Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots by Barbara L. Estrin

Abstract

Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots. By Barbara L. Estrin. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2012. 255 pp. Reviewed by Erin Ellerbeck In a seminal essay on Shakespearean adaptation, Charles Marowitz declares Shakespeare “a living presence and a constant stimulus” (468). He proposes that Shakespeare’s plays have become Ur-texts that are “being used as paradigms for new texts”; what modern audiences most desire, he suggests, is not “the routine repetition of [Shakespeare’s] words and imagery,” but instead new works that dissolve and reshape the plays in order to create “that sense of vicissitude, variety, and intellectual vigor with which the author himself confronted the seventeenth century” (478). Marowitz employs a biologicalgenealogical metaphor to express his frustration with critics who want to preserve Shakespeare rather than adapt his works for the present era: Shakespeare’s “‘greatness’ is nothing more than the sperm-bank from which we must spawn our own offspring” (478). Shakespeare thus becomes, in Marowitz’s estimation, the (sometimes anonymous) father of literary children who are the heirs to an artistic achievement that must be adapted continually in order to maintain its vitality. In Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots, Barbara L. Estrin examines the offspring spawned from the Shakespearean sperm bank and uses her interpretations of novels to re-evaluate three of Shakespeare’s plays: she takes Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, Liz Jensens’s Ark Baby, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces as “theoretical lenses” to contest received critical opinions about The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. Although the novels are not explicitly Shakespearean adaptations (Estrin terms some of them “Shakespearean re-visions”), their attitudes toward foundlings and familial formation prompt her to “read back” and revisit Shakespeare’s plays (13). Shakespeare’s creative achievements and his ability to adapt and adjust inherited narrative formulas, in other words, are brought to light by an examination of the concerns and accomplishments of his distant artistic descendants. Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction is a substantial contribution to the field of adoption studies. It follows Marianne Novy’s influential Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 232 Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (2005), which analyzes adoption in literature from Sophocles to Barbara Kingsolver, by considering the influence of adoption narratives on the perception of adoptees and “suggest[ing] something of the great range in the possibilities for adoption plots” (2). It explores new territory, however, by deliberately eschewing Novy’s “standpoint theory” and avoiding the personal narratives of nonfictional adoptees in favor of an examination of the “mythological homogeneity” of the foundling plot (xx). Estrin links the continued influence of the foundling plot to contemporary cultural issues, providing readers with a “reverse” literary history of the perceived supremacy of bloodlines. In particular, she ties foundling plots to current immigration crises in Western Europe and the United States, connecting extreme forms of nationalism to the longstanding mythology of the purity of blood and lineage. In the chapters on The Nature of Blood, Austerlitz, and Fugitive Pieces, her focus is on narratives that deal with the Holocaust. The first half of Estrin’s book is dedicated to the four contemporary novels;thesecondhalfusesthemastheoreticalmodelsforunderstanding Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the study is its analysis of the ancient foundling plot alongside the Petrarchan lyric. Because the Petrarchan lyric speaker “generates” poetry when his beloved rejects him, Estrin proposes, he becomes a self-generator, making himself anew in the face of abandonment. In the same way that orphan or foundling characters are free to recreate their identities, the Petrarchan speaker is liberated from the ties of marriage and family. The four novels that she discusses question not only the supremacy of bloodlines but also the gendered, hierarchical structure of the lyric plot. In Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces, for instance, the losses of family narratives and thus familial identities spur characters to invert the gender roles typical of Petrarchan love plots. By redefining both foundling plots and lyric plots, Estrin argues, the novels promote an “openness” to a model of culture that is not based in biology. In Shakespeare’s world...