[First published in English Studies in Canada 19.4 (1993): 497-500.

[Index: Shakespeare, literary theory]

[Date: December 1993]

Shakespeare the American

Michael H. Keefer

Review of Michael Bristol, Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare

(London and New York: Routledge, 1990)
It might seem paradoxical to propose that a book which tells us nothing about the
specific meanings of Shakespeare's plays or poems and quotes not so much as a line from
any of them is nonetheless one of the most important studies of Shakespeare to appear
within the past decade. There are, however, good grounds for making such a claim about
Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare. Other recent attempts at an overview of
the receptions of Shakespeare (Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare, for example) pale
by comparison with this book's theoretical acuteness and moral energy. Michael Bristol's
account of the intricately reciprocal relationship between the institutionalizing of
Shakespeare in the United States and the cultural politics which have been dominant in
that country will prove continuously challenging not just to Shakespeare critics and
textual scholars, but also to literary theorists and cultural historians, and indeed to anyone
interested in making sense of the so-called culture wars of the Reagan-Bush era.
Identifying three distinct meanings in the concept Shakespeare, Bristol at once
sets two of them aside. He is concerned neither with the actor and playwright whose
historically situated subjectivity would, he concedes, be well worth constructing, nor with
the author-function which he sees as having been retrospectively constituted so as to
provide a basis for the expressive unity of 'Shakespeare: the man and his works'. Bristol
directs our attention rather to that ghostly entity, that socio-cultural or spiritual origin,
source, or presence which serves as a principal love-object in what he terms the
humanist erotics of reading; Shakespeare in this sense is the name of a tutelary deity of

cult-object (18-19) in the quasi-religious rites of a literary and academic institution

which has tended to experience modernity as a state of mourning and to understand its
own role as one of submission to and disinterested love for the authoritative monuments
of a traditional culture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson described Shakespeare as the father of the man in
America, and the man who wrote the text of modern life. With these words in mind,
Bristol draws together an intriguing narrative of the incorporation of Shakespeare into
American culture as a kind of allegorical institution or institutional allegory that at once
represents and legitimizes a typically conservative and hierarchical vision of the
American social orderso that, as he argues, the interpretation of Shakespeare and the
interpretation of American political culture are mutually determining practices (3).
The first part of Bristol's narrativewhich is also, to my mind, the most
consistently brilliantfocusses upon the institutional infrastructure of Shakespeare's
America. Two illuminating chapters of a primarily theoretical bent are devoted to
analyses of the political economy of scholarship and of competing understandings of
the concept of tradition; these are followed by an account of the assembly and the
functioning of an American Shakespeare archive (exemplified by the libraries founded by
Horace Howard Furness and Henry Clay Folger), and by an incisive discussion of the
theory and practice of textual editing, or of what Bristol terms the deuteronomic
reconstruction of authority.
As this last phrase may suggest, one distinctive feature of this book is the ease
with which Bristol moves from an informed understanding of the processes of canonformation and tradition-making in Judaism and early Christianity to a no less scholarly
examination of analogous processes evident in the formation and transmission of the
Shakespeare canon, from the First Folio to the New Variorum, the New Bibliography of
Fredson Bowers, and the most recent work of revisionist textual critics like Stephen Orgel
and Anna Mette Hjort. Another attractive feature of Bristol's analysis is its inclusiveness:
his vision of the Shakespeare institution takes in Charlie the Tuna, who in the Starkist
commercial wants to demonstrate his good taste by doing Shakespeare (I beat guys
wit' 'dis sword whilst hollering poetry [15]), as well as the Folger Library, the bequest of
a president of Standard Oil, which stands next to the Capitol in Washington, so oriented
that, as its first director explained, [A] line drawn from the site of the Folger
Shakespeare Memorial through the Capitol building and extended onward, will all but

touch the monument to Washington and the memorial to Lincolnthe two Americans
whose light also spreads across the world (76).
The second half of Bristol's book tells a complementary storythat of the
constitution of America's Shakespeare by the discourse of critics from Emerson to
Stephen Greenblatt. A recurrent tension runs through this narrativebetween the
emergent social project of American democracy and self-government (129), and the
modes of traditional privilege and domination available within the Shakespearean canon
for appropriation by scholars eager to legitimize similar patterns of domination in their
own settings; or, in different but related terms, between the emancipatory potential which
many interpreters have glimpsed within that canon and sought in various ways to activate,
and the binding mancipatio which is a condition of receiving the Shakespearean text in a
ministerial spirit (and thus attaching oneself to the tradition of its more priestly
possessors).
The first chapter in this section of the book offers brief analyses of Emerson's
perception of a Shakespearized modernity (Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
are Shakespearized, he wrote; His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do
not see), of the modulations of Emerson's view of expressive authority in the hands of
George Lyman Kittredge, and of the enlistment by Charles Mills Gayley in 1917 of an
Emersonian Shakespeare as a legitimizing originator of a doctrine of American liberty
directly opposed to popular rule. (Bristol acknowledges that Gayley's book, Shakespeare
and the Founders of Liberty in America, may seem aberrant to contemporary readers
while also reminding us that its themes are still not only widely current, they are in fact
official policy in the areas of education and foreign affairs [142].)
The chapters which follow offer similar groupings of representative men: A. O.
Lovejoy, Theodore Spencer, and Hardin Craig are taken to exemplify an old historicism
which at times seems committed above all to the defence of its own theoretical
innocence (160); Harry Levin, Northrop Frye, C. L. Barber, and Maynard Mack
illustrate more egalitarian interpretive tendencies within a post-war period of cultural
reintegration; and the work of Stanley Cavell, Richard Levin, and Stephen Greenblatt is
seen as responding with different strategies of containment to a threatened disintegration
of the Emersonian ideal of autonomous subjectivity in the post-Vietnam era.
These readings are consistently astuteas, for example, when Bristol reveals
eerie resonances between Mack's famous 1952 essay on Hamlet, an article on Vietnam

that followed it in the same number of the Yale Review, and the massive parapraxis by
means of which an oration on the American defeat in Vietnam intrudes itself into
Stanley Cavell's 1976 analysis of King Lear. And yet one might very well object to the
broad historical periodizing which characterizes these chapters, to the insistent
metonymies which allow one essay or book to stand for a scholar's entire output, and that
output for the work of an entire generation, or (since Stephen Greenblatt's writings take
us into the mid- and late 1980s), to the fact that Bristol's narrative makes no mention of
the feminist work that since 1980 has very substantially altered the course of
Shakespearean studies.
The first two objections could be made of any study that offers a historical
narrative of this kind. The third, moreover, is not wholly fair, since in his introduction
Bristol pointedly aligns his critique with the work of feminist theorists, who like him are
concerned not just to know the world but to transform it, and who should find congenial
his detailed analysis of an institutional pathos which can be understood as an array of
specifically masculine subject positions (5).
Should one then suspect, as a matter of principle, that any reviewer who so
earnestly wishes to revise the text at handin this case with a concluding chapter on the
work, say of Linda Woodbridge, of Copplia Kahn, of Marjorie Garber, and of Janet
Adelmanmay perhaps be confessing, in that charmingly backhanded manner which
seems typical of academic discourse, that he would be proud to have authored so much as
half a chapter of a study of this quality?