Writing on Shakespeare

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Halio, Jay L

Halio is professor of English at the University of Delaware. He has edited King Lear in both Foliobased and quarto-based editions for Cambridge University Press, which is preparing a new CD-ROM using both of his editions, and The Merchant of Venice for Oxford.

Barker, Deborah E., and Ivo Kamps, eds. 1995. Shakespeare and gender: A history. New York: Verso. $19.95 sc. ix 342 pp. Bennett, Susan. 1996. Performing NOSTALSIA: Shifting Shakespeare and the contemporary past. London and New York: Routledge. $16.95 sc. viii 199pp. James, Max IL 1995. "Scarce truth enough alive": Shakespeare's contemporary search for truth and trust. Pittsburgh: Dorrance. $20 hc. xiii 208 pp. Liebler, Naomi Conn. 1995. Shakespeare's festive tragedy: The ritual foundations of genre. New York: Routledge. $65 hc. xii 266 pp. Parker, Patricia. 1996. Shakespeare from the margins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $52 hc. $19.95 sc. x 392 pp.

Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean tragedy. Alas, Liebler (like many recent writers on Shakespeare) is infected by the current rage to show herself knowledgeable in the French philosophers and their literary followers, both British and American. Her worst fault is the tendency to jargon. For better or worse (and I think worse), we may be getting used to terms like privilege (as a verb), ironize, valorize, and other -izes that render English barbarous. But imbricates, interpellates, instantiates, bricolage, liminality, processual? Are such terms truly requisite for the perceptions of literary criticism?

Notwithstanding her unfortunate style, Liebler's book offers some valuable contributions to literary study. Although she overlooks the work of previous scholars who have plowed the same or neighboring fields-scholars such as H.D.F. Kitto, Francis Fergusson, and Virgil Whitaker-her study begins where C.L. Barber's left off. She diverges more deeply into social and cultural anthropology than he did, as her subtitle indicates. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rene Girard, Robert Weimann, and especially Victor Turner, Emil Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, as well as Foucault, Derrida, and Artaud, are major sources and influences. Liebler intends, as she says, to explore the ways Shakespearean tragedy is festive in a sense "broader, deeper, and more complex than the one Barber intended for comedy" (1995, 2). In this she largely succeeds, though Barber's text remains far more accessible and therefore more immediately useful than Liebler's.

Some of what Liebler presents is not new. Comparing tragedy to comedy, she notes the "breaking out" of social constraints that involve far higher costs in tragedy than in comedy. Both are festive insofar as they celebrate a community's survival, and in both comedy and tragedy "the constructed cultural values of the fictive community are invariably reaffirmed and reconsecrated, but in tragedy the management, alteration, or manipulation of those values is put in question" (1995, 8). Tragedy thus questions (as Bradley and others long ago reminded us) not only the ability of human communities to act for their own good, but also "what constitutes `the good,' the `common weal' in each dramatized case" (8).

When Liebler gets into the ritual aspects of tragedy, however, she breaks new ground, as when she argues that "[b]ecause rituals are ontologically and functionally transgressive, they are thus open to the uses of the subversive" (1995, 11). For example, by imaging authority in crisis, tragedy (she argues) decenters authority. In each of Shakespeare's tragedies the "subject-body, whether perceived as discrete, individual or collective state, is fragmented, divided, dis-integrated" (15). Taking up Girard's discussions of the tragic hero as pharmakos, particularly in the role as scapegoat, she notes how sacrificial ritual, or "good" violence, "channels otherwise random slaughter into an act of purification ratified by the structure and the membership of the community" (17). In every Shakespearean tragedy, the status quo of the community is at risk from the outset, or so Liebler maintains; hence, the community, as well as the protagonist, undergoes crisis or agon. The change or threat of change has already begun, causing a fissure in the social structure that initiates the possibility of calamity: in Titus Andronicus it is the transfer of rule; in Julius Caesar it is change in the nature of government signaled during the Lupercalian celebration; in Hamlet and Coriolanus it is the state under attack from within as well as without; and so on. Because the hero embodies the same conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences that plague the community, he mirrors their worlds. The relation of hero and community is reciprocal: they nurture each other and then threaten to destroy each other, as Coriolanus demonstrates and, in a different way, Othello. If the community "wins" by destroying the hero, it does so by removing for a time the threat occasioned by ambiguity and change, but it does so at the cost of losing its epitome (23-24).