The Invention of Shakespeare and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention of Shakespeare and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel Fran Teague THE INVENTION OF SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS. Stephen Orgel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 192, 7 halftones. The Invention of Shakespeare gathers twelve of Stephen Orgel’s essays. In his opening essay, he declares the collection’s theme to be “the invention of Shakespeare, the creation of an author suited to [End Page 113] the increasing canonicity of the works” (1). The book steadily resists canonization, however, for the pleasure of the glitches (Orgel’s term). In chapter one, the glitches include the way that rumor, forgery, and misjudgment have forged our understanding of Shakespeare’s life and works. If a teacher talks about what the Chandos portrait tells us about Shakespeare the man, how sailors staged Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone, or why Shakespeare used Don Quixote in his lost play Cardenio, the class learns things likely to be false. The history of how the myth of Shakespeare’s life and works came to be, so well discussed by scholars like Schoenbaum and Taylor, is an important part of this book, but unlike his predecessors, Orgel uses the textual glitches as a heuristic, generating new ways of understanding why the glitches matter. Orgel remarks early on, after noting that the text as we have it today is a script: “The script is not the play, it is only where the play starts. The actors turn it into a play, and every revival of the play—and indeed, every performance—is different. There is never a “final version” (2). In literary discussions, critics often want to believe in a master-text and may resist the idea that editing a play, reading a play, and watching a play differ from editing, reading, or experiencing prose fiction or poetry or other forms. Chapter two, “The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole,” focuses on canonicity. Specifically, it concerns editors and the way that they imagine and improve on Shakespeare in the guise of improving on previous editions. The dizzying way that certain plays are in the canon, out of the canon, ping-ponging back and forth, makes for fascinating (and sometimes comic) reading. After the first chapter, however, the essays are varied: Orgel writes some in his role as a textual editor, some as a sophisticated reader, and some as a play-goer. In his introduction, Orgel groups together five of the essays, “No Sense of an Ending,” “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” “Two Household Friends,” “Getting Things Wrong,” and “Revising King Lear.” These essays “focus in various ways on the sorts of problems I have termed glitches, whether typographical, grammatical, or discursive” (3). He also mentions that two essays, “Food for Thought” and “Venice at the Globe,” were written for groups that share an interest in early modern culture. Two others, “Danny Scheie’s Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare all’italiana,” consider performance from the perspective of an audience member. One essay, “Lascivious Grace,” is perhaps the most personal, but goes unmentioned in the introduction. Chapter three, “No Sense of an Ending,” concerns Shakespeare’s poetry (and that of others) and the way that a poem may seem incomplete rather than the product of an artistic or printer’s choice. The argument also suggests that the sonnets are personal, autobiographical, in what they say about homosexual and adulterous relationships. The following chapter, “Lascivious Grace,” presents Orgel as a reader, analyzing character (especially Iago) in Othello and picking up on threads from the previous essay. This chapter is a revised version of work published in Orgel’s Spectacular Performances, and it shows him as reader, as textual editor, and as a director who “stages the play in my own mind” (50). But he also writes that “two friends to whom I have proposed this [character analysis of Iago] haven’t liked it; both objected that making Iago gay explains too much, that malignity ought to be left motiveless” (51). As a reader, I have no problem acknowledging that productions may certainly offer homoeroticism as an important part of the play, but I think other important elements are race and Desdemona’s choices (and agency), which the essay does...