"Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon ed. by Maurice Charney

Abstract

Reviews377 Maurice Charney, ed. "Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon. Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988. Pp. 213. $32.50. "After the Bible," Maurice Charney remarks while introducing these fourteen essays, "Shakespeare's works are our primary canonized text." That exaulted status fosters and feeds on Bardolatry, "a kind of Shakespeare fundamentalism" (p. 9) that takes many forms, including rejecting the possibility that anything Shakespeare penned is defective, flawed, "bad." The Taming of the Shrew, Peter Berek and Shirley Nelson Garner agree, is "bad" Shakespeare. Berek declares that "it surely leads the canon in bad qualities," including being "morally bad: its patriarchal chauvinism is unalloyed with ambiguity, and its final (and most celebrated ) speech unpleasantly proclaims some Renaissance commonplaces that make even our own century look good" (p. 91). Writing more personally, Garner explains that Shrew does not work for her because its patriarchal values are not hers: "Rather than making me laugh, it makes me sad or angry" (p. 117). Shrew's badness does not make successful performances of it impossible, but, Ninian Mellamphy maintains , Timon of Athens is "bad" in precisely that way. He discusses a 1983 production by a first-rate company (the Grand Theatre Company of London, Ontario, with Robin Phillips directing) to show that the play's monotonous tone and failure to present the ideal Timon relies on in ways that engage the audience's feelings are overwhelming defects. Iska Alter and Russ McDonald come at "badness" from a different angle, challenging assumptions underlying the judgment that a given play is "bad." "The 'badness' of Henry VIII," Alter maintains, "grows out of the confluence of several troublesome factors" (p. 176) which dispose us to regard as inherent difficulties that "are, rather, theatrical constructs, created by the requirements of an older, culturally determined idea about what constituted effective and appropriate dramatic action" (p. 184). McDonald argues that The Comedy of Errors, a farce, is victimized by "genre snobbery." Since "Farce is at the bottom of everyone's list of forms" (p 77), we undervalue the "delights of disjunction " (p. 88) that Errors provides. Avraham Oz and Anthony Dawson, on the other hand, question the basis for evaluating a given play as "good" Shakespeare. Oz allows that Romeo and Juliet is a "melodramatic masterpiece" (p. 142) but insists that is is "bad" tragedy because "devoid of any sense of history" (p. 138). Oz seems guilty of two practices his fellow contributors denounce: "genre snobbery" and using later plays to assess an early play. Dawson calls The Tempest "Shakespeare's most consistently overrated play." Despite what he regards as crippling deficiencies in performance, it remains highly valued, he explains, primarily because "Texts are good insofar as they generate commentary," and this play has an "almost irresistible appeal" to "modern critical method" (p. 61). Dawson's essay neatly complements its predecessor, by Terence Hawkes, who declares that Shakespeare's plays "have no essential meanings , only uses." To illustrate that they are "neither good nor bad in 378Comparative Drama themselves," he imagines a "bad" Henry V the Germans might have mounted for use "as a propaganda exercise against the Normandy campaign " (p. 59) of 1944, the year Olivier's "good" film serving the British war effort was released. Rejecting "the critical tradition that has erected barriers between 'high art' and popular genres" (p. 41), Harriet Hawkins challenges the distinctions between "good" and "bad" differently. She insists there are vital connections between works as seemingly disparate as King Lear and King Kong, Macbeth and werewolf movies, Measure for Measure and the modern American soap opera. The proposition that "all authors are created fallible" (p. 23) applies to Shakespeare, Richard Levin argues, first offering six examples of defects in specific plays, then analyzing the fallacious tactics typically used to convert such instances of "bad" Shakespeare into "good": embracing a theme, invoking irony, and appealing to performance. Dolora Cunningham and Alex Newell focus on defects in characterization . Cunningham maintains that Helena of All's Well violates norms of consistency and aesthetic unity in ways that Shakespeare's other comic heroines do not because he endows her with opposing qualities which in other plays...