If you gave typewriters to an infinite number of monkeys, one of them would eventually quote Shakespeare. That was an oft-repeated theory, but it has now been supplanted by a timelier model. Give search-engine capability to an infinite number of Shakespeare scholars, one of them will eventually discover factoids like the following:
• Macbare, Macbuff and Out Damn Spot are the Macbeth-inspired names of makeup products.
• In popular films that have slight debts to The Tempest, Ariel has variously been played by Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet) and Wilson the Volleyball (Cast Away).
• It’s easier to sing, “just like Romeo and Juliet,” as the Detroit doo-wop group the Reflections did in 1964, than “just like Troilus and Cressida.”
• Motivational speakers who provide Shakespeare-inspired lessons to captains of industry have described the Welsh forests of Henry V as the Silicon Valley of their day. And “while Henry doesn’t have the luxury of a policy-planning staff and off-site strategizing meetings,” a firm called Movers & Shakespeares instructs, “he proves himself a great leader in identifying and then pursuing a clear vision.”
These and many other such nuggets have been strung together by Marjorie Garber, an esteemed and apparently unstoppable scholar, in Shakespeare and Modern Culture, the latest of her many Shakespeare-centric academic treatises. She has already written Shakespeare After All, not to mention Profiling Shakespeare, Dream in Shakespeare, Coming of Age in Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality and at least one essay about Shakespeare and dogs that manages to mention two St Bernards featured in Beethoven’s 2nd, the movie about cute canines.
Now Garber singles out a new aspect of Shakespeare’s versatility. As her latest title indicates, she is out to assert that “Shakespeare makes modern culture, and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” In true academic fashion Garber loves that kind of commutative construction, the chiasmus. Shakespeare loved this too, and Garber has the chiasmi to prove it, straight from the source. (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” etc.) She is happy to compound her book’s facile inversions by calling her method, at one point, “as much pedagogical as heuristic (and as much heuristic as pedagogical.)”
Why, then, should readers follow Garber’s frequently glib trail through Shakespeare’s body of work? Because her sometimes-preposterous book mixes specious points with sharply incisive ones, and her good ideas are worth the trouble. If some of her associations are far more tenuous than others, she does bind them together with an overarching idea.
Shakespeare’s work, in her opinion, is so constantly mutable that it always exists in the present, whatever that present might be. The ways in which Shakespeare is interpreted in different eras say as much about those time periods as they do about the writing itself.
With modernity as her hook this time, Garber makes Romeo and Juliet her most cogent topic point. Her focus here is on youth and romantic love, but Garber traces their evolution insightfully. In past times the world has seen a 44-year-old male Romeo (Charles Kemble in 1819) and a heavy-set, middle-aged 19th-century female Romeo (Charlotte Cushman) who played opposite her own sister. The very impossibility of such casting today makes Garber’s point about the play’s evolution.
Although Romeo and Juliet is now treated as teen-centric (this book reprints Roz Chast’s hilarious New Yorker cartoon charting Romeo and Juliet’s instant messages to one another: “xoxoxo bye see u tmw”), it can confer youth as well as convey it.
Garber describes the way artists like Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were reinvigorated by the ballet version of this story. And she talks about how its depictions of youthful rebelliousness have changed over time. If West Side Story was a Romeo and Juliet geared to social conflict, it came too early to make drug taking and teenage suicide the central issues they could be now. Along her winding way Garber wonders how the name Romeo got to be shorthand for ladies’ man, “with a meaning pretty much opposite to that of Shakespeare’s fatally faithful wooer.”
Garber merrily illustrates how modern culture can miss Shakespeare’s original points. References to Othello in general, and to Iago’s mocking mention of preserving one’s good name in particular, tend to be particularly flat-footed. So do comparisons of any ambitious woman to Lady Macbeth. Still, the layman’s temptation to invoke Shakespeare is irresistible: “The commentator sounds profound and witty; the reader, listener or audience feels gratified and flattered to ‘get’ the reference, and Shakespeare is reconfirmed as the most trenchant and trusted observer of contemporary events since Walter Cronkite.”
No one who reads Garber will ever call anything a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions again. “A Shakespearean tragedy played out on a Long Island street where a boozed-up young woman unknowingly dragged her boyfriend under her car for more than a block as he tried to stop her from driving drunk,” from the New York Post, is the most egregious example to be found here.
So Garber, with her impeccable credentials as William R. Kenan Jr professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard, where she is also chairwoman of the department of visual and environmental studies, again declares open season on Shakespeare-powered idiocy. She might have delivered more cogent, less free-associative thinking had she not already written so frequently and variedly about her subject. But her book credibly demonstrates that the ever-changing timeliness of Shakespeare’s thoughts is what makes them timeless. Refreshingly, when she says that, Garber is not valuing a facile truism over the truth.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not