James O’Rourke’s work attempts to refute the largely New Historicist notion of an “epistemic gap” between Shakespeare’s world and our own (3). The work of critics like Stephen Greenblatt and David Kastan, O’Rourke finds, insists on a nigh insuperable gulf between early modern and contemporary realms of experience. This gap renders any view of Shakespeare as an “active … interrogator” of his own culture meaningless, because as New Historicism understands it, “the early moderns … are incapable of resisting the power of absolutist spectacle” (9). The New Historicist version of early modern poetics, according to O’Rourke, sees the theater as largely Aristotelian, presenting a sublime aesthetics that can finally only reinscribe dominant power structures.
Shakespeare’s theater, O’Rourke avers, has more in common with Brechtian episches Theater, a theater designed to change the world, than with the Aristotelian sublime. His chapters combine local readings and nuanced theoretical insights — largely Marxian and Freudian — with attentive close readings to suggest the myriad ways in which Shakespeare’s theater not only resists but also revises dominant political and cultural structures. O’Rourke sees a Shakespeare who is not merely immersed in his culture, but actively reshaping it. Both O’Rourke’s critiques of New Historicism and his readings of various plays present a powerful perspective on Shakespeare’s work, which — according to the dictates of O’Rourke’s presentism — allows for a Shakespeare who is still in many respects our contemporary.
The first chapter finds disruptive potential in The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Each of these comedies leaves us with uncertainties instead of the generic promise of deserved good fortune. The effects of the unstable genders of female roles performed by boys are such that erotic hierarchies in these plays are disturbed. The tension between Katherine and Petruchio is not dissolved by her final speech, and Ganymede and Viola-Cesario-Sebastian keep alive a desire that is other than heterosexual.
O’Rourke’s local readings, especially in the last example of Twelfth Night, attempt also to undo the Foucault–Alan Bray hypothesis that in order for a phenomenon to be legible at the level of culture it must also have a conceptual existence. If Twelfth Night was written, as has been claimed, for the revels of the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court wherein homosocial patronage bonds sometimes blurred with the bonds of homosexual desire, then Shakespeare’s original audience could have conceived of a homosexual desire for which there was not yet a category (56). This desire, which modern audiences infer so readily in the play, would not then be a contemporary imposition, but an emergent phenomenon that Shakespeare’s play activates without naming.
Shakespeare’s episches Theater, aruges O’Rourke, also refuses the easy identification of audience member with protagonist. Identification as a structure of Aristotelian poetics requires catharsis, so that audience members can move beyond the events of tragedy. O’Rourke argues, however, that Shakespeare’s audience would have identified with none of the characters of The Merchant of Venice. Merchant’s Christians are not simply generic Christians but Italian Catholics whom English Protestants regularly called infidels (63). Therefore, instead of identifying with and affirming the values of the play’s Christians, according to O’Rourke, Shakespeare’s audience would have reviled Antonio as much as a contemporary audience does. The effects of the play are not cathartic. Shylock’s vitriol and his extreme punishment occasion real ethical inquiry, an interrogation that the audience carries with them out of the theater.
Perhaps O’Rourke’s strongest chapter is on King Lear. In Lear O’Rourke sees the confrontation between Catholic pre-Reformation and Protestant artes moriendi. The former stressed confronting the real terrors of death in order to make good moral decisions, while the latter allowed the moriens to ignore those terrors because he was surely passing to a better life. Lear’s attempt to retain something from his kingdom and from his children is a failure to confront the reality of death — that it is a zero-sum game. Cordelia’s “nothing” is an acknowledgment of death’s stark reality.
O’Rourke’s presentist methodology breaks down the epistemic barriers erected by New Historicism. His presentism insists that the resonances between early modern and contemporary concerns are more than ahistorical impositions on the past, and that Shakespeare’s theater does indeed still speak to us.
