The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0153 Thursday, 2 April 2009
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, April 02, 2009
Subject: SBReview_3: _Gothic Shakespeares_
SBReview_3: _Gothic Shakespeares_. Edited by John Drakakis and Dale
Townshend. General editor, Terrence Hawkes. _Accents on Shakespeare
Series_. New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN 978-0-415-42067-9; 264 p. US$39.95.
Reviewed by Peter Paolucci, York University
This festschrift is dedicated to scholar-biographer-teacher Julia
Briggs; it contains a collection of nine essays framed on one side by
John Drakakis' _Introduction_ and on the other side by Jerrold E.
Hoggle's _Afterword_. Four of the essays explore the use of Shakespeare
as a signifier of English patriotism, identity, and the crisis of
English nationalism: Stephen Craig's "Shakespeare Among the Goths," Dale
Townshend's "Gothic and the Ghost of _Hamlet_," Sue Chaplin's "The Scene
of a Crime: Fictions of Authority in Walpole's Gothic Shakespeare," and
Angela Wright's "In Search of Arden: Ann Radcliffe's William
Shakespeare." Three of the essays explore Shakespeare as a re-worked or
re-constituted signifier of modern-day cultural anxieties and concerns:
Peter Hutchings' "Theatres of Blood: Shakespeare and the Horror Film,"
Glennis Byron's "'As One Dead': _Romeo and Juliet_ in the 'Twilight'
zone," and Fred Botting's and Scott Wilson's "Gothspeare and the Origins
of Cultural Studies." The remaining two essays (Elisabeth Bronfen's
"Shakespeare's Noctural World" and Michael Gamer's and Robert Miles'
"Gothic Shakespeare on the Romantic Stage") are anomalous. The former
traces the use of darkness and night (pseudo-signifiers of the Gothic)
in _Romeo and Juliet_, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _The Merchant of
Venice_; the latter is an exploration of Shakespearean influences on
post-modern culture, although this reviewer found the essay to be
fraught with cryptic and unsubstantiated claims ("If Shakespeare were
alive today he'd be the Cookie Monster on _Sesame Street_ introducing
Masterpiece Theatre" (196)). Nevertheless, the editors are to be
commended for the variety in theoretical approaches and subject matter,
and for the scope of topics and contexts. As with any good melange of
critical essays, there is something here to excite -- and irritate --
everyone.
_Gothic Shakespeares_ explores intertextualities between Shakespeare and
Gothic narratives in fiction, drama, film. "[T]he coexistence in one
text of other texts" (Drakakis 9) can appear as "quotation, allusion
[or] . . . appropriation" (12), and encompasses the "transforming [of] .
. . originals" (9) or an intent to "_improve_ the original" [sic]. The
rise of Shakespeare as a scholarly industry clearly has its home in the
eighteenth century, so the connections seem obvious enough, but the
objective is more elusive than first thought. The essays touch on the
Gothic moment of eighteenth century and Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_ as
pivotal moments, but two problems emerge from this critical necessity.
First, attributing meaning to these intertextual moments is inherently
problematic; while there is no shortage of Shakespearean epiphenomena in
the eighteenth-century and beyond, the allusions often seem
disappointingly incidental. For example, speaking about an intertextual
moment in Tod Browning's 1931 _Dracula_, Peter Hutching observes that
Renfield's use of "Words, words, words" "is sufficiently odd to be
noticeable but insufficiently elaborated to be fully meaningful" (155).
The same can also be said, regrettably, for many of the intertextual
moments discussed elsewhere in this festschrift. One is reminded of
Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth": "There's something
happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear."
With regard to the second difficulty, intertextuality is complicated by
the richly varied use of "Gothic." Walpole may have been clear in his
own mind about the meaning when he used the label in the second edition
of _The Castle of Otranto_, but subsequent uses reveal an oblivious
resistance to distinctions of genre and refer fiction, drama, or even
poetry. Gothic is associated with that specific moment in literary
history between 1764 (Walpole's _Otranto_) and the 1820s, and yet
literature before and after this period is also be said to be Gothic
(viz. _Macbeth_ and _Wuthering Heights_). The term also refers to the
distinct genres of supernaturalism and science fiction (Mary Shelley's
_Frankenstein_). Gothic also refers to ghost stories, satanic
over-reacher narratives in the tradition of _Dr. Faustus_ (viz. Matthew
Lewis' _The Monk_), and has even been used to describe the anti-Gothic
or rationalist tradition in Radcliffe and Austen. The term describes an
ornate architectural style usually associated with church design, and
Gothic ruins often become a dominant trope in the narrative. Gothic has
also been used pejoratively in the sense of the "dark ages," and is
associated with a kind of brutal primitivism (the _OED_ shows Dryden
using the term in 1695 to mean "[b]arbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished,
in bad taste"). The term alludes to exotic settings of time or place and
is associated with motifs of frightful nocturnal anxieties, melodrama,
darkness and fear, Catholicism, mysticism, forbidden desires, vulnerable
heroines, themes of power and victimization, and a myriad of phobias,
including agoraphobia, erotophobia, nyctophobia. And if all that is not
enough, the term is also associated with conventions of _romance_. No
wonder the meaning of intertextualities can be elusive.
The overarching, eighteenth-century moment that fused the Gothic with a
variety of re-significations of Shakespeare is handled variously by the
essays. Botting and Wilson claim that "Shakespeare is a Gothic
invention, a fiction" (188) and Townshend suggests the invention of
Shakespeare served as a very specific response to the insecurity of a
newborn literary form: "In relation to Gothic, Shakespeare is at once,
the revered subject and object of protection . . . . Shakespeare
provides the dominant mode through which Gothic fictions seek to
establish their aesthetic credibility, as well as their legitimate
position [in the] literary genealogy that runs from Chaucer . . . . and
beyond" (73). In a Derrida-derived essay that is unnecessarily
self-obfuscating, Sue Chapin thinks _Otranto_ expresses a "compulsive
monumentalization and repetition of the past" (98) and came "to exist
within this early modern juridico-literary economy as a site of power"
that was also simultaneously "a site of transgression" (99). (In the
end, Chapin's essay is as much about Derrida as Shakespeare and the
Gothic). Using Radcliffe's Gothic adaptations of Shakespeare, Angela
Wright's essay rejects the idea that all Gothic adaptations of
Shakespeare are necessarily part of a "gesture of English nationalism
during a time of French encroachment" (113). Wright's superb essay
offers nuanced insight into the progressively sophisticated use of
Shakespeare in Radcliffe's fiction. Dale Townshend's "Gothic and the
Ghost of Hamlet" is a bookend piece for Wright's essay, and takes as its
starting point, an anonymous poem published in 1750 and entitled
"Shakespeare's Ghost" and traces the influence of Hamlet on several
eighteenth century works, including Radcliffe's _The Romance of the
Forest_ and Udolpho, Reeve's _The Old English Baron_, and, of course,
the seminal _Castle of Otranto_.
Craig wants to distinguish between "Shakespearean Gothic" and "Gothic
Shakespeare" (46), with the former referring to the eighteenth century's
appropriation/use of Shakespearean themes and motif (what he calls
"_present_ing" [sic] Shakespeare (56) or "assigning privilege to the
present), and with the latter referring to Shakespeare's own
anticipatory use (foreshadowing) themes and motifs that would
subsequently become identified as Gothic. His essay is helpful in
understanding essays in the collection, like Elisabeth Bonfen's
"Shakespeare's Noctural World." Bronfen uses the word Gothic to mean
ominous darkness; Drakakis calls her use of the term "sensibilities" (18).
The gem is collection is the intriguing Gamer-Miles essay which takes as
its starting point Samuel Ireland's counterfeiting of a Shakespearean
manuscript that duped many Shakespearean experts of the time. The essay
explores the contours of the eighteenth-century biases about Shakespeare
by showing which parts of the forgeries worked and why.
There is so much more that cannot be mentioned here, but the book will
most certainly be of use to Shakespearean and eighteenth-century
scholars and is well worth the read. _Gothic Shakespeares_ is a
pioneering foray into a vast landscape of topics; hopefully further
discussions will ensue.
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