Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths by Helen Hackett (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 260 mentary tradition and the positions of the Stoics and Epicureans. This work will be indispensable for any new studies of the history of Aristotelianism: it has made Averroes’s own status in that history indisputable. DAVID BENNETT, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009) xiii + 295 pp., ill. Helen Hackett takes the two seminal figures of the Elizabethan period—Shakespeare and Elizabeth I herself—and discusses the significance of their seeming inextricable mythic connection in Britain, America, and the rest of the Shakespeare -reading world. Hackett poses this connection as mythic in the sense that there is no direct evidence to suggest that Shakespeare ever met Elizabeth. Though she does present historical data (8), it is primarily framed to provide readers with a factual baseline and perspective on what documentary evidence for a meeting between these monuments actually exists. The text’s real focus concerns how this evidence, or lack thereof, is extrapolated, twisted, decorated, and at times fabricated, serving to perpetuate a centuries-long “double-myth” that shapes and is shaped by pervasive socio-cultural factors. Hackett divides her book into six chapters plus an epilogue, so the text generally proceeds chronologically beginning with an outline of the myth’s origins in the eighteenth century, and ending with twenty-first-century postmodernism. However, three of the six chapters serve as topical bridges between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and include discussions on the American interpretation of Shakespeare-Elizabeth myths, criticism and interpretation of apparent references to Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s canon, and the myth’s shaping by the Shakespeare authorship controversy respectively. Each intellectual movement situates well amidst the others, taking an increasingly globalized context into account, and Hackett is ever careful (and at times overbearing) in transitioning from one chapter to the next. Ultimately, the intellectual movements that Hackett invokes tie in directly with the socio-cultural climate of the time and place, so verisimilitude characterizes the text at most points. For example , Hackett connects the rise of feminist philosophy with stronger representations of Elizabeth in popular culture, ala Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R and Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love (115–116, 223). As Elizabeth’s depictions grow in strength, Shakespeare’s weaken by relation—he is only mentioned Elizabeth R, and is clearly subordinate to the near-omniscient Elizabeth of Shakespeare in Love. In this way, Hackett poses the depicted relationships between Shakespeare and Elizabeth as often representing the locus of a society ’s values. For as topically diverse and complex as the Shakespeare-Elizabeth myth has become, Hackett effectively selects from a representative pool of popular sources (especially historical fiction), documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts , and academic discussion to illustrate her points. As she notes, many of these sources spawn from the others, including academic publications (5). Therefore, the double myth contributes to an increasing critical and historical haze, exacerbated by the passage of time as faulty assumptions from one source carry over into another ad infinitum. Perhaps the most alarming example of such oversight is James Boaden’s interpretation of Oberon’s vision to Puck in A REVIEWS 261 Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i.148–167) as evidence that Shakespeare was in attendance at the 1575 Princely Pleasures festivities. Boaden, amongst others, relies on information derived from Sir Walter Scott’s chronologically-distorted piece of historical fiction, Kenilworth (209–210). Hackett implicates readers of all walks—orthodox scholars, “anti-Stratfordians,” and lay people—in perpetuating and modifying the double-myth to better coincide with their own perspectives , often unconsciously. Despite its strengths—relative even-handedness, viable reconsideration of popularly held critical standpoints, and cross-cultural scope—the author at times undermines her position as the double-myth’s participant observer. For example, when discussing a sample argument garnered from a “Baconian” web site, Hackett is given to disdainfully rejecting the claim, rather than analyzing its significance situated in the larger scope of her chapter: “Some of us must remain unconvinced, and indeed bewildered that so-called arguments such as these have attracted any adherents at all” (165). Her readers can only assume the significance concerns how such poorly...