George Washington University

William Shakespeare. by Terry Eagleton

Review by: Ronald R. MacDonald
Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1986), pp. 532-534
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University
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 532 SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY

it is in the opulent variety of the footnotes that the erudite brilliance of this formidable
book is most dazzlingly displayed.

William Shakespeare. By TERRYEAGLETON.Oxford and New York:

Basil Blackwell, 1986. Pp. x + 114. $14.95.

Reviewed by RONALD R. MACDONALD

Everyoneknows thatTerryEagletonis a Marxist, althoughthe chaste title of his current

book, a contributionto Blackwell's "RereadingLiterature"series, may not entirely pre-
pare even the initiated for what is to follow. If the book's modest length seems to belie
the scope implied by the title, Eagletonis neverthelessperfectly awareof the incongruity.
The projectis only slightly less foolhardy,Eagletonadmits,thanthe MontyPythonroutine
in which contestantsare given twenty seconds to summarizeProust'snovel, firstin bathing
costume, then in formal attire.
Those familiarwith Eagleton's Shakespeareand Society of twenty years ago will note
some radical changes in his view of the poet and the kinds of solutions his plays offer.
The later Eagletonis far less sure that contradictionscan be resolved, far more suspicious
of the moral vocabulary and soft-focus compromises beloved of the humanistsand de-
ployed freely in his own earlier work on Shakespeare.Here, for instance, is the early
Eagleton on the subject of marriage:
To change names mutuallyis to become two in one, as Angelo [in Measurefor Measure] bears
the Duke's name, and this exchangingof identities, becomingtwo in one, happensat the deepest
level in marriage. Marriagedefeats the objectifying circularityof Hamlet's society and the
Greekcamp [in Troilusand Cressida]:in marriageeach is at once himself andthe other, treating
andjudging the other as himself. Marriageis the true and mutualreceiving of the print of the
other, in contrastto the taking of a false print, which involves exploitation.
(p. 83)
And here, by way of comparison, is the later Eagleton on the same subject:
Marriageis natural,in the sense of being the outwardsign or social role which expresses your
authentic inward being, as opposed to those deceitful idioms which belie it. It is the true
language of the erotic self, the point at which the spontaneityof individual feeling and the
stability of public institutionsharmoniouslyinterlock. ... As such, marriageis the organic
society in miniature,a solution to sexual and political dilemmasso ludicrouslyimplausiblethat
even Shakespearehimself seems to have had difficultyin believing it.
(p. 21)
The Eagletonof WilliamShakespeareis constantlycoming to a stop (but hardlyto rest)
in aporiasand ambiguities, undecidablesituationsand unstableantimonies;he teases out,
in good deconstructionistfashion, the perversityat the heart of desire, money, the law,
the body, and language, seeing all institutions as at once irreduciblygeneral and un-
avoidablyparticular.The argumentativestrategyis inevitablythe unsettlingof a hierarchy,
a reversal which often boils down to a reversal of figure and ground. Herewith, a brief
sampler. "Othello is not a play about sexual deviancy, but about the deviancy of sex"
(p. 69); ". .. the elaborate idioms of desire-lovers' quarrels, courting rituals, moon-
struck maunderings-are all 'about' the physical act of coition itself, yet seem absurdly
excessive of it, to the point where one begins to wonder whether the truth is not the
reverse, and the physical act merely provides a convenient occasion for certainforms of
verbal display'' (p. 18). "To any unprejudicedreader-which would seem to exclude
Shakespearehimself, his contemporaryaudiences and almost all literary critics-it is
surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches" (pp. 1-2).
Surely? This last is a gambit in Eagleton's first chapteron Macbeth, RichardII, and
Henry IV. Its tongue-in-cheekblandness, the wide-eyed assumptionthat the reader will

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 BOOK REVIEWS 533

acquiesce without protest as the argumentstands the tragedy on its head, indeed, the
implicationthat we have actually been viewing Macbeth upside down in our prejudiced
way for close to five centuries are all characteristicof Eagleton's style, engaging and
maddeningby turns (or perhapsboth at once), in which the foxes of irony have forged
well ahead of both the tigers of wrath and the horses of instruction.
And yet the mildly disruptiveoften has its effect. Like Freud'srepressed,the outraged
majesty of The ElizabethanWorld Picture has a tendency to return in the criticism of
Macbeth, yielding all too often the familiarspectacle of a temporarilydiscomfitedNature
expelling a troublesomeforeign body so that the Forces of Good may regain control and
live happily ever after. Eagleton suspects that the body in this comforting scenario may
not be foreign at all, and there is much in the play to confirm his suspicion. Violent
competitiveness, for one thing, seems institutionalizedand normativein Macbeth's Scot-
land, not supervenientor adventitious.It is clear that the bloody rebellion in the process
of being quashed at the beginning is not a mere aberration,and the fact that the play
ends with the severed head of anotherwould-be usurperin an uncannyrepetitionof the
action of the opening sequencemust make us wary of any attemptson the partof survivors
at closure and finality. The witches articulatesomething importantat the heart of the
social (dis)order, and the tendency of their language to cast the signifier loose from its
snug mooring in the harborof pietistic ideology may well be experienced as value, a
creative roiling of the smooth surface of official pronouncements.We may not go all the
way with Eagleton to seeing the witches as "inhabitingtheir own sisterly community"
on the fringes of society, "refusingall truckwith its tribalbickeringsand militaryhonors"
(p. 2)-what is the dispute about the rump-fedrunyon's chestnuts if not bickering, and
ratherunsisterly bickering at that?-but it is easy to concur in the notion that to project
the witches as some radical other preying on a normallypeaceable organismis seriously
to mistake the characterof humanevil in Macbeth.
There is neverthelessan insistent hedgehog who occasionally edges out the fox in Eag-
leton's writing, a hedgehog who is so securely in possession of one big thing that his
ways with the text are sometimescavalier. This hedgehoginsouciantlyassigns Mowbray's
speech in RichardII (I.iii. 154-67) to Bolingbroke, and he hangs an argumentof some
consequence on the misattribution(p. 9). It is then Bolingbroke whose tongue is "en-
jail'd" and "portcullis'd" by Richard's decree, Bolingbrokewho contemplatesexile as
the deprivationof language. And yet Bolingbrokeseems in fact unruffledby such a pros-
pect, perhapsominously so. We may sense some wheels beginning to turn when he re-
sponds to Richard'sshorteningof his sentence ("How long a time lies in one little word!
. . . such is the breath of kings," I.iii.213, 215), but he is surely not contemplating
speaking in a certain way in orderto become king: he is contemplatingbecoming a king
in orderthat he may speak in a certainway-an altogetherdifferentmatter, and one that
turnsout to be a good deal more complicatedthan Bolingbrokecan at this stage imagine.
To make Bolingbrokethe one who fears loss of language is to elide the deep irony that
it is ultimatelyMowbraywho engages in that hearty, wordless, and unproblematicaction
in the Holy Land that the executive Bolingbrokeas Henry IV, suddenlyembroiledin the
symbolic complexities of language he has previously ignored, can only yearn for.
We may detect the hedgehog again in Eagleton's discussion of Viola's single exchange
with Feste in TwelfthNight (III.i). "What has discreditedlanguage in Feste's view," we
are told, "is commerce, the breakingof bonds: 'But indeed words are very rascals since
bonds disgrac'dthem' " (p. 28). It is the apposition, "commerce,the breakingof bonds,"
thatwe may findtroubling,for surelythe breakingof bonds is the corruptionof commerce,
which must depend for its orderly operationon the keeping of promises and not on re-
neging. Broken promises are corruptwords and Feste's whole metaphorrelies on this
fact. It is not commerce he implicitly rejects but its perversion. Eagleton, of course, is
perfectly awareof this, and yet his largerdesire to see Shakespeareresistingthe transition
to capitalist exchange in his nostalgic wish for the benign reciprocityof the feudal order
(which nonetheless turns out to be rather less benign than it seems) perhaps covertly
enforces the equationof commercewith the breakingof bonds. Here is one big thing the
hedgehog knows.

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534 SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY

But all this is not so much to carp at minims as to suggest the characterof Eagleton's
style of argumentation,which proceeds in large, if not sweeping, pronouncements.He
has much to say about language in general, ratherless to say about words in particular,
so if he occasionallydistortsthe odd parole in the course of uncoveringthe baleful effects
of langue, it is hardly surprising.Yet one of Eagleton's own recurrentconcerns is the
operation on concrete cases of the abstractand overarchingsystem, whether conceived
as language, desire, money, or the law. All of these have in common a tendencyto afflict
reality with a sort of hemorrhage,to bleed the diverse vitality of the materialworld to
a universaldead white, ignoringdifferencesin a drive for stability and order. If we adopt
the perspective of langue and the synchronic in an attemptto stabilize meanings from
utteranceto utteranceand over time, Eagleton argues, we are in danger of ignoring the
diversity of parole, the wanderingof meaningfrom instanceto instance, which may well
have to be policed in the interest of intelligibility, but which is just as surely part of the
creativity of language, indeed of its poetic use. How to reconcile the demands of order
and coherence with the fecundity of the creative, how to maintainexchange, the life of
any community,withoutdenyingthe individualcharacterof the objectsexchanged,whether
goods or bodies or words? This is for Eagleton at the heart of the problem Shakespeare
confronted, entailing, as it seems, an ultimately undecidablechoice between a conser-
vative ideology of orderand the potentiallyanarchicpower of poetic creation. It just may
be a problemunavoidablyreplicatedin Eagleton's own argumentaboutthe Shakespearean
corpus.
It is doubtless a problem with any argumentat all, but particularlywith one that tries
to yoke togethersuch a diverse arrayof humaninstitutions.Eagletonis fond of the expres-
sion "ratherlike," as in, e.g., desire is "ratherlike" money, or "ratherlike" the law
in its tendency to homogenize the diversity of materialexperience. The expressionpoints
to metaphor,the unstable figure of likeness-in-differencethat hovers uncertainlybetween
a collapse into indistinguishableidentityon the one handand a fragmentationinto a series
of unrelatedparticularson the other. Negotiating the terrainbetween these extremes is
not really a matterof striking some static balance for good and all, of adding a pinch of
this and a dash of that until a satisfactory mixture emerges, because, as Eagleton re-
peatedly argues, the extremes inhere in one another. It is not possible to communicate
without langue, and yet any utteranceis parole and thus involved in the errancy, inad-
vertentor not, of language as it is used. Perhapsany discourse which aims at coherence
will gravitate toward the first pole, toward the synopsis of metaphor, the hedgehog's
ultimate hedge. The reader can only hope that the fox will remain vigilantly aware of
what the hedgehog is up to.

Dreams of Love and Power: On Shakespeare's Plays. By JOSEPH

H. SUMMERS.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 161.
$19.95.

Reviewed by CHARLESR. FORKER

In some sense all drama,whetheron or off the stage, may be conceived as an evolving
dialectic between desires, anticipations,potentialitiesforeseen, feared, or hoped for, and
the actualities, contingencies, and unexpectedturningsof life as revealed in humanchar-
acterand action. This wise, perspicuous,discerning,and deeply felt book embracesessays
on seven of Shakespeare'splays (A MidsummerNight's Dream, The Winter'sTale, Ham-
let, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest), ex-
aminingeach in terms of the way majorcharacterstry to realize their dreamsof love and
power, and come, in the process, to recognize both their limitations and their higher
possibilities. In every case the analysis yields valuable perceptionsabout artistic form,
while illustratingthe subtle means by which Shakespeare,throughengagement and de-
tachment, involves us directly in his unfolding definitions of structureand meaning.

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