Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars. (Reviews).

Sharon O'Dair, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. viii + 166 pp. $47.50 (cl), $17.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-472-09754-7 (cl), 0-472-06754-0 (pbk).

Professor O'Dair's book has less to say about Shakespeare than about the omission of "class" as a conceptual and analytical tool in current scholarship. The intellectual underpinnings of the book come from Karl Marx and especially sociologists such as Max Weber, whose ideas of stratification were based on status and "cultural capital" rather than simply on economic distinctions. Among contemporary academics, she particularly takes into account Bruce Robbins' work on the professions, and some of the scholars of Renaissance literature, such as David Kastan and John Guillory, who have focused on political and sociological issues. On the whole, she is not admiring of her contemporaries' analyses, because she is determined to show -- sometimes by what seems extended verbal sparring over words like "culture" and "class" -- that the subject has never been properly addressed. In her view, it never could be, because the scholars whose intellectual deficiencies she exposes are themselves members of the upper middle cla ss either by virtue of their origins or their education. Acculturation in the values of this class is essential to the educational experience, and to success in the academic profession.

Professor O'Dair's book is primarily a social polemic, which has some interest as a record of her own experiences and perspectives. As she reminds the reader repeatedly, she comes from a working class background and therefore sympathizes with the tastes and political preferences (often conservative) of this group. But like many an upwardly mobile immigrant or member of a minority group, she feels ambivalent about the costs of her academic success, which has made her and others like her aliens in their own families. Her anger is directed against the members of her profession, whose liberal principles are, she claims, laced with hypocrisy: while they may promote open education, the educational process itself and the privileging of book learning are (and long have been) class based and coercive. Simply making education more available does not solve this problem.

The failures of the professoriate, which has aligned itself with oppressed minority groups at the expense of the blue-collar working class, translates into the failures of Shakespearean scholars to deal with issues of class in the plays. O'Dair's texts are The Tempest (especially Prospero as a coercive educator), Timon of Athens and its focus on money, and Coriolanus, which expresses the aristocrat's fear of the loss of social distinctions. None of these texts receives a very detailed or nuanced reading, however. This is a short book (130 pages without the back matter), and the last two chapters, as well as the Preface, hardly deal with Shakespeare at all. The penultimate one is about the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon and the social dislocations it has caused by turning the area into a tourist site, while in the last, where she discusses the "nature of the Left" as it extends to academic life, she announces frankly that "you will look unsuccessfully for a reference to early modern England, or even to Shakespeare" (114). The inevitable conclusion is that now that Professor O'Dair has escaped from the repressive requirements of the English PhD dissertation, she is free to pursue her interests in class, especially as it applies to the academic profession, and this she does with considerable energy and spirit.