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Shakespeare after Theory

Shakespeare after TheoryDavid Scott Kastan. New York: Routledge, 1999.

 

Theory is dead—if the title is the message of David Scott Kastan, English professor at Columbia University, distinguished critic and editor, anthologizer of contemporary criticism, and prominent proponent and practitioner of New Historicism. If so, this twenty-odd-year-old orthodoxy, which claims theory as its major achievement, is also dead, or so Kastan seems to pronounce it. Although the title purports to bury, not to praise, New Historicism, his book really offers apologies and its own example as a way of extending its life. Despite its moribund condition, it survives. Long live theory.

Because New Historicists rule English departments and professional organizations, and not yet from the grave, Kastan’s book is premature as obituary, but timely as resume. It is useful as a recapitulation of the fundamental principles and practices of New Historicism, and as a prompt for important questions about politics in literary criticism, and history and theory in its work. Kastan’s positions on these issues are far more interesting and, in their way, valuable, than anything which he has to say about Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed, they are helpful because they so well reflect, even as they perpetuate, the difficulties which have beset this orthodoxy from its start. His book is better at disclosing the mortal symptoms of New Historicism than at diagnosing its ailments or prescribing remedies.

Born to parents in conflict with each other, New Historicism accepted and rejected features from both, but never established an integrated self-concept. From structuralism, it accepted cultural relativism and its attack on the canon of Western literature, but rejected its value-corrosiveness; from deconstructionism, it accepted linguistic indeterminism and its attack on the aesthetic interpretations of New Criticism, but rejected its semantic nihilism. Finally, it repudiated in all three—structuralism, deconstructionism, New Criticism—a lack of commitment to reforming current social problems and thereby claimed “the moral authority of a committed politics” (p. 27). The resulting collection of differing, even diverging, impulses is New Historicism.

What binds this unstable assortment of impulses together, apart from a dyspeptic response to imperfections in society, is an interest in, and a modicum of power to effect, reform. To New Historicists, the root of all evil is the unequal distribution of power in society, and literature is one form of its cultural expression, an expression often complicated by cross-currents of assertion or subversion. The only resources readily available to English professors committed to politics are literature and the opportunities provided in and by academe to study and teach it for political purposes. They use the concepts of power in itself and in its various guises—the best known being gender, race, and class—as templates in analyzing and assessing literature; their purpose is to affect political thought and behavior. So these fundamental convictions—that literature is inherently political, and reflects or reinforces an unfair distribution of power; and that English professors properly must “do theory” by exposing works of literature as political and implicating writers in the political—these dogmas constitute what New Historicism calls “theory.” Although New Historicists differ on agendas or priorities, they concur on one basic principle: only as people recognize and understand the pervasive presence and adverse effects of the unequal distribution of power within a given society can they work with any hope of making it an egalitarian and democratic one. To this end, New Historicism regards “theory itself as a significant political practice, emancipatory and efficacious” (p. 27). It presumes, not only to a better approach to literary criticism, but also to loftier morals and superior politics.

So New Historicists adopted a view of literature, approved a “theory” and practice of literary criticism, and advocated a proselytizing role for scholars in their research and teachers in their pedagogy—each of which is political, whether avowedly or covertly. In thus breaking with the past, they challenged the long-standing assumptions of literary study and created a controversy which has lasted to this day. Those opposing New Historicism, for whatever reason, agree on one point: inserting a radical or systemic politics into the study and teaching of literature, and into the conduct of college or university life, is detrimental to traditional—and most would argue, basic—values in higher education and democratic society. However greatly elaborated or extended in their implications, other criticisms are contingent on this one.

Such criticism of the “theory” and practice of New Historicism is casting the entire enterprise into doubt and causing dismay and disarray within the ranks. New Historicists, who accuse prior literary critics of complicity, witting or not, in an elitist white male hegemony in literature, now find themselves exposed as more thoroughly biased, even dishonest, by virtue of their commitment to political ends at the expense of scholarly means. As they have repudiated the work of others for not being political, so others will repudiate theirs for being political. Using their work requires accepting their politics; rejecting it consigns it to a long and dusty shelf-life. New Historicism is losing professional credibility, and New Historicists, personal respect in all quarters but their own. Disgrace, long before retirement, is a fate which should surprise no one, New Historicists presumably least of all, for it awaits those who choose, acquire, and then use power for narrowly partisan purposes, even in the name of egalitarianism and democracy.

Seeking a way to extricate themselves from an excruciating situation, New Historicists face the challenge of making a change without appearing to surrender their moral pretensions or political principles. It is hard to be less or partly political after insisting that all is political. Thus, many desire to have it both ways at once: declare victory and retreat. Kastan perfectly catches this ambivalence in his title, ingenious as well as disingenuous in its ambiguity: “after” as “later than” and either “distinct from” or “according to.” Like others, he is torn between fidelity to “theory” and desertion to a yet-unknown cause—a change made difficult by the shame of it all. In the end, although he seems to desert New Historicism in response to ever more widespread and frequent criticism, Kastan remains loyal to it in every essential way in his treatment of Shakespeare.

The tension created by these cross-purposes accounts for the techniques of his  Kastan responds to opposition by preaching to his choir, more by demonizing critics and anathematizing criticism than by adducing evidence and advancing arguments in rebuttal. On three issues—New Historicism as political, historical, theoretical—he evades or elides what he can, admits but downplays what he must, and hopes for the best. All in all, his response to criticism is partisan, tendentious, and unsavory. Then, in his work, he continues to do pretty much according to theory as he has done.

Notwithstanding the difficulties in New Historicism—its confusions, contradictions, and scholarly defects—Kastan attempts to defend its colors and advance its cause. His general approach to critics is attack. Thus, critics’ “attacks on theory” are “conservative” (p. 24) and their “critique of theory” “right-wing” (p.25). Kastan’s labeling divides them from us, presumably, and the bifurcation leads to a double standard—critics have a “political agenda” (bad), but New Historicists have “committed politics” (good)—and to oversimplification. By citing a few conclusory general statements about the death of literature and the demise of democratic society, Kastan tacitly denies that critics start with a paramount objection to power as an essential analytical factor in literary criticism, have other objections following from it, and range across the spectrum of political and non-political perspectives. Critics themselves are emotionally and morally unsteady. They are “apoplectic,” “anxious,” or “hysterical” (p. 24) in their articulations of academic, cultural, or political apocalypse. Their equating theory with an “attack on democratic traditions and rationality itself is, for the most part, disingenuous and inaccurate, masking a political agenda that is uncomfortable with theory’s awareness of and emphasis on the political interests that literature can and does serve” (p. 25). He insinuates as a conclusion the very subject of controversy. He offers not a shred of evidence or argument to support these assertions and allegations, and he belies them with a subtle hedge; the “most part” is not the whole. He omits the rest, presumably honest and accurate, so that we do not know what it is or what share of the whole it is. He forces readers to take his word by denying them the means to judge for themselves.

Kastan addresses the issue of the political nature of New Historicism in two ways. He acknowledges theoretical and practical difficulties, but ignores the consequences. First, he undermines “one main pillar of theory’s claim to political consequence” by arguing that if all motivated or subjective statements are “political acts,” then none of them is, for the distinction which the word “political” would make between what is and is not political cannot be made. I agree. But a point of this importance requires more than an assertion; it requires an argument to draw a line between statements which are and are not political acts, to define the limits of “theory” as guidance for future work. Since his book observes no such distinction, the statement seems a rhetorical ruse. Second, he regrets, not the impropriety of inserting politics into literature, but the isolation of “literary theory…from the more significant scenes of political action” (p. 27). That is, the principle is fine, the implementation, ineffectual. This response is something less than the whole truth because research and teaching can and often do have powerful effects, usually, however, not immediate ones, but no less powerful for being delayed.

The criticism that New Historicism is not historical according to the standards of historical research Kastan answers with a paradox counter-claiming successful work, namely, that “the most powerful and productive recent critical models of a historical engagement with Shakespeare…have been regularly charged with exactly the narcissism that history should counter. Their historical readings seem to some too overtly self-interested to be compelling as historical accounts, significant more as records of our present needs and anxieties than as reconstructions of those of Shakespeare’s time” (p.17). It is highly unusual for scholarly works purporting to take a historical approach to be “regularly charged,” rightly or wrongly, with doing nothing of the sort. His chapter “Are We Being Interdisciplinary Yet,” if read interstitially, indicates many reasons why historians have no use for New Historicism. Critics charge that New Historicists distort or disregard content or context, play fast and loose with historical data, and advance political agendas. Kastan transforms these charges into allegations of personal shortcomings—narcissism or self-interest—to which any critic is liable. The implied defense against this charge—no one can help it; everyone does it—is none at all. Nor is it a defense that the “theoretical sophistication” of New Historicists “forces them to acknowledge” that critics’ present interests influence their approach to the past, but it is a slur to claim that “older historicisms” pretended otherwise (p. 17), a tacit claim to moral superiority by contrasting the bad, old guys and the good, new guys. The validity of the real charge of not taking a historical approach Kastan tacitly admits when he writes that New Historicists “rarely paid much attention to the specific material and institutional conditions of the discursive exchanges it has explored” (p. 18)—which means that they were doing something else.

The really big conceptual question about New Historicism is what exactly does it mean by “theory.” Kastan’s scattered remarks do not amount to the discussion required, not only by his subject, but also by its importance to New Historicism. Indeed, they seem made to serve rhetorical more than theoretical purposes; regardless, they disclose total confusion and half truths about some of the most basic concepts in New Historicist critical discussion: theory, facts, paradigm, model.

In Kastan, theory is a concept of variable significance. He distinguishes “theory” in two ways, in number (singular or plural) and in kind (institutional or intellectual). But the distinctions which he draws to reproach critics seem mainly to confuse him. It is one thing to reproach critics for treating “theory” as “institutionally” “singular” (p. 26), an “umbrella term for the perceived danger, namely, a category of intellectual interest under which diverse and often contradictory discourses have been homogenized and demonized” (p. 24); and not as “intellectually” “plural” (p. 26). It is another to use the term inconsistently. First, he implies its intellectual singularity when he says that if New Historicism “can be understood as a discrete and coherent critical practice, I do not think that it is what I am doing here” (pp. 17-18). Then, as I elaborate below, he asserts its intellectual plurality as well as its institutional singularity. Critics of all stripes have contested both “theory” plural, in kinds, and “theory” singular, in its essential interest in power. They use the term no differently from Kastan and other New Historicists, who use “theory” to refer to the central thrust of their work, as he does in his book and chapter titles.

Kastan’s great gaff is defining “theory” as “a heterogeneous collocation of paradigms and interests that more or less comfortably cohabit under the same institutional roof but that more or often than not are intellectually contradictory and incompatible” (p. 26). He thus defines, not theory, but a department of English professors with related interests, an “institutional roof” replacing an “umbrella.” If not, his definition raises a different question: what exactly is Kastan talking about? For one or more “paradigms,” not to mention one or more “interests,” do not one or more theories make. A theory explains data which exist independent of it, and the relevant data can thereby confirm or confute it; a paradigm, through its constitutive rules, establishes the relationship between the theory and the data; and interests have absolutely nothing to do with it, that is, in any philosophic or scientific sense of the terms. The idea that a theory is a collection of different and often disagreeing discourses unified institutionally rather than intellectually is simply bizarre. In this context, these packages of paradigms and interests resemble nothing so much as publications, with “the most powerful and productive recent critical models” held up as examples of work approved by powerful practitioners in the field. The inconsistencies on “theory” throughout his book reveals either an unlikely ignorance of what the word means in educated discourse or the New Historicist use of the word to disguise “political practice” as literary theory and to apply it as an honorific, to impress others with the high seriousness of a discussion without actually demonstrating that it is merited. What Kastan’s “theories” amount to is little more than opinions pretending to be profound and important.

In all of this, New Historicists reveal little of the temperament, informed opinion, and mature judgment expected of scholars. They are too happy and almost always wrong to claim credit for upending the past, for making discoveries overlooked and acknowledgments avoided, and for accepting as realities their Anglo-Euro-centric ideas about a multi-cultural world order. Worse, they are too eager to make the standard attack, variously targeted, on dead white men or anything which smacks of racism, sexism, or elitism. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain Kastan’s remarks on the demise of “the Western canon of elite literature” which “speaks neither to nor for most of the world’s people; I am sad to say, it speaks neither to nor for most people in North America or in Europe. The forms of high culture are increasingly alien and inaccessible to their lives, and the insistent claims made for the universality of the great books are belied by the limited audience they find” (p. 25). The situation is far more complicated than Kastan suggests and, indeed, his is conflicted, as he finds himself caught between facts and “theory.”

It is a fact—Kastan is right—that many, perhaps most, people at home as well as abroad, in our culture or theirs, believe past literature to be irrelevant to their lives. But that fact means nothing like his implication. It means that “most of the world’s people” are poorly educated; they live in countries which have few or deficient educational opportunities or actively discourage the multi-culturalism which we urge on ourselves. Or they have ignorant, incompetent, or indifferent teachers. For it is a fact of cross-cultural experience that almost any well-taught student or well-read adult can discover something of appeal in Shakespeare; the evidence is the international reputation and readership of, and audience for, this English writer and his plays above all others.

Kastan implies a belief that literature is either culturally congruent with the lives which people lead or “alien and inaccessible” to them. Thus, he prefers the cultural insularity of a conformity to the ordinary and familiar as an alternative to a bogus “universality” imputed to “the great books.” But he garbles the ideas involved here and slides into contradiction with either New Historicist principle or himself. First, Kastan is wrong about a presumed fact; if not, he would be wrong about a politically correct position. Literature need not be culturally universal in order to be universally relevant; differences in literary representations are often more important than similarities as a means of enlarging readers’ moral or social imagination. Otherwise, the argument for an inclusive, multi-cultural canon and curriculum here at home as an antidote to racism, sexism, and elitism collapses. Second, his encomium on Shakespeare erodes his anti-universalist position. Kastan asserts, obviously as praise, that Shakespeare’s “engagement with the world is the most compelling record we have of the world’s struggle for meaning and value” (p. 16). He offers no support for this cross-cultural judgment, which contradicts the New Historicist principle of cultural relativism and, in its terms, reverts to elitism. But it implies a culture-free, thus universal, basis for cross-cultural literary analysis. Clearly, Shakespeare must be taught, and almost as clearly, writers whose engagement is almost as compelling should almost certainly be taught, and so on down to those whose writing escapes rather than engages the world. Kastan dislikes “high culture” because it is elitist, that is, enjoys the social sanction of the elites. But he appears not to recognize that, unlike race or gender, high culture extends and is accessible to anyone who wishes to partake of it. In this sense, it affirms both excellence and equality without sacrificing the one to the other. One explanation is that Kastan makes these anti-thetical statements at different places to serve different tactical purposes. Another is that he is conflicted between theory-based views which require his repudiation of “great books” and all which they suggest of hegemony and elitism, and his appreciation of Shakespeare and, by extension, the whole spectrum of writers and their works in the Western tradition. Kastan should have acknowledged and perhaps addressed these issues; at the very least, he should have offered a consistent, not a confused and contradictory, analysis. Otherwise, why have Shakespeare after theory, much less Shakespeare after Theory?

Kastan skirts the central criticism of New Historicism for using a theory with political power as its essential and predominant analytical construct, and criticizes it for being excessively theoretical and insufficiently empirical. Without modifying theory, Kastan means to add facts: “we must begin to respond to … significant challenges, not by producing more theory but more facts, however value-laden they will necessarily be” (p. 31). His purpose is to interpret the relevant data in ways which purport to “restore Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility: to the collaborations of the theater in which the plays were acted, to the practices of the book trade in which they were published, to the unstable political world of late Tudor and early Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by their various publics” (p 16).

According to, not distinct from, New Historicist theory, Kastan places Shakespeare’s plays in the context of their “political world,” which means, once again, that they must be read in a political context and read as political in that context. He discusses three plays—1 Henry IV, Macbeth, The Tempest—each of which has central political themes; he does not test his approach against Shakespeare’s romantic comedies or romantic tragedies (his interpretation of The Tempest more in terms of European monarchist than colonial history is his best). So what he makes clear is that he is not abandoning the New Historicist interest in power. What he does not make clear is that his prescription for what ails New Historicism is not a radical departure from, but, so he thinks, a supplemental reform of, theory. But, for all his talk about the need to ground New Historicist theory and its resulting discourses in the facts of history, no dosage can effect a remedy. As a matter of practice, history addresses its subject, not by adding to one, subtracting from the other, or balancing the two, but by interactively affecting each other; theory guides the search for, selects, shapes, and significates data from the past, and data confirm, confute, or modify the theory. Theories create expectations, not certainties, about the data. As a matter of logic, using theory to create data—reading a play to show its concern with power—does not support theory. (Finding more black birds and among them more crows cannot strengthen the thesis that all crows are black.) This method actually shields theory from disagreeable truths. Kastan’s method is the way, not of scholarship, not even of political theory, but of politics.

Kastan’s approach is no better than his method. His defining purpose to restore “Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility” errs in two ways, both important in terms of his remarks on Shakespeare as author and of his chapter on editing the texts. First, Kastan is wrong about what are the “earliest conditions.” Even if we omit Shakespeare’s intellectual and emotional resources, these “earliest conditions” are his drafts, none surviving, not surviving texts printed in his lifetime or, under the auspices of close associates, shortly thereafter. Second, and following on the first, Kastan, rather like New Critics, is wrong to rely on the “signifying surface” (pp. 28, 39) of documents alone as the sole basis of historical interpretation. Here he seems to confuse what editors do with what literary historians and literary critics do, although their enterprises overlap. Defining history by the surviving materials, not by what they represent or point to, is a rudimentary mistake in historical research.

Theory and these mistakes lead Kastan to diminish, with intermittent disclaimers or apologies, Shakespeare’s authority as author of his text and to make impossible any account of his artistry. Kastan’s approach is to look to the surviving physical evidence which discloses the effects of others on Shakespeare’s texts as they are produced in the theater and the print shop. To this end, he recites well-known and diverse, collective and consecutive, deliberate and inadvertent, interventions in the texts as many hands readied them for performance and publication. “The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today” recites familiar difficulties in understanding the transmission of Shakespeare’s texts as they evolved on stage and in print over time: additions, excisions, and substitutions; misspellings and typographic errors; and so on and so forth. Nothing is new, and all of it leads to no argument against authorial intention.

Kastan is right that editing cannot achieve one definitive text of Shakespeare’s intentions, if only because of the inevitable choice between original and final intentions if multiple texts are available. But modern editors do not aspire to such texts; most settle for all-inclusive, eclectically emended texts of every word attributed to Shakespeare. Kastan does not suggest what other kind of text should be their goal or what editorial principles should guide them. What is missing but is most important is any sense of proportion; nowhere does Kastan indicate the relative contributions of author and all others to the texts as we have them. He offers not one scintilla of evidence that diverse effects—in kind, number, or import—from diverse causes affect in any essential way an understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. No one familiar with them would think them other than the work of primarily one author. Kastan implies that the texts as we have them and as they are meaningful to us were the work of standing committees. His discussion thus indicates its goal to be, not a better understanding of Shakespeare’s place in the development of the text, but a debasing of his authority for the plays as we have them, to no evident constructive purpose.

Kastan’s view of subsequent and sequential “collaboration,” with or without Shakespeare’s participation, looks away from the composition of his plays. But it need not. If others adapted his plays to serve any number of purposes, so Shakespeare can be seen as a collaborator who adapted his sources to serve his purposes. Stressing the “signifying surface,” not authorial intent, Kastan can offer no obvious theoretical, only a quantitative, difference between others’ use of his texts and Shakespeare’s use of his sources. And instead of a general account of causes of distortion with uncertain and limited bearing on specific texts, critics can study sources, compare texts, and derive results bearing directly on his plays. The problem for New Historicism is that a careful study of Shakespeare’s sources and a close reading of his texts might restrict the range of readings and limit those which qualify as responsive primarily to the literature.

Kastan’s approach, to be of value, must be so in terms of Shakespeare’s plays. I discuss his reading of Macbeth because it would clearly indicate any departure from the many New Historicist interpretations of this play, which they take as an exemplum of the political cross-currents of the assertion and subversion of power in the literature of Shakespeare’s times. But Kastan’s interest in power dominates his reading of Macbeth as it does theirs. Kastan adduces much historical data to suggest that contemporary political discourses establish an equivalence of abuse of power between Macbeth’s usurpation by regicide to obtain the crown and Macduff’s killing of Macbeth to restore Malcolm to the throne. However, he does not show that these discourses influenced the play itself and thus repeats in his work what he purports to fault in the work of New Historicists. Adducing texts showing contemporary debate about collateral and patrilinear descent, or James’s knowledge of that debate, is beside any point if the play does not raise the issue—except the point that the play does not raise it. Macbeth nowhere says, much less implies, that he has any claim to the throne, even in response to Duncan’s surprise announcement making Malcolm his heir. Irrelevant evidence piled on irrelevant evidence makes no argument, only unnecessary reading.

Well known as Macbeth is, Kastan nevertheless distorts, misreads, or omits data in it; he offers confused analyses, advances dubious readings, and implies perverse political principles. He argues that the play is radically ambivalent on issues of power and legitimacy:

“This insistent principle of moral contrast, wonderfully unconditional and reassuring, is not stable but is unnervingly unsettled by the text’s compelling strategies of repetition and resemblance . . . If the play does produce the almost inescapable binaries of its criticism, it reveals as well that the moral hierarchy they define is achieved and sustained only by denying the radical dependence of the dominant term upon its demonized contrary” (p. 166).

Although his contemptuous dismissal of prior criticism leaves him little room for error, Kastan seems uncertain about the relationship of the elements in opposition. On the one hand, the unconditioned moral contrast is “unsettled,”—which presumably means weakened, obscured, or obliterated—by the similarities of, rather than the differences between, the elements; on the other hand, the contrasted elements, inescapably bound to one another, have the “dominant” element dependent on the “demonized” element. These statements plainly disagree with each other; the obvious question is whether the contrasts are real or not. In any event, the resemblances which he stresses reflect context-free readings of the text. As for the dependence of elements in contrast, the response is obvious; it takes two, mutually dependent, to make one.

Kastan’s first line of argument involves eradicated differences, as in the apparent similarity of conduct between Macdonwald and Macbeth. Kastan asserts that “if from the first the play asserts the absolute difference between loyal and rebellious action, it no less resolutely disrupts if not denies that difference” (p. 167). Kastan makes the play indeterminate in meaning, thus plastic and capable of any meaning, because he wants to say contradictory things at once, namely, to assert a difference which both is and is not “absolute.” His evidence is the example of the “unanchored pronouns that literally confuse the two” (p. 167) warriors and make their violence mutual. But he fails to make an elementary moral distinction between actions on the basis of their motives or purposes. Macbeth’s conduct in opposing the enemies of Scotland shows his worthiness on behalf of a worthy cause—a worthiness which Macbeth knows that society honors and rewards—and, at the same time, taints his character, and hints at his behavior as he moves beyond the confines of his position. The play supports this point at every turn; Macbeth elaborates it early to Lady Macbeth and later to himself.

Kastan’s second line of argument asserts that the doubling and redoubling in Macbeth confounds any easy sense of triumph of order at the end. In support, Kastan claims that:

“The ending may be seen either to restore the legitimate line of Duncan, redeeming the murderous interlude of Macbeth’s tyranny, or merely to repeat the pattern of violent action that Macbeth initiates. The play both begins and ends with an attack upon established rule, with a loyal nobility rewarded with new titles, and with the execution of a rebellious thane of Cawdor. Malcolm is three times hailed as king exactly as Macbeth has been by the witches, and Malcolm’s coronation at Scone either returns the nation to health and order or provides the conditions for a new round of temptation and disorder . . . ” (p. 174).

“Established rule”—there’s the rub—fails to differentiate the moral, political, and military bases of the rule; the rubric conceals these significant differences. The play never shows Macbeth, an illegitimate king by virtue of murderous usurpation, rewarding a loyal nobility; only Duncan and Malcolm do so—a likely compliment to James, given concern about his granting of many titles. The irony that Macbeth indirectly defeats the traitorous Cawdor and is himself directly defeated after assuming his title is self-contained.

Worse, the text shows the claimed parallelism between the hailing of Macbeth and of Malcolm to be factually false. Macbeth is hailed three times, each time by a witch, each time by a different title—Glamis, Cawdor, “King hereafter”—a progression from what he is to what Duncan awards to what Macbeth even then may hope for (his starting suggests latent evil intentions). Macbeth is hailed as “King” but once, and then by one witch. Malcolm is hailed one or two times, depending on how one counts Macduff’s salutations in a short speech, and once by the multitude of thanes. All hail Malcolm as “King of Scotland”—a repetition which suggests fixity for the title and stability for the state. As for Kastan’s pair of contrasting futures, a study of Malcolm’s role in the play, his conduct in the long scene in England, and his success in resolving issues defined by terms which the play sets forth can place the conventional understanding of the celebratory ending of the play on firm critical grounds—an effort beyond the scope of a review. Here, the falsity of Kastan’s “facts” must cast doubt on the truth of his inference.

Kastan’s third line of argument advances the idea that all regicides are equal because a duly installed king is a king to whom allegiance is “truly owed.” But an act of regicide is not to be equated with killing a crowned person. Kastan does equate them and argues that the observance of formalities alone establishes legitimacy, which thereby merits allegiance:

“The play makes it difficult to discover exactly where obedience is ‘truly owed.’ Macduff calls Macbeth an ‘untitled tyrant bloody-scepter’d,’ . . . but in fact, however bloody his scepter, he certainly is, as Macduff well knows, titled. Although Macbeth is undeniably a murderer, he lawfully succeeds and is crowned. ‘‘’Tis most like / The sovereignty will fall upon Macbeth,’ observes Ross; and Macduff responds: ‘He is already nam’d, and gone to Scone / To be invested.’ . . .  ‘Named’ and legally enthroned, Macbeth is king and arguably truly owed the obedience of his countrymen” (pp. 174-5).

The context of the entire play, on the stage (before, among others, James) and on the page; basic concepts and concerns of contemporary political discourse; and language used here and elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays show this argument to be technically absurd and, in its substance and presentation, ethically contemptible.

At the level of text almost before interpretation, Kastan must explain Macduff’s use of the word “untitled.” If, as he states it, Macduff is wrong, then Kastan must explain what Shakespeare—or a collaborator or a compositor—meant when he used the word. As far as I know, all editors gloss it as “usurping,” “unrightful,” “lacking a legal claim,” “illegitimate.” If Kastan wants to reject this unanimity, he must at least indicate that he is doing so and offer his reasons. No one suggests an intrusion at this point in the text; again, if he believes one to have affected it here, he is obliged to set forth his reasons. The question then is whether Shakespeare made a mistake or made Macduff a fool and, if the latter, why. But the answer to both is no, for the word reflects a common thematic question in Shakespeare: who is the true prince or king.

Kastan elides the basic distinction between true and false kings, one common to contemporary historical and political discourse, understood by almost everyone in Shakespeare’s audience, implicit in the “binaries” of Macbeth, and explicit in many other of his plays. He does so by transmuting it into “the distinction between a ‘lawful’ king and a ‘usurping’ tyrant.” (p. 175). Kastan’s disregard of the traditional concept of, and concern to identify, the “true king” reflects the New Historicists’ willingness to skew evidence to serve their political agenda. Macduff’s term “untitled” does not indicate ignorance; it assumes the related distinction between a good, or valid, title and a bad, or invalid, one—again, a matter of public understanding and common law. By refusing to attend Macbeth’s coronation, Macduff indicates that he refuses to accept a false king; his invitation to his fellow thanes to join in saluting Malcolm as “King of Scotland” indicates that Macduff recognizes him as the true king. First addressing him, Macduff says “Haile King, for so thou art”—that is, truly and actually, without anyone’s say-so—notably, without election by council and in advance of coronation. Macduff’s entire course of conduct in the play is inexplicable except for this distinction, exemplified in his allegiance to the “true king.” Kastan’s “arguably” is a rhetorical term of coercion but a sign of weakness. It is also a sign of cynicism; it hints that Kastan himself knows that allegiance would be “truly owed” Macbeth, not as the titled, but only as the true, king. But it is not because he is not. Kastan’s silence about the widely understood ideas circulating at the time and evident in the play, and his defiance of nearly universal consensus on the meaning of terms is more evidence of the corrupting influence of dogmatic readings of literature.

It is at this point that the central thesis of Kastan’s reading of Macbeth displays the weaknesses—indeed, the dangers—of the untrained using political principles to read politics into Shakespeare’s plays, read out of them confirmation of dogma, and thereby make them prooftexts. Consider one of Kastan’s guiding principles in his chapter entitled “Macbeth and the ‘Name of King’” (my emphasis): adherence to a legal process establishes a legitimate result. The problem with this principle, well known in political theory, is that it accepts an easy answer to a difficult question about the basis of political legitimacy. Few political theorists argue that power is the basis of legitimacy, that might makes right. Certainly, no one presuming to liberal political views and values ought to subscribe to so unsophisticated and dangerous a principle. Consider its corollary: whatever the state ordains is right. According to this political principle, which guides his criticism but which the play eschews, Kastan must accept as legitimate and worthy of allegiance historical instances of state behavior ranging from the merely irritating to the intolerable to the totally outrageous. Since his Shakespeare after Theory, in articulating and operating according to the political principles and impulses of New Historicism, implicitly endorses such practices, readers might wish to question whether Shakespeare can survive after a theory which discloses such totalitarian affinities.

Kastan pretends that he comes to bury New Historicism, but he really tries to revive or resurrect it. His book accords with and perpetuates its entire political, historical, theoretical program. His theory is after theirs, and so its failures are his. If there is to be Shakespearean criticism in the future, when we have finally put New Historicism behind us—and, of course, there will be; and that time will be free—it will not resemble what he would repair and restore, but not replace. It will develop a non-political historical or literary foundation, and it may return to older forms of scholarship, including more sophisticated methods of source and influence study, for addressing the plays of the writer who abides our question.

 

This review was originally published in Comparative Drama 35.1 (Spring 2001): 125-38.

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Michael L. Hays is formerly an independent consultant in defense, energy, and environment; a full- or part-time teacher for the past forty-five years under diverse auspices; a civic activist for public education as a columnist and blogger; and a retired independent scholar with his doctorate in English, specializing in Shakespeare.

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