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The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family o/Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Lynda E. Boose
Lynda E. Boose*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

Within the conventions of Renaissance drama and within the protocol of the Tudor court, being a messenger was hazardous duty. Inevitably, it fell to the messenger to hazard the wrath of the powerful by delivering precisely the information that no one really wanted to hear. However, since I could find no way to survey the trends in Shakespearean scholarship on the family without stumbling right into the politics concurrently going on in the “family” of Shakespearean scholars, my analysis of Renaissance literary research on the family, marriage, and sex commits me, I fear, to the hazards of playing the messenger. My title beribbons itself with the de rigueur deconstructive chiasmus and that most trendy of opening entitlements, “The Politics of… . “ It finally arrives, however, at what serves for both the title's ultimate deconstruction and the paper's ultimate subject: “The Politics of Politics.”

Type
From the 1987 National Conference
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , Winter 1987 , pp. 707 - 742
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1987

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References

1 See the Drakakis “Introduction” to Alternative Shakespeare.

2 In keeping with the concomitantly emerging ideology of the closed nuclear family, English literature begins to feature a new kind of villain in the Renaissance—the bastard, who is almost always male and whose “illegitimacy” is coded as a threat not only to the boundaries of family but to the sanctity of the state. When the legal concept of branding a bastard child as “illegitimate” emerges—a terminology which apparently enters the language around the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century—it creates a positive and negative verbal coding which, by segregating children born outside the patriarchal family unit from those “legitimate” within it, serves to protect the self-reproducing capacity of patriarchy. The most famous disquisition on this system of verbal stigmatization to protect social privilege through its “Fine word, ‘legitimate!’ ” is, of course, the one spoken directly to the audience in the opening lines of King Lear's second scene by Edmund, the play's bastard son/tragic villain. See also Phyllis Rackin's essay, “Anti-Historians,” for commentary on Shakespeare's history plays and the relationship of wifehood, motherhood, and bastardy to the construction of patriarchy.

3 Woodbridge, , Women and the English Renaissance, p. 2.Google Scholar Woodbridge's point that “the relationship between literature and life is a very slippery subject,” and that there may well be “cases where the very prominence of a theme in literature argues against its being a representation of real life” (3), leads her ultimately to posit a more debatable thesis. Working with a vast amount of material from the Renaissance debate over the nature of women, Woodbridge concludes that the misogynistic tirades of Renaissance literature belong to a literary convention, not to real life, and they therefore cannot finally be seen as representing either the author's or the culture's attitudes toward women.

4 Hill, “Sex, Marriage, and the Family,” p. 450.

5 My apologies for any names that have been overlooked in listing this group that I have defined as the first generation of American feminist Shakespeareans. While it is an accurate generalization to say that the majority were psychoanalytic critics, there are, of course, exceptions—notably, Phyllis Rackin and Linda Woodbridge (Fitz).

6 Gardiner, “Mind Mother,” p. 114.

7 In opposition to Annette Kolodny's belief that a “playful pluralism” was “the only critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women's movement,” Elaine Showalter first coined and proclaimed the “gynocritical” position as the direction in which feminism should theorize itself (“Feminist Criticism,” p. 112ff.). Feminist criticism has since moved back more toward a balance that includes an androcentric pole of male writers, as well.

8 In addition to recent collections edited by Mary Beth Rose and Margaret Hannay, for recent scholarship on women writers see English Literary Renaissance, 14 (Autumn, 1984) for a special issue on Women in the Renaissance. The issue includes Elizabeth H. Hageman and Josephine A. Roberts’ bibliography of recent studies in the field.

9 British Marxist-feminist (or perhaps, feminist-Marxist) Catherine Belsey's work in Renaissance drama, however, does seem implicitly to compel this kind of reconsideration of traditional Marxist categories; likewise, Jacqueline Rose's work in drama and film should be mentioned. Of all the various British academic disciplines, film studies seems to be the one area where there is a consistent focus on revising Marxism to make it accommodate rather than continue to ignore feminist concerns.

10 Under continual external pressure from the methodological push going on throughout the literary discipline, advocacy within feminism for an articulated methodology seems of late to have gained support. There is also, however, a well articulated opposition from highly respected voices such as Annette Kolodny's (see Showalter, pp. 10-14). For a broader look at the issues that particularly effect Shakespearean feminism, see Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Shakespearean scholars Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. See especially Greene and Kahn on the social construction of woman; Adrienne Munich on locating a relationship not already foreclosed between a male author and feminist readers; Cora Kaplan on subjectivity, class, and Marxist/Socialist politics; Ann Rosalind Jones on the new French feminism; and Judith Kegan Gardiner on psychoanalysis and feminism.

11 On Renaissance marriage ritual, see Boose, “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.”

12 McLuskie, p. 106.

13 Erickson, p. 171.

14 McLuskie, pp. 97, 98, 106.

15 Two important collections, Alternative Shakespeares (ed. Drakakis) and Political Shakespeare (eds. Dollimore and Sinfield) have come from British Marxist scholars in the past two years, and Political Shakespeare II is apparently underway. What defines the organizing principle underlying these British collections is what differentiates them from the typical American anthology; the organizational distinction itself recapitulates that of the mainline political allegiances of literary scholars within the two academic institutions. The liberal politics of American academia tend to result in generally pluralistic collections in which the essays share the topic under consideration but not necessarily any conscious, coherent, or identifiably political viewpoint on it. What marks these new British Shakespeare collections is the reader's awareness of the shared political perspective from which the essays all speak.

16 Because the (widely accepted) dynamics articulated by Mulvey's 1975 essay would leave no explanation for female pleasure other than masochism, her work has inspired an intense and continuing effort in film studies to theorize the female spectator, including a number of Mulvey's subsequent thoughts in interviews and other commentaries. The theories that this topic has elicited are richly various and too numerous to catalogue. See, however, the British film journal Screen for a number of such responses and further references, plus see also the work of American film scholars E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane. All of this work in film does have a particular relevance to considerations of gender and stage representation, as McLuskie is perceptively aware. Given the different media considerations, however, the applicability of transferred ideas seems to me to be less direct.

17 From a paper delivered by Neely at a CUNY Graduate Center conference on “Shakespeare and the New Politics” (March 28, 1987). In her critique of new historicism, Neely likewise notes the point I later make concerning the patriarchal, authoritarian nature of the invariably male discourses that new historicists recurrently select as the definitive lens through which to read Shakespeare.

18 The selected and edited papers from this Berlin seminar will appear in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by seminar organizers Jean E. Howard and Marion O'Connor, forthcoming at Methuen. It was not, however, only (or perhaps primarily) during the Howard seminar on Shakespeare and ideology that conflict between feminism and new historicism emerged as the explosive subject in Berlin; apparently such conflict became almost the sub-topic of participant exchanges at the seminar on “Gender and Power in Shakespeare” that was co-chaired by Carol Thomas Neely and Lisa Jardine.

19 Cohen's paper will appear in the forthcoming Howard and O'Connor volume.

20 Stallybrass “Patriarchal Territories,” p. 125.

21 Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” p. 52.

22 Edward Pechter's analysis of “New Historicism and its Discontents” likewise notes that although a central premise of new historicism is to grant literary and cultural knowledge an equal and interanimating status, the practice is “a long way from the mutually generative interpretation of culture and text … the text is said to be produced by its ideological and historical situation; it is unambiguously dependent, while the culture is unambiguously determining” (p. 293). Pechter's assessment of the premises, strategies, and contradictions of new historicism is generally quite incisive. In analyzing new historicist politics, however, he is led by his own conservative perspective to render more unto Marx than Marx is probably owed. When he is led for the same reasons to assume some kind of implicit alliance among all methodologies within the general category of the “left-liberal academic community, for whom … feminism [is] an article of faith” (299), his assumptions prevent him from noting the actual distance that new historicism has been stepping off in moves that seem like an attempt to define itself away from feminism.

23 Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions” pp. 118, 134.

24 In the Introduction to Shakespeare Reproduced (forthcoming), Jean E. Howard defines this movement away from the psychoanalytical and toward the historical as responding to “the necessity to historicize gender constructions if one wishes to escape the oppressive notion of a universal human nature, or, worse, of an eternal feminine.” David Scott Kastan, in his Introduction to the Shakespeare Association of America seminar, “Shakespeare and the New Feminisms” (March, 1987), similarly sees the move as a means by which feminism can “deny that gender distinctions are fixed outside of human construction and control, and … [as] a means of imagining alternatives to our own structures of social relations.” At the CUNY conference on “Shakespeare and the New Politics,” however, Carol Thomas Neely suggests that completely abandoning the claim of subjectivity in exchange for a model in which gender is construed to be entirely an ideological product of a historically specific culture may create as many problems for feminist methodology as it resolves. Noting American liberal feminism's reluctance to deny all subjectivity or identity that is not the construct of ideology, she explains: “feminists have assumed some area of femaleness not strictly biological but not utterly inscribed by patriarchal ideology which makes possible female discourse, a women's literary history, a feminist critique which can do more than lament its own inevitable suppression.”

25 Pechter, p. 301.