Shakespeare and Modern Culture

From one of the world’s premier Shakespeare scholars, author of Shakespeare After All (“the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer”–Newsweek): a magisterial new study whose premise is “that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as “naturally” our own and even as “naturally” true–ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Yet many of these ideas, timely as ever, have been reimagined–are indeed often now first encountered–not only in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news but also in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law.

Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and twentieth century and contemporary culture–from James Joyce’s Ulysses to George W. Bush’s reading list. In The Merchant of Venice, she looks at the question of intention; in Hamlet, the matter of character; in King Lear, the dream of sublimity; in Othello, the persistence of difference; and in Macbeth, the necessity of interpretation. She discusses the conundrum of man in The Tempest; the quest for exemplarity in Henry V; the problem of fact in Richard III; the estrangement of self in Coriolanus; and the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a tour de force reimagining of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of protean “Shakespeare.”

INTRODUCTION
The premise of this book is simple and direct: Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare. I could perhaps put the second “Shakespeare” in quotation marks, so as to indicate that what I have in mind is our idea of Shakespeare and of what is Shakespearean. But in fact it will be my claim that Shakespeare and “Shakespeare” are perceptually and conceptually the same from the viewpoint of any modern observer.

Characters like Romeo, Hamlet, or Lady Macbeth have become cultural types, instantly recognizable when their names are invoked. As will become clear, the modern versions of these figures often differ significantly from their
Shakespearean “originals”: a “Romeo” is a persistent romancer and philanderer rather than a lover faithful unto death, a “Hamlet” is an indecisive overthinker, and a “Lady Macbeth,” in the public press, is an ambitious female politician who will stop at nothing to gain her own ends. But the very changes marked by these appropriations tell a revealing story about modern culture and modern life.

The idea that Shakespeare is modern is, of course, hardly a modern idea. Indeed, it is one of the fascinating effects of Shakespeare's plays that they have almost always seemed to coincide with the times in which they are read, published, produced, and discussed. But the idea that Shakespeare writes us-as if we were Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, constantly encountering our own prescripted identities, proclivities, beliefs, and behaviors-is, if taken seriously, both exciting and disconcerting.

I will suggest in what follows that Shakespeare has scripted many of the ideas that we think of as “naturally” our own and even as “naturally” true: ideas about human character, about individuality and selfhood, about government, about men and women, youth and age, about the qualities that make a strong leader. Such ideas are not necessarily first encountered today in the realm of literature-or even of drama and theater. Psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law have all welcomed and recognized Shakespeare as the founder, authorizer, and forerunner of important categories and practices in their fields. Case studies based on Shakespearean characters and events form an important part of education and theory in leadership institutes and business schools as well as in the history of psychoanalysis. In this sense Shakespeare has made modern culture, and modern culture returns the favor.

The word “Shakespearean” today has taken on its own set of connotations, often quite distinct from any reference to Shakespeare or his plays. A cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan in The New Yorker shows a man and a woman walking down a city street, perhaps headed for a theater or a movie house. The caption reads, “I don't mind if something's Shakespearean, just as long as it's not Shakespeare.” “Shakespearean” is now an all- purpose adjective, meaning great, tragic, or resonant: it's applied to events, people, and emotions, whether or not they have any real relevance to Shakespeare.

Journalists routinely describe the disgrace of a public leader as a “downfall of Shakespearean proportions”-as for example in the case of Canadian financier Conrad Black, whose plight was also called a “fall from grace of Shakespearean proportions,” and who was described as the victim of a “betrayal of almost Shakespearean proportion.” In a book on the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former CIA officer describes the results as “self- imposed tragedies of unplanned- for length and Shakespearean proportions.” Here the word “tragedies” makes the link between military misadventures and Shakespearean drama. The effect of a series of Danish cartoons that gave offense to Muslims was “Shakespearean in proportions”; the final episodes of The Sopranos were “a bloodbath of Shakespearean proportions”; and the steroid scandal in professional baseball was a plot that had“thickened to Shakespearean proportions.”

Vivid personalities like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and William Randolph Hearst have likewise been described as figures of “Shakespearean proportions” or “Shakespearean dimensions.” Nor is it only national or international news that now makes the Shakespeare grade: a headline in the Daily Telegraph of London declared that “throwing a children's party can be a drama of Shakespearean proportions.” And an article in the tabloid New York Post began, “A Shakespearean tragedy played out on a Long Island street where a boozed- up young woman unknowingly dragged her boyfriend under her car for more than a block as he tried to stop her from driving drunk.” “Shakespearean” in these contexts means something like “ironic” or “astonishing” or “uncannily well plotted.” Over time the adjectival form of the playwright's name has become an intensifier, indicating a degree of magnitude, a scale of effect.

Why should this be the case? And what does it say about the interrelationship between Shakespeare and modern culture?
“Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how,” says one earnest young man in a Jane Austen novel to another. “It is a part of an Englishman's constitution,” his companion is quick to concur. “No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” he says, “from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions.” This was modern culture, circa 1814. In the view of these disarmingly ordinary, not very bookish observers, Shakespeare was the author of their common language, the poet and playwright who inspired and shaped their thought.

In 1828 Sir Walter Scott, already a celebrated novelist, “visited the tomb of the mighty wizard,” as he wrote. He had a plaster cast made of the Shakespeare portrait bust in Holy Trinity Church, and he designed “a proper shrine for the Bard of Avon” in the library of his home at Abbotsford, making sure that the bust was “fitted with an altar worthy of himself.” Scott noticed that the two of them-Scott and Shakespeare-shared the same initials, W.S. He had their head sizes measured and compared by a German phrenologist. A bust of Scott was designed to resemble that of the other Bard, and after Scott's death the bust of his head replaced that of Shakespeare in the library. Admiration here became identification-or perhaps a kind of rivalry.

Shakespeare's modernity would also be proclaimed in nineteenth- century America. In 1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson announced that, after centuries in which Shakespeare had been inadequately understood, the time was finally right for him: “It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now,” Emerson wrote. The word “now” in his argument becomes the marker of that shifting category of the modern, and it is repeated for emphasis a few lines later. “Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.”13 Thus Emerson could say of Shakespeare, simply and resoundingly, “he wrote the text of modern life.” We live today in a new “now,” a century and a half removed from Emerson's, but this sentiment-“he wrote the text of modern life”-seems as accurate as it did then.

Nor-as we have already noted-is this view the special province of literary authors. The frequency with which practitioners and theorists of many of the “new” modern sciences and social sciences-anthropology, psychology, sociology-have turned to Shakespeare for inspiration is striking, but not surprising. Ernest Jones, Freud's friend and biographer, the first English language practitioner of psychoanalysis, declared straightforwardly (in an essay he began in 1910, revised in 1923, and expanded in the 1940s)that “Shakespeare was the first modern.” Why? Because he understood so well the issues of psychology. “The essential difference between prehistoric and civilized man,” Jones argued, was that “the difficulties with which the former had to contend came from without,” while “those with which the latter have to contend really come from within,”
This inner conflict modern psychologists know as neurosis, and it is only by study of neurosis that one can learn the fundamental motives and instincts that move men. Here, as in so many other respects, Shakespeare was the first modern.
Thus for Jones, Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy, the onstage, interior questioning of a character's conflicted thoughts and motives, anticipated the new science of psychoanalysis and Freud's “talking cure.”
THE “text of modern life” these days is embedded in a network of text messaging, Internet connections, video clips, and file sharing. Shakespeare in our culture is already disseminated, scattered, appropriated, part of the cultural language, high and low. An advertisement for rugged outdoors types advertised a sale: “Now Is the Winter of Our Discount Tents.” This turned out also to be the name of a rock compilation by the label Twisted Nerve. At the same time, in London, the White Cube Gallery presented an exhibition of work by British artist Neal Tait, titled “Now Is the Discount of Our Winter Tents.” Manifestly, none of these tweaked or inverted phrases would offer much in the way of wit or appeal if the cultural consumer did not recognize, or half recognize, the phrase on which e...