Intersections of Politics, Culture, Class, and Gender in Shakespeare’s "Titus Andronicus", "The Taming of the Shrew", and "The Merchant of Venice"

Abstract

Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 12 (27), 2015; DOI: 10.1515/mstap-2015-0004 Let me open with a question: what does this drawing represent? Whichever way you first saw it, direct your vision to the opposite angle and try to see it as the other representation now. After you have recognized both images and have switched back and forth between them a few times, you may then understand the drawing as the ambiguous rabbit-duck illusion. This drawing, by an unattributed artist, first appeared in the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Bltter (147), a German humor magazine. Its caption was Welche Thiere gleichen einander am meisten? (Which animals are most like each other?), with Kaninchen und Ente (Rabbit and Duck) written underneath. A simplified version of the image 1 was made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1953, in which he (165-71) utilized it as a means of describing two different ways of seeing: seeing that and seeing as. In his analysis, a person can view something in a straightforward manner and see that this image is of a rabbit. However, in another instance, one may notice Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics, California State University at Fullerton, USA. 1 Wittgenstein (165) credits American psychologist Joseph Jastrow for the image, as used in his Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900), but Jastrow based his simplified version on a cartoon in the 19 November 1892 edition of Harpers Weekly (1114), which was itself based on the drawing published about four weeks earlier in Fliegende Bltter. Kay Stanton Intersections of Politics, Culture, Class, and Gender in Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice 42 Kay Stanton a particular aspectseeing it as something, a duck. To Wittgenstein, when one looks at the rabbit-duck and sees a rabbit, one is not interpreting the picture as a rabbit, but rather reporting what one sees: the picture as a rabbit. But what about the case when one sees it first as a duck, then as a rabbit (as, by the way, I did)? Apparently, Wittgenstein was not sure, except that he did believe that it could not be the case that the external world stays the same while an internal cognitive change happens. Since then, the image (as well as other similarly ambiguous figures) has received much additional analysis, notably by gestalt psychologists, who find a correspondence between the interpretations of ambiguous representations and the subjects mode of perceiving reality. Although the rabbit-duck drawing and its interpretations were unavailable to Shakespeare, it can, I believe, be helpful as we ponder the topic of this volume, particularly in regard to Shakespeares treatments of diversity and homogeneity relating to the issues it raises. In his 1977 article Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V, Norman Rabkin made a landmark contribution to scholarship on Henry V by his use of this gestalt figure of the rabbit-duck to explain why to some readers and audiences and in some points in time, the play and its eponymous king are heroic, and to others and in other points in time, the king is monstrous and the play a scathing indictment of him. Better support for his argument can hardly be found than through comparison of Laurence Olivers post-World War II film of the play and Kenneth Branaghs post-Falklands War treatments on stage and filmthough in the film Branagh allows himself in the second half to be swept up into militaristic celebration. New historicist and cultural materialist criticism, notably by Stephen Greenblatt in Invisible Bullets and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield in History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V, suggests duality of vision in the play as well, but in terms of a subversion-containment model, through which the play presents instances of subversive acts that are ultimately contained and controlled by the dominant ideology through its fount, the kingand with Shakespeare, according to Greenblatt (64), in underlying complicity with King Harry, a view with which I strongly disagree, by the way, but recognize as possible by means of Greenblatts perspective. …