Today, the Bard is communal: by this moment in history, it has become abundantly clear that Shakespeare does not belong to any one person, group, ideology, culture, or creed. In fact, we are hard pressed to define the boundaries between “our” Shakespeare and “their” Shakespeare: who are “we,” after all, who are “they,” and where does the Bard begin and end for anyone? Both Denise Albanese's Extramural Shakespeare and Paul Raffield's Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law clearly exhibit this principle, albeit at different points in history.
Albanese's primary thesis in Extramural Shakespeare is that in the United States, Shakespeare can no longer be confined within the walls of upper-class institutions of learning, and that efforts to do so constitute the continuation of a counterproductive cultural fallacy. To prove this point, Albanese situates Shakespeare as produced by, and belonging to, contemporary American culture. Douglas Lanier paved the way for this work in Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002), in which he argues that Shakespeare has every right to a place in contemporary popular culture, as he was originally a people's poet. Moreover, Lanier claims that modern representations of Shakespeare are worthy of examination in their own right—just as worthy (perhaps) as Shakespeare's originals. In addition to Lanier's work, many of the performance pieces Albanese analyses (e.g., the documentaries Shakespeare behind Bars and Looking for Richard) are examined through a similar lens by Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon Books, 2008).
What Albanese adds to the argument is the elaboration of a long-assumed but never before explicitly established link between “Shakespeare the classical playwright” and “Shakespeare the popular contemporary icon.” How does this link occur? What is its history and importance? How does “Shakespeare, the contemporary American playwright” come to be, and how can he be used to further our—and, more important, our students'—understanding of the playwright and his work? Using case studies as well as a firm grounding in factual history, Albanese endeavors to answer these questions.
Albanese begins her exploration by tracing a recent history of elitism and antielitist discourse within popular culture, especially as these pertain to the academy; her book's first chapter is “Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium: American Culture, ‘Elites,’ the Academy—and Beyond.” This sets the stage for her second chapter, “Pacino's Cliffs Notes: Looking for Richard's ‘Public’ Shakespeare,” an inductive examination of Shakespeare in contemporary culture as represented by Al Pacino's 1996 documentary film. Albanese argues that by taking Shakespeare to New York City's streets, Pacino attempts (only quasi-successfully) to bridge the high-culture–low-culture gap inherent in discourse surrounding contemporary popular Shakespeare. Albanese situates Looking for Richard as a paradigm of this issue and analyzes the film through this lens. In her more straightforward third chapter, “Shakespeare Goes to School,” Albanese examines the history of Shakespeare within the American school system and how the Bard came to be the “locus of pedagogical experience for Americans” (67). She then launches into an examination of Shakespeare in popular film in her fourth chapter, “The Shakespeare Film, the Market, and the Americanization of Culture.” She examines a broad range of so-called Shakes-films, settling into deep analyses of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (Castle Rock, 1996) and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet (Twentieth Century Fox, 1996). While these films do exemplify the extreme ends of the Shakes-film spectrum, they are curious choices for Albanese in that neither film can be classified as purely “American,” since both Luhrmann and Branagh are non-American directors. Albanese's final chapter, “Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter,” examines the representation of prison Shakespeare programs in episode 218 of the radio show This American Life (Chicago Public Media, 2002) and in the documentary Shakespeare behind Bars (Philomath Films, 2005). Albanese employs these two pieces as tangible examples of the legitimacy and usefulness of her preestablished concept of a “public Shakespeare.” She concludes her volume with the statement that it is not Shakespeare per se that should be taught to the average individual, but rather a love of Shakespeare. Since, as she argues, general dislike of Shakespeare is a culturally propagated state, by examining the culture itself academics can work to understand this state and how it can be changed.
Though her book is divided into easy-to-digest thematic chapters, there is nothing easy to digest about Albanese's style. She has an affinity for thick prose that frequently works to obscure her meaning rather than enlighten it. For an author so intent on liberating Shakespeare for the masses, Albanese shows occasional signs of an almost dangerous level of embroilment in academic jargon. For example, phraseology such as “dominant Shakespearean formations apparently maintain their hegemony by inertia, since their propositional and ideological content remains unaffected by the emergence of other spheres of cultural production” (20) is not uncommon throughout the work. Still, the brave reader will find real usefulness in the application of Albanese's principles, and it is my belief that this manner of work is extremely important to scholars, teachers, and theatre practitioners if we are to propagate a societal appreciation and understanding of Shakespeare and his canon.
As though to demonstrate my point, Paul Raffield's Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution can almost be called a historic application of Albanese's work, as Raffield also endeavors to take Shakespeare out of the playhouse. Although his primary focus is on the idea of Shakespeare's theatre as actively participating in Elizabethan law, he also provides a contemporary reflection on that law. The study of law in and around Shakespeare is an old one in which we have seen a recent resurgence of interest (e.g., see Jordan and Cunningham's anthology The Law in Shakespeare [Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], Bailey's “Shylock and the Slaves: Owing and Owning in The Merchant of Venice” [Shakespeare Quarterly, 2011], and Gurr's “Venues on the Verges: London's Theater Government between 1594 and 1614” [Shakespeare Quarterly, 2010]). Raffield's volume thus forms part of a current trend of law specialists investigating the Bard.
Raffield's greatest strength is his fastidious eye for legal detail, no doubt owing to his background as a law academic; however, in his text Shakespeare's plays take a backseat to the legal anecdotes he has included (all of which are meticulously documented). While there is no fault in this manner of work, it does at times make Raffield's volume seem rambling. The historic incidents he describes are ultimately culturally enlightening (and sometimes downright entertaining); however, as they accumulate, one often loses sight of Shakespeare.
Each of Raffield's six chapters is devoted to a different play and to its law-minded motifs: Chapter 1 is “‘Terras Astraea reliquit’: Titus Andronicus and the Flight of Justice”; 2, “The Comedy of Errors and the Meaning of Contract”; 3, “Reflections on the Art of Kingship: Richard II and the Subject of Law”; 4, “The Poetic Imagination, Antique Fables, and the Dream of Law,” regarding A Midsummer Night's Dream; 5, “The Ancient Constitution, Common Law and the Idyll of Albion: Law and Lawyers in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2”; and 6, “The Congregation of the Mighty: The Juridical State and the Measure of Justice,” which deals with Measure for Measure. Raffield begins each chapter with a brief discussion of the play in question and its legal themes, and then proceeds into law-centered sketches relatively contemporary to the play's writing and performance that illuminate these themes. Though this approach seems solid, Raffield's enthusiasm for legal scholarship often results in a failure to return to the play at hand. This creates great gaps between anecdotes and plays, leaving the reader to forge connections between the two without authorial assistance. Raffield's volume will likely prove more useful to individuals looking for information on Elizabethan legal practices than to individuals looking for explicit Shakespeare scholarship.
What Raffield does do—very effectively—is establish that Shakespeare's theatre is saturated with law. He paints a picture of a world in which theatre was an extremely powerful political force, a force made for (and often by) individuals educated in the law and legal matters. In doing so, Raffield also establishes the sociopolitical importance of his own work; that is, he demonstrates both why a political Shakespeare is representative of early modern England and thereby why a political Shakespeare should be represented today.
Whether examining “Our Willy, American Icon,” or “William Shakesper, Elizabethan Poet and Playwright,” scholars seem to agree that Shakespeare cannot be confined to the “wooden O” of the theatre. If we are to uncover the full implications and potential of his work, we must be willing to take pages from Albanese and Raffield. Both Extramural Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution indicate that Shakespeare, perhaps now more than ever, benefits most from being a free-range playwright.
