The Tempest : Critical Essays (Shakespeare Criticism)

Rating:
Summary: MARGINAL UTILITY
Review: A typical example of modern (so-called) scholarship, parading trendy critical approaches, none of which sheds much light on Shakespeare's art. The juiceless prose. the sententious "insights" that die as soon as they are uttered, it's so predictable. A couple of examples will have to suffice; here's Barbara Ann Sebek in "Peopling, Profiting and Pleasure in The Tempest": "Like a number of "economic" texts in the early modern period, The Tempest registers and participates in wider cultural efforts to understand the place of pleasure in a proto-capitalist "world system" of commodity exchange". I wonder whether she enjoys The Tempest, or whether she thinks it's any good as art. And don't you love those quotation marks? She sounds like a Berkeley undergrad. Shakespeare would puke on this kind of stuff. Here's one more, from an essay by Don Cameron Allen, "The Tempest", after dismissing claims of anything remotely autobiographical about Hamlet: "None of this can be proved" - as if proof is the sole criterion. He then proceeds to impose on the reader fifteen pages of trenchant commentary - which likewise cannot be proved, and thereby invalidates his whole enterprise single-handedly. Way to go, Don! Naturally we have the genuflection toward Stephen Greenblatt, who has made a career out of ponderous analysis of marginal utility. I am reminded of a comment by the dramatist and playwright Arnold Bennett, made in a 1909 review of a Shakespeare biography; he dismissed the work of the entire body of academic critics as barely scratching the surface of Shakespeare's art, but grudgingly granted their work a "temporary utility". The utility of the material in the book under review is circumscribed by more then mere time - it is limited too by audience, being written for scholars by scholars, the pernicious little roundabout of grants and publications, the orbit of the arid who have nothing to say.