to Shakespeare’s plays (on the urging of her friends the Lambs). This
act of generosity to scholarship was matched by her production on her own of the
first complete edition of Shakespeare made by a woman (or at least the first one
publicly known to be such). Later, in collaboration with her husband, she produced a
second annotated and expurgated ‘‘family’’ edition of Shakespeare. That edition was
among the large part of her writings that were calibrated for a specific audience, be it
young or old, learned or unschooled. Her willingness to write for specific readerships
arguably evidenced modesty, generosity and writerly professionalism. Mary’shusband Charles (generously, or perhaps just justly) insisted publicly that his own
contributions to their joint scholarship were far less than hers, which indeed seems to
be truthful. He also (unlike her) vigorously rebuked anti-feminist detractors of her
work. In all, in this account, Mary’s married and social relations were open and
generous to an extreme. Her contributions to Shakespeare studies were internation-
ally lauded and begifted, to the delight of her husband. Moreover, her extensive
writings earned her a generous fortune, amounting at her death, on one estimation,
to as much as 12 million of today’s pounds (in terms of relative earnings). Which
leaves us to consider the quite ungenerous reactions to Clarke’s Shakespearean
writing on the part of many subsequent Shakespeare scholars. As Marshall and
Thompson explain, her 800-page The Shakespeare Key (an extension of her often-
reprinted concordance, prepared collaboratively with Charles) is ‘‘out of fashion’’
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now on account of the ‘‘detailed attention to Shakespeare’s language’’ she pays in it
(VII.90). Unhappily, this is a relatively rare book now; on the basis of Marshall and
Thompson’s descriptions of its contents (VII.72�4), I will seek it out with high
expectations of finding a valuable tool. Much more famously, Clarke has often been
derided for having written the initially very successful multi-volume work she titled
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. Once again Marshall and Thompson come
to her defence, pointing out that actors often invent for their own purposes a ‘‘back
story’’ for the dramatic characters they wish to understand, and arguing even more
pointedly that Clarke often invented her romantic and melodramatic back stories
with a distinct political intent. This was to attack and condemn those elements of her
civilisation that restricted or denied to young women their autonomy, their equal
education, or their actual physical freedom. In doing this Clarke was very like Anna
Jameson, whose astute studies of Shakespeare’s female characters often bore a
similar thrust. And yet, although Clarke was in many ways a model of Victorian
propriety, this did not seem to have led to great discontent. As the essay describes it,
following from her autobiographical writings, in her long life Clarke was ‘‘deeply
concerned both to maintain its emotional and familial loyalties and duties, and to
enjoy the intellectual resources and abilities that were hers’’ (VII.90).
Such a description of a virtuous and contented bourgeois life lies at a diametrical
extreme from the account by Jacky Bratton of the life and work of the would-be
‘‘princess’’ Fanny Kemble. Fanny was the last of a famous acting line which,
although it had come upon hard times, had retained its cachet, and so Fanny had an
hereditary access to the highest reaches of society reinforced by her own celebrity
(VII.101). For, in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the family fortunes, at 20 Fanny was
thrust on the Shakespearean stage (much to her self-reported displeasure), where she
triumphed.
All the actors and theatre managers described before in the series had made
valiant attempts to reform and to sanitise their environments (by playing a lot of
Shakespeare as opposed to offering an unrestricted diet of lowbrow entertainments,
or even by arranging separate entrances so that high-status patrons would not have
to see the prostitutes who haunted theatre lobbies). But Kemble, as described by
Bratton, pursued no such aim. As Kemble herself wrote, she always and con-
sistently detested the commercial theatre. This was, presumably, simply because it
was commercial. She seems to have been a throwback to the age of Shakespeare or
Baldassare Castiglione in her desires for an artistic and intellectual life infused with
the leisurely amateur spirit of sprezzatura. Bratton does not put it in just such terms,
but writes equivalently that ‘‘Displaying an unbending determination in supporting
herself successfully, sometimes opulently, by her own efforts as an actress, writer and
[paid platform] reader, [Kemble] simultaneously maintained that she hated such
work, only did it for the money, and would choose to be valued on her moral,
intellectual and personal quantities manifest as family member and friend � and
horsewoman, poet, Shakespearean critic and reader, dancer, theological disputant
and conversationalist � rather than a worker in any field’’ (VII.104). And, as Bratton
reports, this was not simply because Fanny disliked acting; on the contrary she
happily performed unpaid in only-for-pleasure private aristocratic theatricals,
untainted by commercialism, even when these evolved in the age of Victorian
earnestness into aristocratic charity events.
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Kemble’s great stage successes, Bratton suggests, cannot be assessed now in
artistic terms, for they likely had quite a bit to do with celebrity and dynastic fame.
Kemble herself reported that at first she had wanted to write plays on the model of
Friedrich Schiller (96�7), and that she detested the possibility of an addiction to
public fame like that which had blighted the waning years of her aunt Sarah Siddons
(VII.104).Too little, perhaps, is revealed about Kemble’s writing career in Bratton’s essay,
but a great deal is said about her later (post-unsuccessful marriage) career as a
platform reader of Shakespeare. This seems to have given her more pleasure than the
stage, and certainly would have fulfilled any yearnings for grandeur when she had
symphonic orchestras and massed choruses accompanying her.
Last in the volume is Lisa Merrill’s account of the nonconformist, yet widely
acceptable and feted, American actress Cushman. Cushman, like Kemble, found
success in a second, post-stage, career as a Shakespeare platform reader. Yet her life
stands in equally sharp contrast with the would-be aristocratic one of Kemble, and
the hard-working bourgeois one of the married Clarke.
Cushman, powerfully built and not at all conventionally beautiful, was especially
famed for her breeches portrayal of Romeo, which was relished by both British and
American audiences over many decades. Merrill claims that the prudish Victorian
public was able to accept an actress, cross-dressed as Romeo, depicting passionate
erotic desire, attributing this to a widespread belief that ‘‘middle-class women were
incapable of feeling sexual desire’’ (VII.148�49). Indeed, Cushman herself answeredcertain detractors in such terms; for example when her younger sister played the part
of Juliet, Cushman claimed she was protecting her sibling’s chastity by playing
Romeo (VII.144�45). An extended discourse of ‘‘discourses’’ in Merrill’s essay does
not focus on the full extent of the irony in all this. What does, rather, is Merrill’s clear
intimation that the young Cushman had a powerful crush on Kemble, and her
revelation that two of the successors to Cushman’s sister in the counter-role of Juliet
became Cushman’s lesbian lovers (VII.137�38, 151). Eventually Cushman even used
her persona as Romeo as a means to tease her ‘‘little lover’’ Emma Crow by
provoking her jealousy of another ‘‘pretty ‘Juliet’, so sweet & fresh & graceful’’
(VII.152) whom she played opposite.
The older Cushman also undertook, in effect, directorial duties, and played
various male roles including Hamlet. In the timing of her Hamlet performances, says
Merrill, Cushman intentionally placing herself in direct competition with the most
famous male actors (VII.153�56). Cushman excelled also in the more powerful
Shakespearean female roles, especially Lady Macbeth.Macbeth was the play Cushman insisted upon mounting (rather than an easier
melodrama) when joining with Edwin Booth in benefit performances in the aid of the
Union cause in the Civil War. In connection with her advocacy of the Union cause
Cushman also wrote in the most peculiarly erotic manner to Jane Carlyle; this
inescapable eroticism Merrill sees as typifying how flirtations between women
‘‘escaped the attentions of most arbitrators of social morality’’ (VII.160�61). Later in
life Cushman became a pivotal figure in the Anglophone expatriate community of
Rome, and later still gained a second fame as America’s pre-eminent platform reader
of Shakespeare. Cushman’s complex life is generally well addressed in Merrill’s essay,
although I could have spared some of its last half dozen culture-theoretical pages
filled with imbrications and mappings in favour of some details of Cushman’s
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remarkably tumultuous, and yet somehow socially accepted, private life. This would
not have served mere gossip or prurience. A lesbian palimony suit, for instance,
seems to have left her unscathed, and some of her long-lasting partnerships with
women were seemingly widely noted. Merrill’s treatment of the life, emphasising
social history, would seem to demand more comment on these matters.
Finally, the ninth volume of the series treats three men who contributed to theearly twentieth-century growth of the academic study of English Literature. The first,
A.C. Bradley, in 1904 published Shakespearean Tragedy, a book that continues to
be a favourite of English Literature students (and also of the President of the British
Psychoanalytic Society � no unsophisticated reader � as he just told me). But it is not
now highly regarded by many English Literature professionals, including Cary
DiPietro whose essay on Bradley simply assumes that its readers will be complicit in
an attitude of denigration. Thus DiPietro charts a long-running ‘‘oscillation of
opinion between popular fascination and professional ridicule’’ (IX.12) concerning
Bradley. The word ‘‘popular’’ may help explain why the Modernists objected so
vehemently to Bradleyism, but, as DiPietro correctly reminds us, it also implies a
cultural phenomenon which cannot be ignored. But here again DiPietro’s language
assumes complicity when he writes of ‘‘the continued appeal of Bradley’s writing to
contemporary readers, even if you or I may not be among them’’. At the same time,
DiPietro also somewhat undercuts the responses of F.R. Leavis and L.C. Knights to
Bradley by revealing the irony that some of the modernist-formalists readings, set up
to counter Bradley’s despised character criticism, hinged on ‘‘an alternativepsychological profile of . . . main characters, with some extra attention given to
their ‘dramatic function’’’ (IX.57�58). But, thinks DiPietro, such deficiencies in the
‘‘trajectory of professionalization begun by the generation of the Scrutiny
and American New Critics’’ have been corrected by the later professionals who
since the 1980s have developed new ‘‘sophisticated, theoretically informed and often
interdisciplinary critical schools’’ (IX.59).
The conclusion drawn, that although ‘‘Critics occasionally speak of a return of
Bradley . . . a genuine return . . . seems impossible, especially since poststructualism
has probematized the very notion of literary criticism as a discrete process’’
(IX.58�59), seems to me a fuzzy argument. I also wondered how DiPietro, the
editor of the ninth volume, could present such a no-longer-useful Bradley as a
‘‘Great Shakespearean’’. The answer supplied is that his importance is not due to his
achievements as a critic or scholar, but rather to his promotion, in accord with the
ideals of Matthew Arnold, of a civilising, value-addressing, mission for education. So
in the end the ‘‘legacy’’ of a still widely popular Shakespeare critic does not depend
on ‘‘his theory of tragedy nor upon his particular readings of the plays’’ (IX.67), buton his social mission, his positionality, in effect his party allegiance. I might remark
that poststructuralism seems to want to make that the case for all of us.
Next in the volume is a much more sanguine account by Andrew Murphy of the
work of W.W. Greg. Although Murphy acknowledges that aspects of the programme
of Greg and the New Bibliographers have been critiqued, he still finds much of
Greg’s achievement worthy of praise. Indeed, Murphy thinks that some of the
adverse remarks made by Greg’s critics are invalidated because they overlook Greg’s
scrupulous use of evidence and his expressions of caution when conjecturing.
Concluding that ‘‘Greg’s best work continues to be of fundamental importance’’, this
essay may give courage to those whose aim is to contribute to a cumulative
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enlargement of knowledge about Shakespeare, and who fear that a succeeding
modishness or positional ‘‘branding’’ may trump understanding.
In the third and final essay of the ninth volume Michael Bristol treats the
donation to scholarship by Henry Clay Folger of the unmatched resources of the
Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger, who was a Gilded Age American business
magnate (acting in partnership with his scholarly wife), expended much of his energy,used his influence, and left his fortune to create that legacy. So, through much of his
life he acquired core holdings, planned an organisation, and astutely manoeuvred to
secure the library’s location. Bristol most interestingly discusses why and how he
went about this.
Thus Bristol provides an insightful and unbiased analysis of why Folger, in
common with some other even wealthier industrialists, focused their massive
philanthropy on bringing about the democratisation of access to culture. Those
wealthy figures � who included Charles Pratt, Charles Millard Pratt, John
D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Huntington, and Samuel Tilden � are
described as motivated by desires to universalise, or spread to a much wider public,
the ideals of friendship and service that they accepted as the fundamentals of their
exclusive world. In practical terms their aim was to impart a particular lustre on
American civilisation in the form of institutions such as museums, libraries, theatres,
schools, and universities. Doing this, they hoped, would enable their munificence to
continue indefinitely thanks to a non-acquisitive economy of ‘‘gift increase’’ � an
economy in which continued acts of giving only increase the value of, and never
consume or diminish the availability of, the cultural goods and resources madeavailable (IX.138).
Bristol’s treatment first analyses two partly divergent tracts concerning friend-
ship, both well known to Folger, one by Cicero and the other by Emerson. Cicero
emphasised social virtues and open reciprocity, but Emerson contrastingly empha-
sised private self-reliance and respect for independence, truthfulness and forbearance.
Bristol then shows a consonance between Emerson’s views and those of other
thinkers influential on Folger. Additionally, long-held traditions of independence,
personal endeavour and self-actualisation were in Folger’s family heritage (one
branch of his family included Benjamin Franklin, another a famous mediator
between native Americans and colonists, and another whaling captains).
One particular virtue important to Folger is emphasised by Bristol when he cites
a lecture by Emerson (traceably remembered by Folger) that proposed the ‘‘first
valuable power in a reasonable mind’’ was the ‘‘power of plain statement’’ (IX.126).
Bristol next cites James Russell Lowell’s extolling of Emerson’s ‘‘exquisite fineness of
material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred
garb of expression’’ (IX.127). In the light of that I found it surprising to find Bristol’sessay straying in one section, but only one, into the territory of ‘‘an important
element in the circulation within the discourse of Shakespeare criticism . . .’’ (IX.170).
For generally the style and argument of Bristol’s essay is easy and bright, wholly
avoiding ‘‘those habits of rhetorical inflation that weaken a man’s speech’’ as
Emerson put it (and as quoted by Bristol).
Thus Bristol’s essay, among many others in the collection, is an excellent study
excellently presented which has opened for me new and surprising aspects of
the realms in which I have laboured. Yet I still share with several of the essays’ own
writers some uncertainty as to just what constitutes a Great Shakespearean
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(and what excludes one). This seems of little consequence, however, in comparison to
the virtues overall of this collection, although it might have been titled (had
Marketing allowed it) Some Jolly Interesting Shakespeareans.
B.J. Sokol
University of London, Goldsmiths College, London, UK
# 2012 B.J. Sokol
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