Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons Paul Menzer Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons. Eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiii + 259. $90.00 If we needed another reminder of the divorcing interests of those who profess and those who perform Shakespeare—and we probably don’t—the opening sentence of this ambitious collection will serve. “Character has made a comeback,” the editors write, an instantly legible pronouncement to any academic but a true head scratcher for a working actor (1). For most performers, character never went away. Indeed, one of the more startling discoveries for an academic who strays into the rehearsal room is that actors are the Last Bradleyites. It can feel a bit like meeting those mythical Japanese soldiers who hid out in Pacific jungles, unaware that the war was lost. Depending upon your perspective, it is either a frustrating or a delicious irony—or both—that one of the most energetically discredited modes of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism has arguably exerted the greatest academic influence upon the presentation of Shakespeare on stage over the last century. Of course, this biased account positions actors as the deluded others who hold fast to a lost cause, or, at least, take a quaint angle of address to the challenge of representing imaginary persons on stage. In fact, the essays in Shakespeare and Character advance a collectively convincing argument that it is the academy that has lost out by turning away from “character” as a locus of connected “political, ethical, historical, literary, and performative aspects of early modern theatre” (1). In the introduction, then, the editors leverage both theatrical and “vernacular” intuition that character is central to Shakespeare’s art to resuscitate academic interest in the topic (3). The book’s central claim, in sum, is that “character is the organizing principle of Shakespeare’s plays – it organizes both the formal and ideological dimensions of the drama and is not organized by them” (7). (If the collection invites pushback, it will be against claims like the final clause, which flips a central plank in the poststructuralist platform.) With theoretical sophistication and practical address, these twelve essays take up this maddeningly elusive topic to mount a persuasive argument that character deserves the academic spotlight once more. Given character criticism’s checkered history, this collection takes a systematic approach to building what it calls, in the inevitable locution, the “new character criticism” (1). While many essay collections reward scattershot reading, Shakespeare [End Page 413] and Character has a deliberate, aggregate structure from which a sequential reading profits. After the introduction’s brisk review of the fate of character in the hands of critics, the reader moves through four broad sections: “Theory,” “History,” “Performance,” and “Theatrical Persons.” The first three sections constitute the “how-to” portion of the book, with the final essays comprising case studies of what a “theoretically sophisticated and historically informed new character criticism can accomplish” (12). The book’s remit is clear and its structure is sound, which gives the collection a satisfying and unusual coherence. The “Theory” section opens with the charmingly oblique “Confusing Shakespeare’s Characters with Real People: Reflections on Reading in Four Questions” by Michael Bristol, which features such unexpected queries as “Why is it possible to ride a bicycle” (21)? (Momentum is incredibly stabilizing, if you must know.) Bristol uses the example of bicycle riding to air an argument about latent and historical human potentialities: all humans possess the potential to ride a bicycle, but they need bicycles on which to ride. This argument allows Bristol to forge the rapprochement between traditional and modern understandings of “human nature” necessary for a new character criticism: “there are underlying regularities that make historically specific differences intelligible within our own similarly peculiar and transient conditions of life” (22). For all its productive eccentricities, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that the essay closes with a high humanist refrain: Engagement with a character has a moral dimension; it corresponds to the imperative of respect for our human vulnerability to loss and grief. We learn about our own complex human nature by thinking about and coming...