Shakespeare: the apex predator
EMMA SMITH
It is regularly suggested in the press that there should be a moratorium on Shakespeare productions, usually from people who've seen a particularly dull one, or from playwrights whose works aren't being staged because Shakespeare is hogging the schedules. Posed opinion pieces by radical pedagogues or disenchanted actors about why we should not teach Shakespeare in schools are the inevitable corollary of his unique brand recognition. But even these gestures of disavowal are expressed in the very terms they seek to banish, as in the paradoxical Guardian headline: "Save us from a winter of discontent – ban the Bard". Asking whether we over-privilege Shakespeare's works actually often turns out to be, consciously or not, another way of talking more about Shakespeare: "that's enough about me – what do you think of me?".
Apparent attempts to decentre Shakespeare are thus often self-defeating. When, for example, English students at the University of Pennsylvania agitated for a portrait of Audre Lorde instead of Shakespeare in their departmental corridor, it was Shakespeare's name that got the story into the headlines, as it was when an Arizona state law appeared to include The Tempest in a ban on the teaching of ethnic studies in school. New theories about the extent of Shakespeare's collaborative work appear to chip away at the solitary-genius monolith, but in fact they gain their intellectual and institutional traction from our very investment in that monolith. Adaptations similarly reinforce Shakespeare's dominance even as they attempt to overwrite his social and linguistic conventions. Arguments about the claims of other Renaissance writers to our theatrical and critical attention often do this with reference to a standard set by Shakespeare: for the editors of the landmark collected edition of Thomas Middleton's works, for example, his appeal was that of "our other Shakespeare"; an academic project on early Elizabethan theatre is called "Before Shakespeare"; a likeable Twitter feed retweets theatrical and academic announcements with Shakespeare's name replaced by that of Fletcher, his collaborator and successor. Shakespeare's prevalence is such that debates about cultural value are already Shakespeare-shaped. Do we privilege Shakespeare above other writers? Self-evidently and self-fulfillingly so.
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Downgrading Shakespeare in theatre repertoires and school curricula and university tenure and politicians' rhetoric is thus probably not feasible. That's not to underestimate the cultural, theatrical and educational disadvantages of Shakespeare-centrism. That Shakespeare may be the only pre-twentieth-century author read in schools is no less problematic than the habitual hyperbole about Shakespeare in academic writing. Recent criticism conjures a Shakespeare who is preternaturally well-read as well as intellectually and emotionally wide-ranging, and philosophically and technically astute. Shakespeare's works groan under this bardolatrous hermeneutic burden. Popular suggestions of bardicide resonate with the perverse logic of the so-called authorship controversy. Both are gestures of iconoclastic resistance to the impossible ethical gravity with which we have charged these texts and, in particular, this author.
There are, of course, cultural compensations for our reckless over-investment. Shakespeare's peculiar status enables – necessitates – such a range of approaches that even as it restricts the field, it also enlarges it. At Oxford, where I teach, the apparently conservative prominence of Shakespeare as, along with Chaucer, the only compulsory author in the undergraduate curriculum, is often implicitly ironized by the kinds of work students do on his canon. Their work on Shakespeare is more likely than other parts of their Eng Lit course to engage with contextual sources from Rowe to rap, with critics and critical assumptions from Bradley to Butler, and with a global reach from Kurosawa to Kiev. The number of productions, reworkings and critical engagements from every disciplinary perspective gives Shakespeare studies a particular, overwhelming intellectual variety.
This is not, or not only, a modern version of Coleridge's "myriad-minded Shakespeare", but it does acknowledge that Shakespeare studies have begun to reflect on the conditions and consequences of their own cultural supremacy. The danger is that such self-consciousness can become complacent narcissism: ("that's enough about me"). Rather like the Globe's world tour of Hamlet, Shakespeare studies can tend to a self-congratulatory intellectual tourism masquerading as radically generous border-crossing. But in our better moments, we can recognize it – and of course that self-consciousness is itself grist to the Shakespearean mill. Like Plato's or Derrida's pharmakon, Shakespeare is both disease and cure; perhaps it all depends, as Leontes recognizes, on whether we have seen the spider in the cup before, or after, we drink.
Or perhaps another animal image is better suited. In the great food chain of being, Shakespeare is the apex predator in a cultural ecosystem where he has no rivals, only prey. The literary rabbits and deer and mice need to watch out. But the ecological model actually requires such a dominant figure – a keystone species – for the healthy functioning of the whole system. Alpha predators keep other animals in check, an effect that cascades down to encourage biodiversity and maintain the conditions for a flourishing ecology. Perhaps if we didn't have Shakespeare, we'd be making plans to reintroduce him.
Emma Smith teaches English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her book Shakespeare's First Folio was published last year.
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