Like many literary critics of a certain age, much of what I write, including this review, is influenced by Stephen Greenblatt. I make this observation because a lot of my arguing with Shakespeare’s Freedom is driven by what I learned from Greenblatt’s earlier books, particularly Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1983) and Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, 1988). Or, to put this point another way, in Shakespeare’s Freedom we find the Stephen Greenblatt of the twenty-first century arguing with his earlier critical self.
The argument is about “Shakespeare’s freedom,” the claim that as a writer Shakespeare was able to free himself from the ruling ideas of his day, what Greenblatt refers to as Shakespeare’s “dream of autonomy” (15). Greenblatt often suggests that this dream was only that, but he also, and to a surprising extent, suggests it was a dream Shakespeare did achieve. Greenblatt begins the book with the declaration “Shakespeare as a writer is the embodiment of human freedom” (1). In Greenblatt’s account, even when Shakespeare discerns limits to that freedom, he remains in a certain sense free because of this discernment: “the limits he embodies are ones he himself disclosed and explored” (1).
After an overview chapter that sets out this thesis in a general way and with an example from Measure for Measure, four chapters explore this claim in distinct areas of experience: aesthetics, culture, and the state. Chapter 2 argues that Shakespeare developed a sense of beauty independent of a bland normative fairness, one that embraced individual flaws. Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare imagined in Shylock a member of an ethnic and religious group who is ideological only to a point since Shylock does not subsume his identity in the group’s by sacrificing his life for it. Turning from cultural to state politics, chapter 4 argues that Shakespeare presents us with authorities who believe they can be “absolute”—the word means in its Latin root “untied,” another version of free—through either an evil ambition that believes itself to be above the law (the prime example is Macbeth) or an apparently benign desire to rule in accordance with some abstract moral principle, itself an absolutist stance that fails to recognize the messiness of history or individual motive (prime examples are Brutus or Henry V). In Greenblatt’s account, Shakespeare settles on a better sort of absolutism, one untied from the desire to rule or from illusory political abstractions. This individual, freed from ruling ideas or the idea of ruling, instead acts as we are enjoined to act at the end of King Lear, with “the simple injunction to speak what we feel,” an independent “emotional honesty” that Greenblatt describes as Shakespeare’s “remarkable gift” (94). The final chapter turns back to the aesthetic, with Greenblatt wondering whether, if Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that no one is totally free, the plays themselves as works of art nonetheless can or should be. Here Greenblatt engages most directly (by way of reference to Adorno) with the question of the art’s autonomy.
As we expect from a book by Stephen Greenblatt, there are many wonderful, insightful moments of literary reading and cultural juxtaposition, rendered in beautiful style, as in the book’s account of the aesthetics of Renaissance portraiture. I remained unconvinced, however, particularly by the examples for which Greenblatt makes the strongest claims for Shakespeare’s distinctive freedom, such as his representation of the dark lady of the sonnets or of servant rebellion at the end of King Lear. Thus while Greenblatt sees representations of the dark lady as Shakespeare’s attempt to find “aspects of identity … that do not fit normative expectations” (44), there is much in Shakespeare’s representation of a “dark” and sexually dangerous woman that is stereotypical for his day, as Greenblatt elsewhere in this chapter seems to recognize. And while Greenblatt describes the servants who challenge Regan and Edmund or help Gloucester as exploring what it “means to be human” and acting out of “human obligation” (91), the play makes it clear that their actions exemplify good service and the recognition of traditional authority in the face of the scary breaking of traditional bonds. As the old man who helps Gloucester states, “O, my good lord, I have been your tenant and your father’s tenant these fourscore years” (King Lear, conflated text, 4.1.13–14, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. [New York, 2008]).
Greenblatt in this book is typically nuanced and dialectical, so that in Shakespeare’s Freedom we discover that what looks like it was free really is not, or that the happy dream of absolute freedom easily becomes a dangerous desire for absolute license. Nonetheless, the tendency of this book to argue through sharp dialectical reversals has, to my mind, two disadvantages. First, the reversals leave the binary divisions in place. There’s not enough room for internal difference within either side of the binary. I think that readers of the Journal of British Studies, accustomed to more particular and local history, will find the historical claims of this book rather broad, even if, or rather because, they are dialectical. Second, because the book typically works through dialectical progressions, we never get a sense of Shakespeare going backward, being unsure, or just writing contingently. Greenblatt in this book and elsewhere writes very well about the necessity of recognizing the contingent and the improvisational. But in Shakespeare’s Freedom, even recognition of limits is the most dramatic evidence of Shakespeare’s transcendence. This book’s Shakespeare knows what he does not know. He discloses the evil underside of freedom. I believe that most of us, and most cultures, are more confused than that.
Most fundamentally, why argue that Shakespeare was uniquely free as a writer? Why not, following the lead of an earlier Greenblatt, imagine Shakespeare as a member of his culture, an extremely gifted member to be sure, but one nonetheless who acts in a limited way as a transfer point for cultural conflict? In Shakespeare’s Freedom, Greenblatt observes the illusions and dangers of the dream of total freedom but seems to want to dream it anyway. The literary critics and historians who read this book may not be persuaded, but there is much to suggest that this book is written for a general reader. My concern is that for these readers, that dream is already too familiar. I would rather recommend for them (and I do) Shakespearean Negotiations, in which Greenblatt taught his readers to look for “complex, ceaseless borrowings and lendings” (7) rather than unique genius and epiphany.
I do not fault Greenblatt for changing his mind in his latest books. A brilliant critic such as Greenblatt has every right, perhaps even duty, to adjust his critical perspective—and even in Shakespearean Negotiations he tells us that he had hoped for the epiphany. Since, however, Greenblatt is implicitly exploring urgent questions in current literary studies about the categories of literature and of the author, I do wish that in Shakespeare’s Freedom he had made his arguments with his earlier critical self explicit. It would have been a fascinating conversation.
