Gary L. Smith
ENG 378
Summer 2002
THE BIG TENT OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
A Review of Marxist Shakespeares
Near the end of the final essay in the recent anthology Marxist Shakespeares, Scott Cutler Shershow calls attention to a pair of parallel scenes in King Lear. In the first, Lear’s “prayer” as he comes in from the storm ends with his belated exhortation that wealth should be shared with the likes of the “poor naked wretches” that he sees exposed to the storm:
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
And thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.[1]
And in the other, a blind Gloucester hands his purse over to a man he believes to be a beggar, saying:
So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough. (4.1, 67-68)
As Shershow notes, commentary on these passages shows that they can plausibly support two quite different interpretations. Does this interest in “distribution” mark an effort to envision a collective economy? Or is it simply an endorsement of the traditional virtue of charity, through which the well-placed discharge a responsibility to give to those less fortunate? Shershow’s purpose is not to resolve that dilemma, but to expose the logical and ideological distinctions between the two options. For the very possibility of charity presupposes existing social formations in which certain parties possess the largesse to pass along to others. As Shershow puts it in a discussion of an influential sixteenth-century’s preacher’s homily on the subject, “charity and generosity are about transferring value from haves to have-nots; and they thus require a world of properties and subjects, a world in which the poor you have always with you.”[2]
What makes this transvaluation of the value of charity noteworthy, in part, is the resonance with which Shershow’s observation echoes a conclusion reached by Kiernan Ryan in the same volume’s next-to-last piece. In an essay devoted largely to a self-consciously contrarian reading of Measure for Measure, Ryan likens the contrived “mercy” shown in Duke Vincentio’s flurry of pardons and forced marriages to the hypocritical system of justice exposed in The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock points out that the law preventing the Jew from obtaining his contractual “pound of flesh” yet allows Christians to own human beings as slaves. “If you deny me, fie upon your law,” Shylock declares (4.1, 101), and Ryan argues that Vincentio’s playdoes for mercy what Shylock’s does for law: “Measure for Measure demystifies mercy, which feeds off the oppressive hierarchy it secretly consolidates - the power structure that produces the need for mercy in the first place.” (241)
Both Ryan and Shershow move beyond Marxist play readings to consider theoretical issues, and more will be said about that shortly. But what needs to be said now is another word about the mutual reinforcement of their essays. What makes it so prominent is the relative absence of similar inter-textual support elsewhere in the volume. Obviously, no anthology can or should speak with one voice. Yet even a very careful reader could come away wondering what particular principle explains the composition of this particular chorus. Editors Jean E. Howard and Shershow emphasize that the book brings together “myriad persepctives” (9) yet essentially leave their choices unexplained. All twelve essays do indeed discuss Shakespeare’s works, and in interesting and often productive ways. But how some of them fit the title category of Marxist is far from self-evident. Whether that is an organizational shortcoming of the book is a much less interesting question than whether it says something about the difficulty of defining the parameters and priorities of Marxist studies at the turn of the twenty-first century
The book’s center of gravity, though it is placed third among twelve essays, is Richard Halpern’s strident critique of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx.[3] While it bears a properly academic title, “An Impure History of Ghosts: Derrida, Marx, Shakespeare,” Halpern’s essay could fittingly have been called “political posturing.” (41) For that, Halpern argues in a number of ways, is what Derrida’s claim to be “haunted” by Marx boils down to after Marxism has been stripped of material connections and made “indistinguishable from deconstruction.” (39) And the book’s editors emphasize their sympathy with this line of thinking by singling out Halpern’s essay for special mention early in their introduction, apart from the ordered summaries of the other pieces. “The editors agree,” they write, “that the tent of historical materialism is not infinitely expandable or Marxism would lose its specificity as a situated knowledge project.” (6)
This explicitly stated desire to distance the Marxist project from Derrida and deconstruction is one of three themes that might be called negative initiatives in the book’s introduction, in the sense of being efforts to define what Marxism is not in the twenty-first century. A second conjures up a version of New Historicism, criticized for adopting certain Marxist methods without considering their theoretical and philosophical roots. In a pointed and cutting reference to Stephen Greenblatt and terminology he has popularized, for instance, the editors complain that “one frequently reads accounts of the circulation of cultural energy that ironically celebrate the vigor of nascent capitalism even while overtly condemning its social consequences.” (4) And the third is the equation, in the popular mentality and media, of Soviet-style communism with Marxism as a body of explanatory theory and philosophical persuasion. The latter did not collapse with the former, the book’s editors insist: “In fact, a decade after the destruction of the Berlin Wall it is time to put aside narratives of Marxism’s demise and put its resources to use in new forms of intellectual production.” (5)
What makes those forms Marxist? Howard and Shershow are reluctant to say. It is not any priority attached to “class” relations, they emphasize (7), and it involves “a newer insistence on the relative autonomy of superstructural elements” (8). But from there, they simply move on to discussing the individual essays as diverse Marxist approaches without really explaining what led them to be placed in that category in the first place. “The essays in this book,” they write, “explicitly locate themselves in relation to ongoing debates within Marxism and in relation to Marxist categories of analysis while nonetheless opening in a variety of ways to affiliated knowledge-making paradigms.” (6) But the part about explicitly locating is simply not true in some cases, while the “variety of ways” is so vague as to have little meaning. If “the tent of historical materialism is not infinitely expandable,” in other words, it nonetheless seems pretty big.
An unhappy marriage
Three of the essays focus on issues of women’s labor and cultural production and more broadly gender ideology taking shape in the early modern period, and Howard and Shershow tie that line of inquiry to “an urgent question in the present: Why is the present relationship of Marxism to feminism imagined as an unhappy marriage where the wife loses control of her property?” (9) That is certainly an interesting theoretical question, if not quite “urgent” by some standards, but it does not seem to be answered or even much clarified by the essays said to be addressing it in this volume.
In “’Judicious Oeillades:’ Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Natasha Korda uses a Heidi Hartmann quote about that unhappy marriage to introduce her post-revisionist argument about the extent of women’s property rights in early modern England. Focusing on the much-discussed common law doctrine of “coverture,” under which a woman’s legal identity and property rights were formally overshadowed by her husband’s, Korda finds recent scholarship suggesting that “there was far greater complexity and less rigidity in the legal system governing marital property, and a wider discrepancy between legal theory and actual practice, than was previously imagined.” (84-85) She draws on the Shakespeare play to illustrate how housewives actually acquired control of increasingly more property partly because of the accumulation of household goods under early capitalism, thus leaving their husbands free to participate in economic production. She invokes a standard Foucaldian framework to suggest that the housewife’s private self-discipline gradually replaced public scrutiny and “shaming.” Yet she does not say how this furthers understanding of the subject or the period. And though she notes that the unhappy marriage quote alludes to the concept of coverture, she offers no opinions on how her analysis might alter or illuminate the strains in that relationship.
While Korda’s essay is concerned with possessions, Dympna Callaghan focuses on production in “Looking Well to Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England.” Callaghan’s main concern is to call into question a gendered division of labor in which women’s creative productive work in the embroidery of textiles was opposed to, and valued less than, men’s creative aesthetic work in the writing of texts. She holds up the infamous handkerchief from Othello in illustration, though as a reviewer has pointed out, her argument is somewhat weakened by the play’s internally conflicting accounts of the handkerchief’s origins. [4] But what makes it even more strained is her apparent effort to connect the essay explicitly to Marxist theory. This Callaghan does by the sidestep of acknowledging correctly that the cloth does not represent an instance of commodity fetishism - but she then defines the latter term incorrectly as “the erasure of the human energy that has wrought an object.” (77) In fact, the highly unique nature of the handkerchief in Othello makes it fundamentally inconsistent with Marx’s concept of a commodity, which acquires abstract “exchange value” precisely because it is not unique but interchangeable with others. Informative as Callaghan’s essay is about textiles, this raises questions about the play’s suitability for her argument and the essay’s inclusion in the category “Marxist.”
Barbara Bowen’s “The Rape of Jesus: Aemilia Lanyer’s Lucrece” also is marked by an early nod toward Marxism, in the form of a stated aim “to bring together the feminist impulse to clarify and enlarge our reading of early women with the Marxists’ attention to literary form.” (107) Her close reading of Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and its context is devoted partly to making rape visible and knowable to male readers; until the mid-sixteenth century, she notes, rape statutes recognized little difference between abduction of property and abduction of a woman. (105) But she also foregrounds the facts of rape as a political act, as “the story of Lucretia was ‘a founding myth of liberty’ for Renaissance humanism.” (113) Lanyer’s poem, she argues, prompts the male reader closer to an understanding of the experience of being raped through an identification with Christ the tortured rather than his torturers. In her most politically incisive conclusions, drawing partly on legal theory, Bowen sketches out the position that “bodily integrity” is a fundamental condition for public life and political struggle. ( 124) It is a point that could have been profitably developed apart from and beyond her deep reading of Lanyer’s poem.
Another country, another globe
Four of the book’s essays deal in different ways with what might be generally characterized as the location of Shakespeare’s plays. Walter Cohen’s essay on mercantile expansion is at once one of the most informative and most modest in its stated aims. There is no evidence to suggest that mercantile expansion was a “fundamental force” behind the plays or that their production would be radically different if that expansion were more adequately registered, Cohen emphasizes in “The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography” “On the other hand,” he adds, “overseas economic enterprise influenced Shakespeare far more than is routinely recognized: one sees its impact everywhere from local detail to the shape of the career.” (154-55) That is seen in, among other things, the settings. Except for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cohen points out, all the plays are set at a distance from Shakespeare’s England in space, time, or both, and the settings generally reflect three overlapping generations of trade in the Tudor and early Stuart dynasties. (131-32) The influence is seen also, and more ominously, in the “routineness, even banality” with which the process now called globalization is represented in many of the plays. “In Shakespeare, as today, that process is usually just taken for granted,” Cohen observes in what might be called an anti-formulation of the playwright’s fabled universality. “Where Shakespeare could not see, we too remain blind.” (157)
Taking the theme of global expansion in a different direction, Denise Albanese fast-forwards capitalism four centuries beyond the mercantilism of Shakespeare’s day in “The Shakespeare Film and the Americanization of Culture.” Or perhaps “jump-cuts” would be a better choice of hyphenated verbs, since Albanese explores her topic largely through a sustained contrast of Baz Luhrmann’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. One of the more revealing elements of the essay is Albanese’s carefully planted, coy disclosure that she and several academic colleagues were asked “by generally well-educated (and generally, although not exclusively, middle-aged) people whether we found the [Luhrmann] film offensive….” (221) Besides showing how hopelessly out of touch well-educated, middle-aged people are, this mini-anecdote points up the moral that the truly consequential battles over the “meaning” of Shakespeare’s plays are being fought out not in college classrooms or academic journals, but in production planning meetings and movie box offices. In contrast to Branagh’s reverential and subtly but surely Anglophiliac approach to the plays, Luhrmann’s product is pitched to an international youth market that emanates from the United States. In that environment, Shakespeare is no more and no less than a component of the finished product - “little distinguishable from kitsch” (220), like the Catholic memorabilia that busily but vacuously adorn Juliet’s death. It is virtually impossible to conclude from Albanese’s text whether she is approving, critical, or indifferent to the trends she documents. As she appropriately comments, “irony has become a part of the sales repertory of capitalism.” (224) But given that the film was shot in Mexico to keep production costs low, there definitely is added value in her observation that “surplus value is secured via what seems a familiar US gambit: neocolonial outsourcing.” (223)
So how can neocolonial exploitation be resisted? This is one important question among others in the essay by Crystal Bartolovich, though the title “Shakespeare’s Globe?” would not immediately reveal that. On one level, Bartolovich considers the newly constructed and much-debated Globe Theatre in London as an assertion of English nationalism in response to the country’s postwar identity crisis. But the real burden of her argument is that there is no such identity to be restored. The celebrated English language has been much influenced by French, for instance, and the new Globe Theatre itself has had sponsorship from the transnational corporations Unilever and Panasonic. “I am not, of course, suggesting - economistically - that Unilever and Panasonic now ‘own’ Shakespeare,” Bartolovich adds, “but I am wondering what it means for how we understand ‘culture when forces outside the nation ‘invest,’ in both senses, in its putative icons.’” (194) The conclusion she draws is that cultural nationalism is neither an epistemologically nor strategically sound basis for progressive action. With respect to Shakespeare, this calls for an effort to “socialize him,” to make him the globe’s Shakespeare, by recognizing “the numerous ostensibly ‘alien’ hands, voices and labors which helped produce the language and nation-state which Shakespeare’s name has been called upon so often to underwrite.”(202) Caliban no doubt would approve the sentiment. Yet the negation of nationalism leaves conspicuously unanswered the question of how the “socialization of culture” can be articulated as an alternative mode of sociopolitical solidarity.
The location singled out in Richard Wilson’s “The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu” is the sixteenth-century playhouse itself, and the questions are: What is really going on there? And why does Shakespeare want us to think that it’s something else? More specifically, Wilson stages the argument that Shakespeare is ever concerned to deny or conceal the commercial origins of the drama. As Cohen emphasizes in his separate essay, Shakespeare’s company not only was engaged in a business enterprise, but enjoyed a crown-protected monopoly on the trade. (155) Yet Shakespeare “mystified the market investments of the commercial stage by imagining the ideal theater as a scene of aristocratic patronage,” Howard and Shershow note in their introduction. (13) Seeking to explain that through a deployment of Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, Wilson reacts defensively to “detractors” of that approach, but then says “it is easy to see why a theory of the disinterestedness of art, that yet insists on the interest of the disinterested, should seem confusing to American and British readers.” (165-66) He is right. It does seem confusing. And Wilson does not make it simple to see what Bourdieu contributes to the work of clarification. But he does show how Shakespeare exploits the mystique of patronage to solicit and sustain commercial clientele, “dignifying the playhouse spectators, in the words of the Prologue to Henry V, as ‘gentles all.’” (172)