T. Alan Smith and Peter C. Rollins, eds. Shakespeare's Theories of Blood, Character, and Class: a Festschrift in Honor of David Shelley Berkeley.

T. Alan Smith and Peter C. Rollins, eds. Shakespeare's Theories of Blood, Character, and Class: A Festschrift in Honor of David Shelley Berkeley.

New York and Washington, D.C.: Peter Lang, 2001. x + 244 pp. index. $57.95. ISBN: 0-8204-4518-5.

Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds, eds. Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital.

Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000. vi + 298 pp. index. $55. ISBN: 0-312-22271-8.

The honoree gets the last word in his Festschrift with "Claudius, the Villein King of Denmark," an essay first published, in Hamlet Studies, in 1989. This essay is worth inspection because its methods appear central to the ways Berkeley thinks about literature, ways learned by his former students at Oklahoma State University, and imitated in their contributions to the volume. "Criticism," Berkeley writes, "clamped in the vice of democratic obliviousness to blood-based class distinctions, has not noticed that Claudius, by virtue of nine times being named a 'villain' or 'villein' is thus intimated to be base, and therefore, being a member of the royal family, a bastard half-brother to Hamlet's father" (213). But Claudius is not "named a 'villain' or 'villein'"; in G. B. Harrison's 1948 edition of Shakespeare: Major Plays and the Sonnets (from which, after all these years, and editions, Berkeley quotes his Shakespeare), he is named a "villain" only, never a "villein," and in the 1623 Folio the word is always "Villaine," usually capitalized. "Villain," it is true, derives from the Old French vilain, as does "villein," serf, but that does not mean, in Shakespeare, that "villain" necessarily and inevitably connotes low birth, despite C. S. Lewis' contention, endorsed by Berkeley, that the word "still carries some implication of ignoble birth" (215). When the nobly-born Richard of Gloucester declares his determination "to prove a villain," he means a malefactor only.

Here is what follows from the confusion of villain with villein. Claudius is the former King Hamlet's "bastard half-brother," whose "unprepossessing appearance suggests his peasant origins" (214). Claudius "smells" (215). Through intercourse with him, Gertrude "is becoming villeinized ... acquir[ing his] blood and los[ing] the blood of Hamlet's father" (217). This contamination of bad blood began with Hamlet's paternal grandmother, who, though "unmentioned in the play because of the extreme delicacy of Hamlet's and his father's positions" (my italics), played her husband false: "after giving birth to Hamlet's father ... [she] formed an adulterous alliance with a man of the villein class, and their child was Claudius ..." (217). "Hamlet," Berkeley writes, "generalizes his grandmother's weakness in arraignments of the female sex" (217). Such arraignments are plentiful, but the notion that Hamlet's antifeminism springs from his "unmentioned" grandmother's dalliance is fantastic. "Hamlet insults Ophelia [because she is] a potential dissolver of gentle families," meaning that his own blood would become bad in her, as that of Gertrude is doing from mixing with Claudius'. Finally, although Hamlet is stabbed before Laertes, Laertes dies first because his blood is less pure whereas Hamlet's superior blood is therefore "to some degree resistant to toxins" (217).

The faults of this essay--willful etymologies, an ignoring or ignorance of recent scholarship, the construction of large edifices on small or non-existent foundations (the notion that Shakespeare shared crank biological theories that he had probably never read), extreme tendentiousness--all this, plus enormous carelessness, is the norm of other chapters in this collection. One essay begins "Only once in the canon does Shakespeare apply the term villain to a character in the dramatis personae of the play--that character is Iago." The Folio version of Othello is followed by a list of" The Names of the Actors," which includes "Iago, a Villaine," but there is no reason to suppose that this list is Shakespeare's. The author of this essay writes "epistemology" where he obviously means "etymology," and several times misrepresents the name of the author of the Hecatommithi, Giovanni Battista (not Baptista) Giraldi (not Geraldo) Cinthio. The author of an essay arguing for the beneficial effects of mirth cites an authority on Elizabethan awareness of psychosomatic conditions: "The Elizabethans ... were by and large more attentive to the physiological effects of passion than we are" (44)--surely not than "we" are in 2001 but perhaps than "we" were in 1925 when Hardin Craig made his observation. I am not identifying the authors of these essays so as not to penalize them for the lessons they learned too well from their mentor.

The chapters of Shakespeare Without Class are more varied than those of Shakespeare's Theories of Blood in approach--and in quality, though the rubric under which they are collected has a dreary familiarity. These essays were "chosen," Hedrick and Reynolds say, "to address current issues of class, race, gender, sexual preference, postcoloniality, and pedagogy, [and] were originally solicited so as to distinguish the volume from other treatments of Shakespearean adaptation by an emphasis on 'dissident' responses to Shakespeare" (3). In "Shakespace and Transversal Power," the introductory essay to the collection, the two editors pounce upon Stephen Greenblatt's characterization of Marlowe as "the really spectacular life of the late 16th century ... spy, blasphemer, atheist, violent brawler, double agent, homosexual, as well as brilliant playwright and poet, murdered at the age of 29" (36). What's wrong with that? Well, "Greenblatt's summary of Marlowe's life ... places, probably unintentionally, homosexuality in the realm of the lurid and scandalous. It does so perhaps for ostensibly practical reasons, linking it, syntactically, to atheist or brawler rather than to 'brilliant playwright and poet.'" This reaction to Greenblatt's mild assertion shows world-class sensitivity. Interestingly, the placement of homosexuality in precisely that realm of the lurid and scandalous is both purpose and achievement of "No Holes Bard: Homonormativity and the Gay and Lesbian Romance with Romeo and Juliet," Richard Burt's chapter on several "gay and lesbian inflected spin-offs" of Shakespeare's play (153), including the films Tromeo and Juliet, Romeo and Julian: A Love Story, and Le Voyage a Venise. Politically incorrect, it seems, Greenblatt's statements are surely about Marlowe, but the anointed words of Burt on pornography are not about Shakespeare.

Of the "current issues" addressed here, pedagogy is less obviously related than the others to oppression. Donald Hedrick does much huffing and puffing on the subject in the penultimate chapter without making clear the reasons for his grievance. He appears exercised by the place of moral questions in the classroom, if indeed they have one. He approves Marjorie Perloff's judgment that we can no longer ask a student, "What would you do if you were Desdemona?" and then suggests that "We might recontextualize Perloff's dismissed question more transversally, to ask, following [Edward] Pechter's example of contingent need, 'What would you do, Zane, if you were Desdemona?'--pedagogically a 'real,' transversal question for a male student's 'subjective territory' ... rather than a 'test' question ... with predetermined parameters'" (246). If this is your kind of thing, there is plenty of it here, including this crise de conscience on the perils of indulging feminism: "Having as a fundamental assumption that women are equal to men, however, might seem to render [a feminist approach] liable to the admonition against deciding moral positions in advance" (250).

Fortunately, other essays are both intelligible and instructive. One by William Over shows how Henry Brown's African Theater in New York City in the early nineteenth century "dissented from mainstream New York's cultural practice by incorporating within its formal elements innovations and disguised or overt political allusions, in this way freeing itself from subordinating ideologies" (78). The word "Shakespeare" automatically confers official cultural legitimacy; under its banner, the African Theater "broke the boundaries between high and low culture--combining Shakespearean verse with folk lyrics--and circumvented Shakespeare-as-cultural-status-quo by using the innuendo of political protest and the subversive possibilities of 'imitation'" (79).

In "Vaulting Ambition and Killing Machines," Curtis Perry shows why Jarry, in Ubu Roi, and Ionesco, in Macbett, "found Shakespeare to be contemporary, and why they both returned to Macbeth: [they were drawn by] not just the play's cynical depiction of state violence, but the way it explores the paradoxes of ambition and mimetic desire, the tragic necessity of the gap between the fantasy of absolute autonomy and the conventional objectives that must stand in for it" (97). Perry shows how well Jarry and Ionesco understood Shakespeare and bent him to their ends. If Shakespeare is a kind of cultural capital as the volume's subtitle maintains, these later playwrights have inherited it, have, indeed appropriated it; that they have misappropriated it is another matter, for their uses of Shakespeare appear to me, from Perry's argument, to be entirely legitimate and understanding, and deeply respectful.

In another chapter, "'What is the city but the people?,'" Bryan Reynolds discusses Coriolanus and Brecht's Coriolan, showing (what I could not have supposed anyone would doubt) that there is in Shakespeare's play "a radical potential that exists ... prior to any alteration made by Brecht" (126). The play as Shakespeare wrote it "was predisposed to Brecht's [devoutly Marxist] purpose ... and ... could easily be performed ... in line with Brecht's politics, that is, without textual adaptation" (109, original italics). However, since Coriolanus can be read the other way round, for instance, "by T. S. Eliot in his overtly fascist poem Coriolan" (120) and, indeed, by one H. Husges, who argued in 1934 that Caius Marcius tries to lead Rome "as Adolf Hitler wants to lead our beloved German Fatherland today" (127), Reynolds is at pains to show that Brecht's "textual changes ensure that his play cannot be read as pro-fascist or right wing" (120), an absence of ambiguity that is perhaps its limitation.

These chapters, and others by James Andreas and Leslie Katz, are provocative and should engage any student of Shakespeare's work.

MARK TAYLOR

Manhattan College