Decoding Shakespeare.

In the course of his review of my book Shadowplay ("Interesting, if True," July 15), Jesse Lander touches on two familiar academic objections to the book's argument. The first is the widespread assumption that political allegory was rare in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This is not the case. To take a few wellknown examples: The Mirror for Magistrates, Gorboduc, and John Bale's King John were all political works, coded to sidestep the ban on contentious public discussion of religion and politics. Still, they were Protestant, broadly in sympathy with the establishment, and therefore relatively transparent. Not surprisingly given the penalties incurred by incautious authors, the subtext of more critical works has since escaped attention. Here twentyfirst century readers have an advantage. Ever since revisionist scholars have alerted us to the nature of national concerns that were denied expression in Elizabeth's England, much of the literature has begun to take on a new significance. Seen in its restored context, for example, the most popular play of the age, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, reveals a cleverly coded element that explains its puzzling appeal--a powerful protest on behalf of a patient people against a deaf regime and its crackdown on the country's native beliefs. There is nothing modishly "historicist" about such readings: the bold expression of forbidden opinions in coded form is the normal role of principled artists in a state "made tongue-tied by authority." The reason why so few readers have looked for coded material in Shakespeare's work is that until recently few were aware that he lived under an oppressive regime. Ben Jonson's preface to Bartholomew Fair makes it clear that code, and snooping state code-breakers, were rife in the theater of his day.

Lander's second objection is that coded meanings limit the universality of Shakespeare's work. Shadowplay argues that, like the disclosure of any other double meaning, their discovery enriches the text. Pursuing the ingenious layers contained within Shakespeare's words is the function of literary commentators, but alarm bells clearly ring once a detected meaning leads in an uncomfortable direction. In the fourth act of As You Like It, the word crest is applied to the head of a deer presented to the exiled Duke by his huntsmen. They give the word a heraldic twist: "Thy father's father wore it / And thy father bore it." Had the device of a deer's head been the family crest of the Protestant Earl of Essex, a favorite candidate among certain scholars for the play's anonymous Duke, commentators would long ago have seized on the heraldic meaning, and identified a certain reference to Essex in the virtuous Duke, as they do in Henry V. It was in fact the crest of the brilliant general Sir William Stanley, defector and Catholic leader-in-exile, a figure so notorious that he has only recently been restored to mainstream history books. Shadowplay opens up the extra-ordinary implications of allusions like these. My exploration of the multiple meanings of single words in no way differs from the technique of other commentators; the difference--and the shock value--lies in applying it to Shakespeare's radically revised historical context.

CLARE ASQUITH

Mells, England

THE REVIEWER REPLIES:

The scholarly literature on political allegory in early modern England is extensive and contentious, as is the growing body of work on censorship. However, the relative frequency of political allegory and the pressure of censorship are not the issue. The pertinent question is whether Shakespeare's plays taken together constitute a sustained and intentional allegory. Since we have no declaration from Shakespeare on this point and no evidence that any of his contemporaries discerned such an allegory, the case stands or falls on the persuasiveness of the correlations established by Asquith, and while she pursues her quarry with energy and ingenuity, the results are open to doubt. This inconclusiveness is a necessary consequence of the structure of her argument: secret meanings that are readily demonstrable would hardly remain secret. Asquith attempts to resolve this difficulty by deploying the work of recent revisionist historians as an interpretive key, but while this may help explain the obtuseness of modern scholars who have operated under a false assumption about the speed and completeness of the English Reformation, it does not explain the absence of contemporary comment. If Elizabethan Catholics were able to get the message, it is hard to see how it would have escaped the attention of zealous Protestants or those of more moderate inclination. My point is not that Shakespeare did not display Catholic sympathies; I'm sure that he did. What I find doubtful is the notion that Shakespeare consistently used allegory to pursue a "long career as a Catholic apologist," not because such an interpretation diminishes Shakespeare's "universality," a word that does not appear in my review, but because it does not adequately describe the plays that I know. As Cicero observes in Julius Caesar: "Indeed it is a strange-disposed time; / But men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves."

JESSE LANDER