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Κύρια Extramural Shakespeare (Reproducing Shakespeare)
Extramural Shakespeare (Reproducing Shakespeare)Denise Albanese
Extramural Shakespeare makes a bold contribution to the recent debates about Shakespeare’s place in American culture in the new millennium. Informed by cultural studies discussions about elite and mass culture and drawing upon the unique, transdisciplinary methods associated with that field, this study argues that Shakespeare should be considered instead as public culture. Denise Albanese argues that due to the emergence of mass education in the twentieth century, Shakespeare has become public property, even though official discourse and film treat his texts as if they belong to elites. Extramural Shakespeare demonstrates that reading Shakespeare dialectically attends to the hopes for a better world his texts might still represent.
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10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Extramural Shakespeare Reproducing Shakespeare marks the turn in adaptation studies toward recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence. It builds on two decades of growing interest in the “afterlife” of Shakespeare, showcasing some of the best new work of this kind currently being produced. The series addresses the repurposing of Shakespeare in different technical, cultural, and performance formats, emphasizing the uses and effects of Shakespearean texts in both national and global networks of reference and communication. Studies in this series pursue a deeper understanding of how and why cultures recycle their classic works, and of the media involved in negotiating these transactions. Series Editors Thomas Cartelli, Muhlenberg College Katherine Rowe, Bryn Mawr College Titles The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time Edited by Gregory Colón Semenza Extramural Shakespeare Denise Albanese 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation Denise Albanese 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Extramural Shakespeare EXTRAMURAL SHAKESPEARE Copyright © Denise Albanese 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10513–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albanese, Denise. Extramural Shakespeare / Denise Albanese. p. cm.—(Reproducing Shakespeare) ISBN 978–0–230–10513–3 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR2976.A55 2010 822.3⬘3—dc22 2010004229 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 All rights reserved. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 For my sister Maureen, who is too smart and sensible to believe in myths, and in memory of my mother 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 This page intentionally left blank List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Shakespeare in Public 1 1 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium: American Culture, “Elites,” the Academy—and Beyond 11 Pacino’s Cliffs Notes: Looking for Richard ’s “Public” Shakespeare 39 2 3 Shakespeare Goes to School 67 4 The Shakespeare Film, the Market, and the Americanization of Culture 95 5 Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter 119 Notes 145 Works Cited 165 Index 175 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Contents 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 This page intentionally left blank 1 2 3 4 5 Looking for Richard Hamlet Hamlet Romeo + Juliet Romeo + Juliet 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese 57 103 104 113 115 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Illustrations 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 This page intentionally left blank S ince I think of myself principally as a scholar of seventeenth-century literature, it’s a surprise to me to have produced a book on Shakespeare. But his centripetal pull on my class schedule in my home Department of English, combined with my joint appointment in Cultural Studies, has resulted in the happiest sort of project: one informed by my teaching the most potent, revered, and mystified figure in Anglophone literary history on the one hand, and by the forms of critique and analysis that make possible the broadest positioning of Shakespeare in the totality of cultural and social practices on the other. So my first thanks must go to all the students, both undergraduate and graduate, to whom I’ve taught Shakespeare, Horkheimer, Adorno, Bloch, Jameson, and a host of others, for their patience, skepticism, devotion, independence of mind, smarts, and enthusiasm. Although the form of this analysis has little in common with the modes of criticism to which I was introduced both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, it would be impossible for me to have a thought about Shakespeare or early modern culture that was not in some sense informed by those who have taught me: Richard Harrier, Eleanor Prosser, Terry Comito, John Bender, J. Martin Evans, Ron Rebholz, Wesley Trimpi, Louis Adrian Montrose, and especially Dustin Griffin, whose graduate course on the afterlife of Milton in the eighteenth century, to which I was admitted as a drastically underprepared undergraduate, first introduced me to a way of thinking about the cultural work that authors do, the afterlives they possess. But the end of graduate school was not the end of my formal education: when I first came to George Mason University, I took a seminar entitled “Big-Time Shakespeare” at the Folger Shakespeare Library with Michael Bristol. This book is the long-overdue culmination of a series of conversations he and I have had ever since, which began with an invitation to pinchhit for Larry Levine at an MLA session. Though no trace remains in the following pages of that paper, this project would likely not exist were it not 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Acknowledgments ● Acknowledgments for the Folger seminar and my subsequent time as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan, which first taught me about cultural studies while I finished a more historicist project. As is appropriate for a book whose stakes are in the present, many of my debts are owed in the here and now to the myriad colleagues and friends who have listened to all too many versions of this project and who have given bibliographical, argumentative, critical, and personal support to me in the years this project has been in gestation, mutating, it seemed, every time I sat down to write. I owe a particular debt to my former department chair, Deborah Kaplan, whose support of me has meant more than she can know; to Cindy Fuchs, my colleague in film studies, whose enthusiasm for and acuity about American popular culture first led me to think about Shakespeare in relation to his putative other; and to my wonderful colleagues in early modern studies, Devon Hodges (ever incisive and ever sane) and Robert Matz (whose own work on Shakespeare’s sonnets is a model for anyone seeking to address the public appetite for Shakespeare). Thanks to my friend and colleagues, present and erstwhile, in Cultural Studies, Paul Smith, Tom Moylan, and Aine O’Brien, for good times and good arguments. Zofia Burr and Alok Yadav have been dear friends as well as keen interlocutors. For insights, conversations, and general jollying I am grateful to Caroline Bassett, Curt Barger, Lorraine Brown, Steve Brown, Peter Brunette, Dympna Callaghan, Dina Copelman, Julie Eisenberg, Rosemary Jann, Glenn Hennessey, Inderpal Grewal, Kim Hall, David Kaufmann, Winnie Keaney, Roger Lancaster, Roger Lathbury, Susan Lawrence, Madhavi Menon, Bobbi Ponce-Barger, Phyllis Rackin, Shelley Reid, Roy Rosenzweig, Amelia Rutledge, Jessica Scarlata, Laura Scott, Scott Shershow, Jyotsna Singh, Chris Thaiss, Susan Tichy, Valerie Traub, and Terry Zawacki. David Levy has given me a great deal, only some of it information about conservative discourse in the United States. The work on this project has been furthered by many people and in many fora: Amy Scott-Douglas, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Jacques Lezra organized seminars at the SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) at which portions of chapter 5 were presented; thanks to them and to all who attended for their insights, which can only have strengthened the study. Thanks as well to Tom Moylan and the audience at the Ralahine Center for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick, whose searching questions have made this chapter better. Thanks to the Folger Library’s March 2007 conference, “Shakespeare in American Education,” and to NEH funding in relation to that conference, I was able to undertake a significant portion of my archival research and to benefit from the work of my fellow participants. Another portion of this study was initially written at the behest of Jean Howard and 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 xii ● xiii Scott Shershow; I owe thanks to them as well as to Crystal Bartolovich, whose invitation to give a paper at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies conference sparked the analysis in chapter 4. And I am grateful for the interest and support shown by the series editors, Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, who, like the anonymous reader secured by Palgrave Macmillan, also offered keen and useful responses to the manuscript. Thanks to the University of Delaware Press for permission to print portions of my chapter “Canons Before Canons: College Entrance Requirements and the Making of a National-Educational Shakespeare,” which will appear in Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, ed. Mimi Godfrey, Coppèlia Kahn, and Heather Nathans (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). Thanks as well to Routledge UK for permission to print a revised and expanded version of the book chapter “The Shakespeare Film and the Americanization of Culture” from Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2000), 206–226. My thanks to the special-collections librarians and university archivists at Stanford University, Columbia University, the City University of New York, Howard University, and the University of Virginia; and to Dr. David Ment of the Board of Education Archives in New York City. And I owe a real debt of gratitude to colleagues on the faculty of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at GMU, who were willing to help out a less-thantech-savvy humanities professor with improving the quality of the images that appear in this volume: Edgar Endress and especially Sean Watkins and Lynne Constantine. One final note: I wish Larry Levine, who after his retirement from Berkeley became a colleague of mine at Mason, and I had had more time to talk about this work, which owes so much to his groundbreaking research. I suspect he’d have liked the possibility that Shakespeare might be more a form of public property than he ever suspected. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Acknowledgments 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 This page intentionally left blank Shakespeare in Public W hy this, why now? A familiar pair of questions to anyone affiliated with a cultural studies program, as I am, but not quite so evidently necessary in the realm of Shakespeare studies, where I also do my work. While topical criticism of Shakespeare flourished in the 1980s and into the 1990s, more recently it has fallen into abeyance, perhaps because the suspicion with which ideology critique viewed Shakespeare, as agent of hegemony and property of the ruling class, offered little possibility for a more complicated, even dialectical development. This is a book that aims to offer just that sense of complexity, that possibility for dialectical readings, in accounting for Shakespeare outside the walls of academia, that is, Shakespeare in public. Its aim is to argue that in the years around the turn of the millennium, Shakespeare is no longer located where prior critical accounts have placed him—at the top of a cultural hierarchy that maps out onto a social and economic one—but is both more elusive and more pervasive. That there is a great deal of complexity whenever Shakespeare’s place in the social world is the subject of conversation is more or less a given: through the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Shakespeare has become a flash point for all types of cultural battles. He or his texts have been used variously to “civilize” nonAnglophone immigrants; to signify elevated taste (or tasting good, in the case of Charlie the Tuna); and to rouse cultural warriors fighting to preserve eternal verities from the contaminating effects of mass culture.1 As the materialist work of the 1980s and 1990s has enduringly taught us, Shakespeare is a site (and sign) of political struggle as well as the name of an author. On that front there will be more to say, since this study aligns itself with the materialist work to which I’ve alluded, while aiming to update its 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 INTRODUCTION ● Extramural Shakespeare dependence on a now-superseded hypostasizing of Shakespeare principally as an agent of high culture in the United States. But by way of preamble to the larger task, it is necessary to acknowledge that it is sometimes hard to figure out what the future of such political work might be. The home questions critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Jean Howard, Alan Sinfield, John Drakakis, Marion O’Connor, Ivo Kamps, and many others once raised about Shakespeare, dominant culture, and ideology have apparently been settled, or else they have receded both in urgency and in currency: in effect, the professional conversation (which was in any case always more vigorous in Britain than in the United States) has moved on.2 If I may be permitted an overly schematic description of the field, the many species of politically inflected analyses characteristic of early modern studies in the 1980s and 1990s have largely been put aside, even as more strictly archival or literary work has begun once more to rise in professional importance. Meanwhile, any challenges posed by Shakespeare as a cultural object of continued topicality have been transmuted: some political energy has been taken up with the question of Shakespeare in relation to the performative or the postcolonial (including postcolonial formations in America), while questions of status, in particular, have been deferred onto the study of Shakespeare and film, new media, or other manifestations of popular culture.3 On some level, of course, increased specialization is the natural turn for any emerging area of study. But insofar as that specialization often leaves behind broader questions and the sense of a social totality within which cultural formations operate—and thus within which the political analysis of Shakespeare finds its greatest urgency—many of these studies have also left behind a critical sense of what John Joughin has analyzed as a “national culture.”4 For instance, while it is likely that residual colonial anxiety accounts for some aspects of Shakespearean relations in the United States, the economic and geopolitical priority this nation has held during much of the last fifty years suggests a fundamental disjuncture: between the colonial understood as a recent and defining fact central to the imagined life of the nation-state, and the colonial as a residual ideological trace that can be reactivated by elites for the purposes of establishing hegemony—as when Shakespeare’s Englishness became central to the educational system within which increasing numbers of non-Anglophone immigrants were to be inserted at the turn of the last century. And since much work in the category of film and popular culture in particular, undertaken within the disciplinary confines of literary study, reflects little familiarity with a rigorous, energetic, and highly elaborated discourse on politics and mass culture as put forth by cultural studies scholars, the former work seems curiously compartmentalized, even at times deprived of the tools needed 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 2 ● 3 to continue to reflect on Shakespeare as an iconic element in a complex cultural field. I’ll have more to say on these matters in the pages that follow. But whatever the myriad virtues of a return to the archive, a reassertion of specifically literary discourse, or the development of a postcolonial or mass-mediated subfield taken in and of themselves, it remains the case that Shakespeare as public object—extramural Shakespeare, in the terms of this study—is in need of further articulation. Hence the pertinence of the two questions with which I began. It is only by understanding Shakespeare via models and critiques that move beyond textual practice and into an ensemble of interpretive strategies that cross disciplinary lines, as cultural studies does, that Shakespeare’s place in perimillennial American culture may be understood. In fact, given the cultural shifts I will be describing in the pages that follow, such a rearticulation is urgent, if the valuable political lessons put forth by materialist scholars are not to be turned into mere historical artifacts, moments in the discipline’s trajectory whose present utility and further development are no longer at issue and may even have become the object of embarrassment. Yet it need not be true that the time for “political Shakespeare” has come and gone, since it has been the development best oriented toward acknowledging Shakespeare’s manifestations in, and meaning to, the nonacademic realm—which is precisely apposite to the present moment. Of late, the profession has become institutionally inclined to recognize the existence, even the pull, of a “wider public”—an inclination that is sometimes inchoate or inherent, visible as trace in the recent abeyance of the “high theory” that once dominated English studies as a whole. Such an inclination is, however, sometimes made quite vivid by more concrete occasions, as betokened by the exceptional success of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World or the more typical and market-based pressure to produce classroom-friendly studies rather than highly annotated and densely theorized scholarly monographs.5 At many points, then, it seems as though academics are being encouraged (and driven) to seek a world elsewhere. But it is a world whose interest in Shakespeare is operantly defined as the simple “outside” of scholarship, the real world beyond the putative ivory tower.6 As that suggests, it remains the case that understanding that public in complicated, even well-theorized ways has not been part of the institutional conversation. Indeed, the very need to think through what is meant by “the public” has by and large not been recognized as a problem, despite the fact that the term denotes a complex, inevitably discursive object. Naturally, it represents a demand for practical address, even as it constitutes an artifact of modern techniques concerning the statistical management of populations 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Introduction ● Extramural Shakespeare as epistemological aggregates (as with, say, opinion polls); more tellingly still is the fact that the public is the site of fantasy for academics—our “other,” as it were. The prominence of concerns about the accessibility of scholarly work to a larger audience relates to an inarticulate desire, one born of perimillennial fears of irrelevance, supersession, or even suppression by, among other things, a state whose recent manifestation was squarely on the side of an uncritical and anti-intellectual orthodoxy all the more effective for its efforts to cloak itself as a depoliticization of knowledge and to legitimate itself as the will of citizens and taxpayers. Attacks on academics that have continued since the emergence of cultural materialism usually seek to represent themselves as serving the “public interest” in higher education and usually, although not always, take state-funded universities as their battleground. When, therefore, the study of early modern literature spontaneously moves away from addressing public formations around Shakespeare as a species of politics and a new generation of scholars emerges to take up strictly literary-historical and archival research agendas, it is useful to think about how relatively autonomous moves within a discipline might nevertheless be conditioned by changing circumstances outside it—and about how varying invocations of the public that lurks outside the academy’s walls cannot but be central to the pursuit at this historical juncture. At the end of this study I shall have more to say about Shakespeare’s public, and with troubling what count as extramural formations. Even so, my principal goal is less to try to pin down the myriad and often contradictory dispensations within which an idea of a larger forum for Shakespeare is summoned forth—to define that public operationally—as it is with offering a complex rearticulation, sometimes argumentative and sometimes principally descriptive, of Shakespeare’s place in American culture in these perimillennial years. As I’ve already begun to suggest, to the extent that extramural formations demand a wall—depend, that is, on an embedded notion of the academy as ivory tower or as a space that’s unreal or otherwise exempted— every concern with extramural Shakespeare must also constitute an indirect argument about Shakespeare in the academy.7 One aim of this study is, therefore, to return to the position with which I initially took issue and which has constituted the central problem for much materialist work: that of Shakespeare in relation to power and dominance, in particular social class and the way it is presumed to be expressed by taste—which is to say, by cultural capital. After arguing that it is no longer useful to identify the possession of that capital with the work of dominance, in Extramural Shakespeare I suggest that an even more nuanced case must now be drawn in the case of Shakespeare: regardless of the status of elite culture in general, Shakespeare’s status as a synonym for an ensemble of elite 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 4 ● 5 cultural goods needs to be challenged, a challenge that in turn necessitates a historically nuanced recalibration of the sociopolitical field. It thus becomes important to recognize that this current moment is very different from the one in which Shakespeare came to signify highbrow culture at the turn of the twentieth century, which Lawrence Levine has influentially described. But even more is required, since, as I shall suggest, this perimillennial conjuncture is also not identical with the Reaganite-Thatcherite one in which the culture wars first arose and which gave rise to “political Shakespeare” in the 1980s in the first place. As I hope the preceding sketch of the social totality suggests, the aim of this study is to reposition debate on Shakespeare by challenging the failure to rethink how certain cultural properties relegated by analysis to high culture, Shakespeare preeminent among them, might nevertheless have migrated from the position of privilege to which they have been all-butpermanently consigned. Given the economic crisis that began in 2008, it would be especially foolhardy to argue that class is irrelevant to understanding national culture: doing so would in any case speak to the long-standing resistance in American analyses to accept class as a constitutive reality. Even more pointedly, it would echo the way in which the realities of growing economic inequity have become part of a rhetorical (and highly ideological) shell game, where matters of taste and consumption magically take the place of that inequity as the subject of criticism. Nevertheless, what might be called the Shakespeare-function—the sum of the myriad roles Shakespeare plays and is made to play institutionally and publicly—is far harder to read as the leading edge of economic and social relations in the perimillennial United States than it perhaps once was. That does not mean that Shakespeare has no privileged locations: in fact, one through-line of my analysis concerns the persistence of pedagogical agendas—of the social fact that Shakespeare is, above all, schoolroom matter—in media and forms that are ostensibly anything but pedagogical. Nor do I intend any sentimentality, either about cultural commonalities or, for that matter, about the fact of social resistance to Shakespeare from those who have been construed (by discourse, by self-positioning, by objective social relations) as somehow located “below” such presumably rarefied cultural property. My claim is simpler and yet, I hope, with greater productive possibilities. First, I argue that Shakespeare is part of a public culture in the United States precisely because the mass-educational project of the twentieth century made him so. Second, as a consequence, Shakespeare needs to be read dialectically: while bearing in mind the myriad ways Shakespeare still functions as a sign of rarefied status in the American imaginary, it is also important to remember that the uses of Shakespeare are not exhausted 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Introduction ● Extramural Shakespeare by his semiotic role, and that under some circumstances Shakespeare—his plays and what he represents—might still hold out the possibility for what Ernst Bloch has deemed “the dream of a better world,” the momentary glimpse of a utopian horizon that can propel longing for a more just future that has yet to arrive.8 Chapter 1, “Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium: American Culture, ‘Elites,’ the Academy—and Beyond,” therefore begins by addressing the continuing National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) initiative on “Shakespeare in American Communities,” a program meant to take Shakespeare performances to cities and towns presumed otherwise to stand outside the dispensation of his plays. Rather than offer a skeptical and symptomatic reading of this state-sponsored program, I call attention to its contradictions instead: the NEA produces Shakespeare both as an inalienable part of the U.S. imaginary and, somehow, as external to popular American experience. But, as I argue, political discourse about Shakespeare in academia has in effect chosen to reproduce the latter half of the contradiction as the whole story. That is to say, the claim that Shakespeare is elite, a rarefied cultural property rather than a public object, has hardened into a kind of fact beyond which there is no going. Whatever its historical truth (cf. Levine), it certainly has not been held to the test by a searching engagement with the concrete mechanisms by means of which Shakespeare is made pervasive in U.S. culture. Inspired by Raymond Williams’s crucial volume, I offer a Keywords-type treatment of the concept of elites: I thus consider the way the term “elite” has increasingly lost its shoring in status distinctions and has become a way to punish regimes of dissent from conservative hegemony. Yet elitism persists as a term of art in academia, a fact the more mystifying in that there has been increased awareness that academic privilege is itself ephemeral, increasingly subject to the rationalizations of the market. From there, Chapter 2, “ Pacino’s Cliffs Notes: Looking for Richard ’s ‘Public’ Shakespeare,” considers Looking for Richard, the 1996 documentary focused on Richard III that Al Pacino produced and starred in, as an index to the Shakespeare-function in America: that is, what values, resistances, and fantasies attach to him, what role the Bard is seen to play in the American imaginary. After all, it is not until mystifications are subject to analysis that I can begin to demonstrate the truth of my claim. Performance, as has been recognized, looms large in the documentary, and I allude to the way in which Pacino’s interest in bringing Shakespeare “to the people” might be correlated with (or perhaps haunted by?) Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, whose superficially similar aims were characteristic of an earlier, more clearly progressive social and political conjuncture. Pacino’s film seems both more personal and more apolitical—more in line, that is, with the general 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 6 ● 7 invocation that Shakespeare constitutes a “universally lovable object.” Even so, that Pacino starred in a Broadway production of the play in which his nonclassically trained intonations were subject to criticism opens his documentary up to the larger question of how naturalized Shakespeare is—and is recognized to be—in Britain’s former colony, more than 200 years after independence and more than 100 years after Shakespeare first became an educational inevitability. The documentary evinces an anxiety on this subject, an anxiety linked to what I deem its hidden pedagogical imperative, even though the film ostensibly values performance over scholarship as a way to know Shakespeare truly. Both because of Shakespeare’s fantasmatic ties to England and Englishness and because Shakespeare is always produced as somehow anterior or “other” with respect to U.S. culture, Pacino’s film winds up recapitulating overfamiliar pedagogical topoi in cinematic form, much like the Cliffs Notes the actor tellingly brandishes as a prop. Meanwhile, the complex ensemble of everyday responses to Shakespeare found in the documentary goes by and large unexamined, with resistance to Shakespeare introduced only so that the film can offer itself as the preeminent vehicle by which distaste and indifference may be overcome. The implicit claim seems to be that film will succeed where school has failed, a claim rendered the more contradictory for the documentary’s having been offered precisely as an adjunct to formal education. But how did the association between education and Shakespeare come to dominate the American imaginary in the first place? Given that this persistent conceptual link has been underexplored in political scholarship, I devote chapter 3, “Shakespeare Goes to School,” to addressing the educational substrate that interpellates American citizens in the regime of Shakespeare. Beyond the need to sketch a historical description, my aim in the chapter is dual. First, it is to suggest that the mass culture with which Shakespeare ought most tellingly to be linked is a culture of mass education, which began to be consolidated at the turn of the twentieth century. In this I differ from a critical practice that, like Pacino, somehow needs to locate Shakespeare “elsewhere” in order to mystify the appearance of his texts in extramural venues other than academia or some other forum of elite culture—for instance, in a hypostasized “popular culture” whose relationship to its object is figured as appropriation rather than ownership. My second aim is to focus on the College Board’s role in rendering Shakespeare an inescapable part of that mass-educational culture. The necessarily selective analysis of Shakespeare in American education I provide touches on the history leading up to the College Board, where extracts from selected plays that appeared in primers such as McGuffey’s served as rhetorical training in a nascent citizen- and subject-formation. When the mass-educational project emerges in a United 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Introduction ● Extramural Shakespeare States pressured by non-Anglophone immigration and responding to the exigencies of industrialized capital, this earlier practice comes to compete with, and be supplanted by, a newly productive—and eugenicist-inflected— understanding of Shakespeare as part of the “race knowledge” of America, even as the concept of “elites” is being refashioned to allow for newcomers. Hence, I argue, the consolidation of a pretertiary canon of plays: although reading practices were themselves increasingly drawn from an autonomous literary aesthetics, the very selection of plays to be prepared for college admission reveals a political intention at work. That intention, like the reason Shakespeare became compulsory in high school in the first place, has gone all but dead in the critical understanding. Yet without such historical insight, it is impossible to realize how Shakespeare has been mispredicated in current political criticism. This inattention also makes possible such missionary agendas as the NEA’s “Shakespeare in American Communities,” within which, as I have noted, Shakespeare is produced both as an inalienable part of the U.S. imaginary and, contradictorily, as somehow external to popular experience. In chapter 4, “The Shakespeare Film, the Market, and the Americanization of Culture,” I turn to the plethora of Shakespeare films in the 1990s to indicate that Shakespeare, while still understood as pedagogical property with strong affiliations to Britain, is increasingly becoming a market phenomenon, not unlike American education itself. As has been argued, from the beginning of the film industry, Shakespeare has been seen as a vehicle of mass uplift, a way to redeem a medium from contempt, and evidence of a sustained fantasy about popular forms rendering elite objects “accessible.” By contrasting Branagh’s monumental (marmoreal?) Hamlet with Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, I argue that filmed Shakespeare has become a prime forum for renegotiating the Shakespearefunction. While Branagh’s film echoes a reverential, pedagogical, and Anglophilic dispensation toward the Bard that is increasingly belated in American culture, Luhrmann’s insertion of capitalist tropes is of a piece with his stylistic refashioning of Shakespeare along familiarly domestic popcultural lines. Luhrmann’s film stands in for a Shakespeare understood as a direct apparatus of the market, rather as much of U.S. public culture is now itself understood. But the story does not end with the interpenetration of Shakespeare and the market in the new millennium. For all that questions of production are and should be at issue, there remains the possibility of a utopian surplus, of Shakespeare as a repository for “social dreaming”—a recognition, that is, that Shakespearean formations, even when imbricated in questions of political economy and acts of hegemony, can still be useful, can still signify beyond 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 8 ● 9 those confines. In a final chapter entitled “Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter” that addresses the contradictions posed by a public radio show featuring a production of Hamlet by prison inmates, I consider how the distance established by public radio from its objects unexpectedly redoubles a a discourse within which “identification” with Shakespeare has become an object of suspicion: the resistance to the Shakespearean manifested by political criticism has, it seems, become the toothless new dominant. I argue nevertheless for the necessity of acknowledging what these prisoners say of their own relationship to the play and for accepting the challenge of understanding how Shakespeare, despite the constraining features of prison education programs and despite the fact that the texts cannot but be fetishized and ideologically fraught, might nevertheless represent the possibility of enlargement in all the complex and variable senses of that word. If, as I conclude, Shakespeare is a public object, then there is a progressive politics in allowing anyone who deems himself or herself addressed by the texts—who is constituted as part of Shakespeare’s public—to escape the hermeneutics of suspicion and the charge of class treachery with which the desire to be Shakespeareanized has for too long been embroiled. In closing, I offer a few meditations on the utility of a model of public culture, perhaps most recently popularized in the field of anthropology and via the journal to which it has given a name. It seems increasingly evident from its practice, if not from its accounts of itself, that academic scholarship no longer fears to embrace questions of value as they accrue around Shakespeare. If I am right, then this study is timely: in arguing for a salutary displacement of Shakespeare from the realm of the elite and his consequent and complex embeddedness in a public culture broadly construed, I hope to keep critical reflection on Shakespeare as a cultural object alive to new possibilities and new conjunctures. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Introduction 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 This page intentionally left blank Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium: American Culture, “Elites,” the Academy—and Beyond This was not a fight we looked for . . . All those East Coast elites had to take it to the courts . . . Rick Santorum, July 2004, in favor of the constitutional amendment against gay marriage The Pennsylvania Republican [Santorum] directed his colleagues to link . . . Democrats to the “Hollywood/entertainment elite,” and asserted that “Hollywood’s values are not America’s values.” Mark Preston, Roll Call, July 19, 2004 Governmental, nonprofit, and communications elites in particular are overwhelmingly liberal in their outlooks. So are academics. The radical students of the 1960s have become tenured professors, particularly in elite institutions. As Stanley Rothman observes, “Social science faculties at elite universities are overwhelmingly liberal and cosmopolitan or on the Left. Almost any form of civic loyalty or patriotism is considered reactionary.” Liberalism tends to go with irreligiosity as well. Samuel Huntington, “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite” (2004) In an elite composed of individuals who find their way into it solely for their individual pre-eminence, the differences of background will be so great, that they will be united only by their common 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 CHAPTER 1 ● Extramural Shakespeare interests, and separated by everything else. An elite must therefore be attached to some class, whether higher or lower: but so long as there are classes at all it is likely to be the dominant class that attracts this elite to itself. What would happen in a classless society—which is more difficult to envisage than people think— brings us into the area of conjecture. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) * * * I n keeping with the extramural agenda of this study, I begin by stepping outside the confines of a particular text or formation to get our bearings on Shakespeare in American culture in the years around the millennium. If, as is my premise for this study, a new conjuncture has emerged whose contours challenge received descriptions of Shakespeare’s writing as metonymous for elite culture, what, precisely, has changed? How has the concept of elitism shifted in register and function from the period some one hundred years ago, when, as Lawrence Levine has argued, Shakespeare first became “highbrow”? Is elitism still a discourse reliably linked with the myriad forms of social, political, and economic power beyond those circumscribed by the academy, where Shakespeare is undeniably ensconced? Do changes within academia in any way affect the questions I’ve raised? And most significantly, if Shakespeare is not strictly elite, then how can we link the answers to the questions I’ve already posed to offer a more complex, more accurate account of the place his plays occupy in the American imaginary? My epigraphs have already indicated that recent political discourse has registered a shift in what might be called our national conversation around the place and value of elitism: certainly, the more recent statements emerging from the right side of the political spectrum suggest that at the very least, to be a member of an elite is no longer a good thing.1 But however suggestive such remarks are that elitism has changed in affective sign and register, I need to demonstrate that the change is more than adventitious rhetoric and that it subtends more than mere excoriation of dissent. Hence the significance of an ongoing initiative first announced on Shakespeare’s birthday in 2003, “Shakespeare in American Communities,” by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA’s role in the funding of culture (or, rather, Culture) has made it a bellwether of national ambivalence about—indeed, queasiness at—the meaning of elitism in art for the nation-state ever since the so-called culture wars in the late 1980s and 1990s.2 Even as such skirmishes have mutated into aggressive maneuvers around religion and state policy that usually leave the arts behind, the 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 12 ● 13 agency that occasioned them with its individual artist grants to controversial performance artist Karen Finley and others, and its support of an exhibition devoted to the queer-themed photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, has drastically shifted its emphasis: in the perimillennial period, the NEA has operated to ratify a tacit consensus about the official limits allowed to art with respect to formal experimentation and ideologically challenging content, limits enforced in the name of the nation-state and its standards of aesthetic and corporeal decency (at least as subtended by and equivalent to taxpayer dollars). It is worth noting that the year before Santorum spoke against elites on both East and West coasts, the NEA, former sponsor of outlier art, saw its place as bringing Shakespeare to America in order to counter what Dana Gioia (former chairman of the NEA) described as the institution’s “inherent problem of elitism.”3 As might be expected, the substitution of Shakespeare for more avantgarde artistic practitioners was duly celebrated among conservative commentators: witness the National Review opinion piece by Roger Kimball, which ran under the celebratory headline “Goodbye Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare.”4 But it is equally worth noting that the project continues, even flourishes, to this day under the Obama administration. Given the fact of its continuation, the NEA’s definitive shift in investment from Finley and Mapplethorpe to Shakespeare seems to reveal that any comcomitant shift in the discourse of elitism has proven more durable than the circumstances of its emergence. Even so, those immediate circumstances are pertinent to my argument. Performance art such as Finley’s might arguably, as Shakespeare so frequently has, be called elite, at least in the sense common to most experimental and avant-garde practices of being intelligible as a complex intervention in the field of artistic production, and acceptable as such, only to a comparative few. The rarefaction of her art, however, was not precisely the problem. Instead, the art that generated controversy was understood only too well, on an inchoate, emotional level, as an affront to “community standards”—standards, that is, whose ad hoc manufacture, by politicians and media alike, nevertheless had some indeterminate purchase on a broader horizon of value. This implicit linkage between elite formations and a “general public” is historically distinct, and it tells us a lot about the horizon on which Shakespeare has since loomed large. In moving from Finley to Shakespeare, the NEA has effectively offered the Bard as a fantasmatic corrective to the coterie practices of an art elite inclined to give offense by an agency newly rededicated to serving the “public good” in its potentially most anodyne form (and thereby increased the agency’s funding during a time when such financing has been increasingly hard to come by). For this substitution to have the political efficacy intended for it, and the endurance 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare it has shown, it is important that Shakespeare be, precisely, not elite; instead, he must be represented as a birthright. When “Shakespeare in American Communities” was first announced by Dana Gioia, it was designed to send noted regional theater companies across the country to perform a limited repertory of Shakespeare plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Richard III, and Othello. Thus its twin aims: the reinvigoration of a touring theater-company tradition and the introduction of “a new generation of audiences to the greatest writer in the English language.”5 As the phrase “new generation” betokens, this initiative presents the future as a form of return, a recourse to a moment in history when other generations also got to know their Shakespeare through the efforts of acting troupes dedicated to his works; as part of its legitimation narrative, the NEA’s associated pamphlet provides a capsule overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical pervasiveness in America, especially in the nineteenth century.6 Gioia makes clear what’s at stake in this return when he avers that a genealogical relation exists between national formations and Shakespearean ones: “I think it’s impossible to understand American culture or American theater without understanding Shakespeare,” a sentiment that would be roughly familiar to anyone who attended the breaking of ground for the Folger Library, or, for that matter, who recalls the 2007 initiative in the U.S. capital, “Shakespeare in Washington.”7 At the same time, however, the state’s interest in Shakespeare is not strictly as an alreadydemocratic alternative to decadent and offensive coterie practices, but as one that is potentially so—or, rather, one whose relation to the nation-state is both national precondition and an occasion for messianism. Hence the need to fund renewed national exposure to this “once universally accessible dramatist” who is now (lamentably) “our most sacred dramatist—to whom most audiences [are] not able to relate.”8 In keeping with the rhetoric of outreach, the Web site for this initiative, also funded by Sallie Mae and with honorary co-chairs Laura Bush and the late Jack Valenti, the former president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, suggests that its efforts to promulgate Shakespeare are unprecedented, and unprecedentedly wide, in terms that might raise the suspicions of skeptically minded interlocutors. In the words of Valenti, “unless you know, read, and hear [Shakespeare’s] magic stories, there is a vacancy in your life.”9 And presumably such vacancies are pervasive, given the necessity of bringing productions of the plays to all fifty states, and especially of sending NEA-funded Shakespeare to counties and regions that have seldom if ever seen federal arts money or, it has been claimed, professional Shakespeare. “Shakespeare in American Communities,” therefore, presents us with an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, Shakespeare is 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 14 ● 15 foundational to American culture; on the other, he is beyond the experience of far too many Americans. Gioia’s postulation of Shakespeare’s centrality must be at odds with Valenti’s belief that Shakespeare has not been seen outside major urban population centers: it appears as a difference between Shakespeare’s dominant place in official ideologies—what critical consensus has generally deemed his “elite” status—and the fact of his removal from the everyday lives of many American citizens. Valenti’s sentiment is of a piece with his words on the necessity of exposure to Shakespeare; or, rather, the second sentiment constitutes a corollary to the first. In this dispensation, completeness of life and, notably, education is coextensive with knowledge of Shakespeare. Because this is so, and because Shakespeare, like many cultural objects on which a high value has been placed, is presumably more readily found in major cities on the coasts rather than in the putative heartland, “Shakespeare in American Communities” exists to bring—or is it restore?—ever-greater numbers of U.S. citizens into the purview of sweet triumph, witty composition, and profound relevance. It is worth noting that the initiative appears to be flourishing: during 2009–2010, for instance, thirty-seven theater companies in twenty-five states and the District of Columbia will have conducted performances under its aegis.10 Notable, too, is the fact that the initial rhetorical emphasis on performance has been supplemented in practice by the dissemination of educational materials and by pedagogical agendas in middle and especially high schools: it thereby makes good on a historically durable linkage between Shakespeare and pedagogy, a linkage I will explore in chapters 2 and 3. But for now, I want to focus on the readiness with which a critique of the NEA’s inevitably contradictory rhetoric could be sketched. Indeed, perhaps too readily. Its apparently familiar claims about Shakespeare’s centrality might lead one to misdiagnose the shifts in underlying conditions that generate the symptoms and thus ignore what may be new in their articulation. What interests me about the publicity materials for “Shakespeare in American Communities” is not the way they seem to confirm a number of alreadyavailable narratives about the hegemony of the high literary, the fetishization of an apparently anodyne Shakespeare, and the insistent alignment of aesthetic and national values carried over from the old into the new millennium, even though all these points might still have their place. Nor am I interested at the moment in addressing the historical ignorance that gives rise to a missionary zeal to promulgate Shakespeare—a zeal all the more puzzling since it seems to contradict its own postulate that Shakespeare, as foundational, is constitutive of Americanness itself. Rather, what draws me to the project is the way it does not wholly respond to the obvious critiques, the way its meaning exceeds the provocation of immediate circumstances. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare The critical analysis to which the NEA project might yield itself is not precisely exhausted by an indignant focus on ideology; to the extent that this is so, “Shakespeare in American Communities” betokens the necessity to find a new way to talk about the politics of Shakespeare in perimillennial America, the motive for this study. Curiously enough, the NEA’s rhetoric—and, for that matter, the aims of the initiative as a whole—rhymes with the way that progressive academics have characterized the Shakespeare-function during the last twenty years or so. As my emphasis might have already suggested, the central feature of this harmony is the claim that geographical rarefaction means something: it is the sign of the uneven dispersal of high culture and also of the preferred habitations of the privileged few whose access to Shakespeare is a matter of propinquity, not only of elective affinity.11 Such cities are also home to many of the United States’ best-known cultural institutions. Thus bringing Shakespearean plays to “cities and towns” that have not had the opportunity to witness them is tantamount to leveling the cultural playing field, presumably while prizing Shakespeare from rarefied clutches. Topical fantasies of democratic access aside, however, the view of Shakespeare espoused by “Shakespeaee in American Communities” does not seem all that different from that propounded by leftist critics in the 1980s and 1990s, and taken as given ever since. While matters of location have not in themselves loomed large in academic discussion, that Shakespeare is elite is all but an article of faith in academic discourse seeking to address literature as a social formation. It is a governing premise of this study that such a characterization is that rarest of Barthesian myths: one that, for different reasons, solicits assent from both Right and Left, and one that it is more than time to question. As Barthes familiarly argued, at the heart of such mythmaking lies a motivated tendency to substitute Nature for History and so to naturalize power-saturated assertions concerning social reality.12 Myth is typically a bourgeois activity—which is to say, an apparatus of cultural dominance; for this reason, Barthes pronounced myth on the Left a rarity, deeming it “inessential” with respect to the commonplaces about family, marriage, nation, and value necessary to bourgeois life. But that is because his notion of leftist mythography is derived from obsolescent socialist-realist modes, with their emphasis on “man the producer” (Barthes, 146–147). Current progressive myths concerning elite formations take on a different form. Rather than celebrate the laboring masses directly, these myths (promulgated until recently by, among other elements, cultural studies scholars) honor their habits of consumption, particularly when it comes to mass culture. That mass culture is presumed to be coextensive with the tastes of subordinated 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 16 ● 17 or economically disempowered populations, and that, moreover, the study of mass-cultural representations constitutes a form of solidarity with those populations, have become near-articles of faith in academia among scholars interested in relating the study of literature and the possession of literacy with power.13 To say as much is not to deny that such study has had progressive agency, nor that the many subtle readings of mass-cultural artifacts generated under this dispensation have been merely celebratory and undialectical in their response to popular tastes. But it is not my aim to identify what political impulse might continue to be honored in the name of mass culture. Instead, I want to call attention to the two significant questions that have been laid by the wayside as a result: whether, in general, elite cultural forms in the perimillennial United States continue to have the power historically ascribed to them; and above all, whether Shakespeare, in particular, is the inalienable property of elites—as opposed, strictly speaking, to their taste, avocation, or phantasm of privilege, but also as opposed to the possibility that at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, Shakespeare is so widely dispersed, and so institutionally plural, that it makes little sense to think of his texts as anything but public culture. Unlike its conservative counterpart, leftist mythographic discourse has not been altogether guilty of dissociating the Shakespeare-function in the United States from the material determinants that undergird the production and promulgation of Shakespeare. But in choosing to work within the either/or hydraulics of a culture understood as permanently divided between high and low, materialist Shakespeare criticism, like much cultural criticism in general, has found itself retracing the movements of a debate that began half a century ago, with the ever-greater accommodation of cultural products to the forces of industrialization. The influence of the culture industry, whose mass-produced fantasies were held to traduce genuine art, was an urgent point of argument for Frankfurt School critics such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as for American intellectuals such as Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald.14 Such argument, however, now has the character of a received gesture, a truth beyond which there has been no going. The current stasis is all the more peculiar in that it was originally the purpose of cultural studies in general, and of cultural materialist analyses of Shakespeare in particular, to question whether such truths were as fixed, as “natural,” as they appeared to be. Surprisingly, later proponents of this position seem to have chosen to ignore the fact that the historical conditions isolating Shakespeare from “the masses” continue to shift, and that progressive criticism interested in examining Shakespeare as a cultural object needs therefore to shift correspondingly. What was once a salutary 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare observation—that Shakespeare, understood as cultural capital, is the antithesis of demotic culture—has come to seem an immutable state of affairs. This is despite the fact that an increasingly pluralistic and market-based model of cultural goods has effectively put paid to the long struggle between high and low, elite and popular, that consumed twentieth-century debates about culture, class, and the production of public consciousness. When, however, what sells is an increasingly privatized, and endlessly customizable, range of texts and pleasures, and when the NEA motto of “A great nation deserves great art” equates that art with the narcissistic reward structures of the market writ large enough to accommodate the self-aggrandizing state, it no longer makes sense to quibble about binary cultural hydraulics. And when the privileges (real and fantasmatic) of academia have increasingly come under ideological and economic siege, it seems misplaced to apologize for having once had faith in redemptive cultural objects and for the forms of high literacy that it takes to profess them. Although the United States is my principal locus of engagement, the fact is that critical studies of Shakespearean relations, like much of cultural studies itself, first flourished in Britain, where the relationship between access to high literary capital and class privilege has been pursued with greater vigor than it has tended to be here. Notable in this regard is the critical formation cultural materialism. While not all of its practitioners engaged with presentday cultural registers, they nevertheless variously worked to demystify the presumptive value neutrality of literary studies and to position Shakespeare as a principal vehicle of hegemony and national heritage. Indeed, it was within this formation that the first linkage between Shakespeare and mythography was articulated. As Graham Holderness suggested in the preface to his edited collection The Shakespeare Myth, that myth functioned like a particularly valuable piece of British currency bearing the image of the Bard: “The fortunate holder of a Shakespearean banknote possesses both monetary wealth and aesthetic richness; and by virtue of that possession is integrated, both materially and culturally, into the hegemonic ideologies of bourgeois society.”15 At the time his collection was published, Holderness’s elegantly compressed formulation and the work it introduced represented an exciting and urgent demystification of Shakespeare worship, and hence of myth as understood in the hegemonic terms that principally preoccupied Barthes. And attention to popular culture was of a piece with that demystification, since popular culture, whatever the problems with its relationship to democratic formations of taste and whatever blind eye it turned to industrially imposed practices of consumption, was deemed nevertheless to represent a realm of comfort and familiarity for nonbourgeois subjects. Hence to find Shakespeare contained in popular forms was to find evidence—or 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 18 ● 19 perhaps, to express a hope—that the authority of dominant culture was being burlesqued, and with it the hegemonic values that Shakespeare was presumed to perpetuate.16 The most frequently used critical term to describe this act of popular burlesque has been “appropriation”—but this is a term whose utility to formations around Shakespeare demands further scrutiny.17 Appropriation is akin to theft, the taking of private property: in critical circles the concept was given initial currency by the conceptual artist Sherrie Levine’s “appropriations” of Walker Evans’s photographs through rephotographing them, making her copies all but indistinguishable from the originals and thereby erasing any boundary between authorized and unauthorized. That is, she treated those originals, attached to the name of an author and possessed of discrete market value, as a form of public property, to be taken and drawn upon as needed, and hence as part of a cultural repertory transcending mere propertarian relations. What started off as embedded in propriety and possession ends up dissolving the distinction between realms: the appropriated image enters public culture.18 To reposition arenas thought to be opposed and antithetical is, I aver, the real legacy of an act of “appropriation.” And that repositioning is what renders Holderness’s demystification—and the myriad other moments associated with cultural materialism as well as with cultural studies—in danger of calcification. Insofar as the discourse of appropriation has been understood to depend on an apparently unending dynamic of elite and popular, of possession on the one hand and theft for the purpose of reuse on the other, it turns, as Barthes observed apropos of myth, the historical into the natural. Such stasis reappears, comparatively dematerialized, in American studies of popular Shakespeare, as in Douglas Lanier’s admirable Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, which usefully explores a wealth of texts in a number of different registers—film and music among them—and which principally defines its twin objects in familiarly binary terms.19 Indeed, merely by supposing surprise at finding a reference to Shakespeare in popular culture, Lanier cannot but reify the cultural registers that are the site of his interrogation: One way to answer the question “What is Shakespeare doing in popular culture?” is to recognize that these allusions are doing something, that pop culture uses Shakespeare to create meaning and not merely as an inert decoration or simple-minded token of prestige. Shakespeare’s appearances in pop culture typically involve interplay between two cultural systems—high and pop culture—that operate in parallel realms, two bodies of reference, sets of cultural institutions, canons of aesthetic 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare standards, modes of constructing cultural authority. That interplay takes many forms, some harmonious, some reciprocal, some recuperative, some competitive, some antagonistic, and even some unstable combinations of these. But at its heart is a contest for authority between the two cultural systems and the institutional interests they represent. (16) The very fact of the initial question asserts that Shakespeare cannot be said to properly belong in any of the myriad locales the study details. As is inevitable with such governing premises, Lanier’s study effectively polices a boundary that it purports merely to describe; even more, and more perversely, while submerging its object in the detritus of the everyday, it winds up confirming Shakespeare’s privilege simply by suggesting that it can be polluted by submersion, if only in passing. Although the passage I’ve cited acknowledges the conservative position still articulated in publications like The New Criterion, which defend high culture from the siege it is presumed to be under from the taste of the masses, in practice any sense of dialectical possibility collapses into a unitary vector. Indeed, Lanier’s position, like that of other critics working in the field, represents a mere inversion of the earlier intellectual orthodoxy. In this latter view, a high culture whose authority has been contested for at least a century has, for all analytical intents and purposes, remained unaffected by any struggle for cultural dominance, not to mention any changes in the material conditions to which this struggle might be related. This exemption of a hypostatized elite culture from scrutiny renders popular culture always agitating and yet, pathetically, always without agency. Dominant Shakespearean formations apparently maintain their hegemony by inertia, since their propositional and ideological content remains unaffected by the emergence of other spheres of cultural production. Curiously, then, a popular culture that interests critics because it hints at resistance expressed via a politics of taste remains interesting despite, or perhaps because of, its very lack of success in accomplishing its goal. In effect, a contest between cultural registers becomes a licensed, indeed formalized and highly structured, carnival.20 Hence another of my aims, which is to suggest that that political work continue by other modes of intervention, that it not rest at rendering Shakespeare as merely an object of theft and suspicion. To reiterate that claim is to be involved in an unconsciously duplicitous motion, where academics’ own ambivalently experienced yet unabated access to Shakespearean goods is straitened into a narrative of repudiation and disavowal, a sign, perhaps, of guilt at the possession of a cultural capital presumed (I would argue, wrongly) to be inalienable from the power to oppress. 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 20 ● 21 That the conversation about political Shakespeare, when it still occurs, is often identified with the need for self-recrimination needs little effort to demonstrate. Take, for instance, Sharon O’Dair’s passionate and provocative repudiation of her own formation, her movement from child of the working class to an academic with a Ph.D. who teaches Shakespeare.21 Her study suggests that her gradual investment in academic discipline and performance marks the occasion of her tacit treason to her class, a treason betokened by her willingness to jettison the preferred markers of class taste, preeminent among them a distaste for Shakespeare. The melancholy fact must be acknowledged that such a claim, while laudably conscious of academia’s imbrication in social relations, makes one’s entire career an act of bad faith, or a sin of commission that an academic monograph can inevitably do little to expiate. Apart from what such acknowledgment reveals about widespread academic self-criticism, however, there remain two larger hypotheses undergirding O’Dair’s argument pertinent to my analysis. The first concerns the apparent belief that the connection between social class and aesthetic taste is both immutable and uninflectable—that Shakespeare, having once been identified with elites and as elite, is understood to be of little interest to working-class subjects everywhere and at all times except insofar as they are “ideological dupes,” captive of a collaborationist impulse.22 (Rejecting this belief is not the same thing as a critic’s believing all such subjects ought to be exposed to Shakespeare; there is a difference between understanding social complexity and missionary advocacy that I will strive to maintain.) The second, far more important, is that matters of taste still constitute the leading edge of politics, a position that has as its corollary the assumption that popular culture is genuinely a “culture of the people” and hence that the affirmative study of it carries more progressive political value than the study of the canon.23 Of the latter of these two questions I have already written at some length elsewhere: as John Frow has acutely suggested in his analysis of what counts as “value” in cultural studies work, academic interest in popular culture is not an escape from canon formation and the drawing of distinctions but an extension of such work, as one might expect when it comes to professionalized writing about representation and aesthetics.24 Whatever political efficacy the analysis of popular forms might offer has been subject to contestation for some time: even avowedly utopian critics such as Fredric Jameson can offer only hypotheses about reading potentialities, confined as they are to the ambit of the text and to the historical as a form of allegorical figuration.25 And because the high-cultural text has suffered from being cast, in terms made (in)famous by Matthew Arnold, as a vehicle of uplift, the myriad ways in which it might work other than as ideological mystification have 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare eluded the institutional capture of cultural studies critics. That is, although one point of emergence for cultural studies was the study of canonical literary texts, the field has long since shifted its energies to popular forms, leaving the status of so-called high culture apparently unaffected by the social, political, and economic changes to which the popular forms are considered subject. Strangely, such inattentiveness to how high culture might function in a new historical conjuncture—if, indeed, it is to have an important role— winds up reinforcing the very ideological postulates of universality and timelessness with which that culture has been taxed. Exchange the earlier, anodyne propositions about “the human condition” with somewhat newer ones about hegemony and domination, exchange reflexive reading strategies with equally unenergetic propositions about high culture’s power continually being subverted from below, and you wind up more or less in the same place: stuck. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the kind of cultural criticism in which I am engaged has all but vanished from Shakespeare studies. The impasse to which I’ve just alluded circles back to the first of my hypotheses, concerning the one-to-one correspondence between elite cultural goods and elite social status. As is well-known, Lawrence Levine, in his influential Highbrow/Lowbrow, argues that Shakespeare, like opera, went from popular entertainment in the nineteenth century to the preserve of the moneyed and educated in the twentieth, a place where to all analytical intents and purposes both remain to this day. In the place of a culture united in enthusiastic enjoyment of, and familiarity with, a wide range of Shakespearean plays, in Levine’s version of American modernity there opens instead a yawning division between popular taste, which the entertainment market exists to serve, and the more rarefied palates for which bel canto singing and Shakespearean theater are habitual pleasures. And in place of an engagement with the specificities of historical subjects understood via the complex interplay of regional factors, race, educational levels, class, ethnicity, and gender, Levine instead definitively registers a linear shift in the ground of discussion to practices of consumption and hierarchies of taste. While Levine’s groundbreaking study can scarcely be held accountable for the way that these questions of taste have become linked to what is and is not “authentically” American, it is worth noting the extent to which his descriptive model seems to have conquered the field. Even critics of Shakespeare who with some justice point to Levine’s work as a nostalgic evocation of a common culture disagree mainly about relative emphasis rather than with the continuing utility of placing Shakespeare in the superlunary realm.26 However, the parallels he draws between opera and Shakespeare as comparably elite forms do not stand up to material scrutiny, and it is the collapse of those parallels that reveals the inadequacies of his model to the 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 22 ● 23 present moment. It is of course true that Shakespeare and opera benefit from the support of privileged institutions and classes such as Levine touches on: witness the NEA. It is also true that both can be united under the sign of Europhilic culture, a generally bourgeois aesthetic disposition toward the Old World and its cultural goods. But analysis need not stop there. The expenses associated with opera as it is put forward in the United States, from training singers and musicians to mounting large-scale productions to the cost of attendance, are not in any way reinforced or valorized by a national educational discourse in which Verdi, Wagner—indeed, even music training in the form of school bands—are considered central. That Shakespeare is an increasingly ineluctable part of education in America is not, in contrast, open to much contestation: the focus on pedagogy added by “Shakespeare in American Communities” to its originally performance-focused initiative makes that clear enough. Perhaps even more tellingly, though, opera has thus far appeared to be beyond the imaginative and ideological reach of a demand that its stage be in some sense a microcosm of the nation-state in its representation of the civic body, a demand that, when it is made, cannot but suggest there is something at stake for the national imaginary in who plays its parts.27 While the many accomplished African American opera singers are of course duly noted and celebrated, casting practices that would now be considered offensive on the Shakespearean stage still seem to pass without very much remark in opera. It is no longer remotely thinkable for any white actor, let alone one of the stature of Laurence Olivier, to put on black face in order to portray Othello; however, there appears to be nothing at stake for American public culture when a tenor such as Placido Domingo has done the same to embody his Verdian counterpart Otello. As I’ve been told, a good tenor is hard to find. When aesthetics trumps politics, indeed, when the separation between the two remains highly naturalized, we might imagine that that is simply because the forces of ideological enforcement have not yet stormed the battlements, that opera constitutes a zone of exemption from the culture wars to which I’ve earlier referred. Precisely: opera can have continued its embrace of a practice that has long been delegitimated and found offensive when it comes to the Shakespearean stage, because its comparatively rarefied, indeed, recondite, status protects it from wider scrutiny. One is of course not to imagine that all operagoers are secretly reactionary partisans of a high-class minstrel show.28 Rather, it is because opera, unlike Shakespeare, does not matter to the imaginary of the United States that its racial impersonations do not incite controversy. Opera’s very internationalism—manifested in everything from casts and conductors to the still-general practice of not translating the sung lyrics into English—represents an outmoded metonym for the dominant class, 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare or, rather, represents a taste that, while once indeed the sign of social and economic preeminence, is now in danger of being associated with un-Americanness in the current political climate. Hence my initial epigraph from Samuel Huntington. One hundred years after the Gilded Age brought into being a network of institutions dedicated to displaying and preserving an Arnoldian notion of culture as “the best that has been thought and said in ‘the world’ ” (i.e., Europe and particularly Britain)—and one hundred years after Shakespeare first became an entrance requirement for admission to elite universities— governing elites no longer need a public dedication to European art forms as a leading sign for, and legitimation of, their power. At issue here is the continued utility of the idea of cultural capital, a term derived from the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and widely adopted in American academia, thanks in part to John Guillory’s book of the same name.29 Michèle Lamont’s comparative sociological study of the upper middle classes in the United States and France confirms what might well have been suspected of a nation sometimes adjudged “anti-intellectual”: acquiring cultural sophistication and symbolic capital—what John Guillory described as the high literacy for which the canon is a simply a convenient vehicle and which is generally comprehended by “cultural capital”—does not matter very much to professionals and managers in Indianapolis and New York; it matters far less than it does, in fact, to their counterparts in Paris and ClermontFerrand.30 Lamont’s study serves as a salutary reminder of the need to emulate Pierre Bourdieu’s nuanced attention to the specificities of a national formation even as we adapt his terms of analysis. For all the conceptual power of “cultural capital” in delineating some historical aspects of the interplay of class, taste, and power, in America there persists an alternative crystallization around the self-made, pragmatic subject as the avatar of success within American capitalism, a crystallization that governs most popular articulations of power and influence. Such myths are perhaps on the ascendant, given the glee with which Bill Gates’s lack of academic credentials has been circulated, and given as well the promotion of the relentlessly self-mythologizing Donald Trump as a point of mass aspiration. His television show, “The Apprentice,” which until its turn to celebrity charity work featured applicants eager to prove their business moxie, merely makes overt the governing premise that most “reality” shows cover over with an arbitrary grid of exoticized difficulty: the model of success on offer, and defined in terms of a pot of money at the end, is an enactment of the imaginary of capitalism—and it depends on grit, luck, dirty tricks, and mass-cultural star appeal. If Golden Age plutocrats at the turn of the prior century sought the inoculation provided by 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 24 ● 25 philanthropy and the trappings of traditional Europeanized high culture, and educational reformers of the time increasingly positioned Shakespeare as a gateway to university admission, their latter-day counterparts generally feel no such pressure, no need to assume the protective coloration even of residual Anglophilia (Trump’s excessively gilded and mirrored residence is a domestic, almost “vulgar,” simulacrum of high bourgeois taste in European decor: Vegas-style luxury with precious materials). Increasingly, bourgeois tastes have become disarticulated from bourgeois power; instead, those tastes constitute a residual formation, regardless of whether they are espoused from Right or Left. Indeed, given the rush to affiliate Shakespeare with elitism and the failure, thus far, to make good on the belief that he can be disarticulated from hegemonic formulations, it appears sometimes that the only people left who articulate the affirmative value of bourgeois culture are politically reactionary, fighting a rear-guard action not only against “tenured radicals” but against the emergent market populism of an even newer Right than has been on the ascendant in the United States. Coincident with that ascension, the power of “elite culture” as a sign has increasingly shifted from positive to negative, as the epigraph from Huntington suggests. Even his title, “Dead Souls,” tropes (via its reference to Gogol’s text) the cultural capital ascribed to elites, while suggesting it is a form of baggage that murders the American spirit. Although public figures such as Huntington do not reserve the scorn for opera that they do toward national avant-gardes and the production of new aesthetic forms, when governing elites in the United States effectively repudiate European cultural production and values—the aesthetic products of the political formation “old Europe,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive phrase—it is to position themselves securely within a fantasmatic national consensus that sees popular taste not just as a market but as the core point of reference for identity as an American. In fact, that taste has become an increasingly valuable locus of reduction and condensation for a host of economic and political agendas—a form of alibi, as it were, in which attending to popular entertainment or market demographics stands in for attending to the material conditions under which most American citizens live. Under current conditions, in which economic power, popular taste, and the state are united hegemonically, the persistence of initiatives such as “Shakespeare in American Communities” cannot signify that the same old ideological work critiqued by cultural materialism is being performed via Shakespeare, despite their superficial similarity to past formations. All the more reason, then, for any study of Shakespeare in American public culture to be suspicious of the stories we already know how to tell—or, to put it more pungently, of the performances that actually inscribe what they 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare purport merely to reflect. If increasingly state institutions and their agents reject the elitism signified by European high culture but strenuously protect Shakespeare, it is not simply because of the structural hypocrisy of power, which says one thing and means another—although, as I shall suggest later, the referential register of “elite” in American discourse is far from coherent or straightforward. Partly, it is because Shakespeare’s nationalization goes beyond the control of the elites to whom Levine has the Bard surrendered at the turn of the last century. But partly it involves recognizing how the political study of Shakespeare has become disarticulated from the structural transformations of academic labor that have occurred in these perimillennial years. Academics’ use of the term “elite” to designate Shakespeare (and, by extension, themselves) is not only a misapprehension of its textual object: it has become an unwitting concession to the hegemony of the market and its political agents. * * * One way to bring the unwitting concession into view is via a study of the semantic field within which elitism emerged and now operates. “Elite” and “elitism” are among the terms ripe for the Keywords treatment identified with Raymond Williams, since they are politically efficacious terms whose historically determinate semantic and ideological shifts stand in need of unconcealing.31 Although in cultural criticism “elite” and “popular” seem, like high and low, a natural and mutually constitutive binary, in fact they are radically asymmetrical, since the career of the latter term is far longer and more substantial, and thus a significant index of changing social relations.32 In what seems like a fortuitous coincidence for a study on Shakespeare and the public imaginary, “popular” emerges in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, in senses both political and cultural. It is unclear what purchase, if any, the word had on actually existing formations drawing on the will of large number of the underclass; nevertheless, it is plausible to suggest that the word operated not unlike a structure of feeling, a semantic-historical promise of a realm of broader-based practices. And yet, unlike “popular” or, for that matter, such words as “literature” or “culture,” “elite” is a term whose history startles most for its apparent brevity rather than for its mutating signification. A search of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance, reveals an unexpected discontinuity in the history of usage. “Elite” first comes into the English language in the fourteenth century as a synonym for “elect” and was used, like that word, to denote someone chosen (from L. eligere) in a specifically religious sense—hence the few citations, all to bishops and other episcopal persons.33 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 26 ● 27 Then, if the historical dictionary is to be trusted, “elite” all but disappears from usage for some 500 years—even during a period in which distinctions based on rank were, by common agreement, being challenged by those based on wealth. This is not to say that the discourse of choice and distinction disappears altogether. Rather, it was signaled by the word “aristocracy,” which, in addition to the familiar modern sense of a distinction of nobility based on blood and heritable title, was used more broadly, in a way concomitant with its Greek etymology, to refer to a mode of government by the “best” citizens of a state. Hence Elyot’s 1531 Booke Called the Governour: “In the Greke tunge called Aristocratia . . . in englisshe, the rule of men of beste disposicion.” Indeed, a supporting citation in the OED to Volpone, in a passage that also mentions the Senate, seems to suggests a deliberate, and potentially conservative, classicism—a usage that by extension brings education to the forefront and potentially furthered by Hobbes, who, in 1651, defined the aristocracy as the formation “wherein the highest magistrate is chosen out of those that have had the best education.” Gibbon’s 1781 usage appears to translate political referentiality further into the terms valorized by Enlightenment discourse: hence “a perfect Aristocracy of reason and virtue.” Although in 1850 Thomas Carlyle wrote straightforwardly of “the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best,” the apparent (and unqualified) nostalgia of that “again” suggests not some lost and Periclean Golden Age, but rather, a semantic slippage that the OED, in a rare bit of overt editorialism, laconically locates with the French Revolution: whereas earlier usages launched themselves against pervasive monarchy, later ones, the dictionary avers, see democracy, the rule of the many, the “popular,” as opposed to the chosen, as the competing form of political life. Over time the sense of the word mutates still more: as the OED definition suggests, “The term is popularly extended to include all those by birth or fortune occupy a position distinctly above the rest of the community” (OED, “aristocracy,” 5). If the OED’s genealogy is to be trusted, the more recent connotations of “aristocracy” all but set the stage for the reemergence of “elite,” which returns to English through French, overtly stripped of its religious connotations, to denote the “choice part of flower (of society or of any body or class of persons).”34 Byron’s 1823 Don Juan is the first text cited—“With other Countesses of Blank—but rank; / At once the ‘lie’ and the ‘elite’ of crowds”—a phrase whose mocking employment of the term juxtaposes aristocratic title with namelessness and rank with the mob, effectively undermining any purchase on actually existing status distinctions, while it raises the question of what sort of discursive and social universe Byron was thus trying to put to the sword. Few usages are so dismissive, however: apart 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare from technical extensions of the term into botany or typography, “elite” has seemed rather durably to take over the functions of a politically delegitimated “aristocracy,” a word that since the late eighteenth century had assumed the taint of heritable privilege, of a nobility of the blood. Of particular interest is T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture of 1948: the truncated phrase from it cited by the OED, “An elite-governed society,” barely hints at the connection the poet sought to forge between power and privilege, the better to defend a British culture he perceived to be under siege at the end of World War II.35 Eliot’s text is both an oddly illuminating choice for the OED and a displacement of the word’s more usual field of engagement in the earlier part of the twentieth century. That the illustrative quotation chosen should come from Eliot little reveals that its more habitual context was debates in the comparatively new field of sociology, which Eliot signals (but does not exhaust) through his references to Karl Mannheim’s writings. Although the word itself returned to English through French, the comparatively new concept it subtended found its initial formulations in the writings of Gaetano Mosca and Vilifredo Pareto, two Italian thinkers whose theories of cultural segmentation, of the domination of the many by the few, helped set the terms for a long series of sociological debates that have been associated most often with Max Weber.36 Yet for all the attention the discursive category has generated, elite theory is not, in most senses, conceptually elaborate; it focuses on modeling how social forms make and remake themselves through the actions of talented or otherwise distinctive individuals who do not have inherited access to power. The power of elite theory lies in its historical effects, the way it both displaced the revolutionary model of class struggle associated with Marx and responded to the threat that nascent democratic institutions posed to the very division between orders of society. Thus Tom Bottomore: The concept of the political elite was pursued by Mosca and Pareto as a key term in a new social science, but it had another aspect which is scarcely less apparent in their writings: namely, that it formed part of a political doctrine which was opposed to, or critical of, modern democracy, and still more opposed to modern socialism.37 That is to say, the concept of “elites” was located at the intersection of state politics and power-knowledge. It emerged not all that long after another event of interest to Foucault: the demographic management of population, through statistics and other techniques, which renders the various denizens of both the nation-state and the colony discursively knowable, discursively 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 28 ● 29 masterable.38 As such, sociology, in particular its elaboration of elite theory, is subject to the same critical gaze that Foucault directed at its juridical, medical, and psychologistic counterparts. Unlike those other fields, however, sociology, as yet another of the sciences of man, was in the process of constructing an overtly self-legitimating model of cultural differentiation, one whose conservatism was in effect a reaction formation in favor of centralized state power and of the elites who did its work, directly or indirectly. Matters of academic provenance aside, however, the word “elite” has come into increased prominence in the rebarbative and opportunistic discourse of American politics at the recent turn of the millennium. As several of my initial quotations indicate, “elite” has gained vigor as a term of reactionary political abuse, a way to dismiss and demonize a regime of values that represents an exhausted social liberalism. What seems most obvious, however, is not simply that the term constitutes an abnegated, indeed abject, subject position from which its putative designees recoil in fear (these days, people duck the term “elite” at least as much as young and affluent urban residents once dissociated themselves from the dismissive title “yuppie”). It is that the term itself has come to have no stable referent and so represents a mode of othering whose motility is as much to the point as the falsely universalized populism for which the attackers of elitism claim to speak.39 Sociological theory suggests that elites can be replaced when they no longer serve the essentially conservative function to which their pursuit of distinction entitles them—when, as I’ve already suggested, they withdraw from, or rebel against, the tacit equipoise between power and the ostensibly disinterested promotion of knowledge to which academic and intellectual elites are enjoined. John Guillory notes that the word “liberal” has been in the process of becoming so contaminated that it is all but delegitimated as a political possibility in American public discourse, echoing the fate of Marxist radicalism extirpated by McCarthyism in the 1950s: hence, presumably, the newly ascendant “progressive.” But both “Marxist” and “liberal” have some recent history of referentiality, which is to say, some anchor, however vexed and in need of complication, in material history. The rhetoric of “are you now or have you ever been?” tried to pin down a definitive affiliation, and the rubric of the “fellow traveler” at least denoted that there were, in fact, such things as actually existing Communists with whom one might consort. And to the extent that liberalism was a self-constituted discourse and, in certain regions of the country at least, an actual political party, it too has some purchase on institutional fixity. Not so, precisely, with elite. Not only has the term changed in affective sign, from a positive to a negative value. Its recent career shows it to slide with a rapidity that would put reactionary fantasies of a deconstruction 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 Reframing Shakespeare for the Millennium ● Extramural Shakespeare unanchored in the material world of fixed meanings to shame, the more peculiar given the conservatism of some of its most ambitious articulations. Even so, I hope it is clear that my interest is not in making obvious, and straightforwardly partisan, argumentative points. Rather, it is in thinking about how the present prominence of anti-elitist discourse signifies a tacit reversal of vector for the political conditions under which the term itself emerged, and the consequences of that reversal for how we think about Shakespeare right now. Mosca’s and Pareto’s theorizing on elites as a positive force was, as Bottomore suggests, inflected by the beginnings of socialism and of democratic political cultures in Europe. At this conjuncture, however, elites defined in terms of culture and taste and evoked as a distorting deviation from popular will, serve as useful straw figures: their demonization gestures in the direction of mass political projects even as the feint guarantees that concentrated financial and corporate power, a growing and far more pernicious form of authority wielded by a select few, remains generally uninterrogated. As long as there are cultural elites to attack, this dispensation might suggest, then democracy remains strong—and, rhetorically at least, socialism a threat. It is perhaps no accident that the term “class struggle” has been revived to delegitimate even the mildest criticism of economic inequality or the most middling efforts at health reform, for it reveals that the conditions of democratic dissent subtended by the Keynesian state are readily substituted for the historical possibility of socialism they kept at bay. Indeed, the collapse of the one into the other might be read still more pessimistically. For all the ideological connections forged under neo-liberalism between the necessity of a free market and the maintenance of social and political liberties, to the extent that actually existing democracy tends to hinder the excesses of untrammeled capital, the democratic state form must be preserved as sign while its propositional content is reduced to that which it defines by a condition of exteriority.40 “Liberty,” they cry, when their real concern is license—arrangements by mean of which capital can be multiplied ever more effectively, even more freely, through transnational flows. Under such elusive discursive and material conditions, what does it mean when progressive academic discourse has insisted on Shakespeare’s elitism—and when, in a strangely handy (if unconscious) capitulation to right-wing rhetorical baiting and an equally strange resistance to dialectical thinking, it insists on seeing itself as shamefully elite? In an analysis of the “torsioned” class position of academics-as-intellectuals, Guillory has noted that in recent times, “an intellectual is interpellated now as a peculiar kind of political subject.”41 This politicization attaches itself in particular to those working in the humanities, even as their field becomes subject to increasing 10.1057/9780230112940 - Extramural Shakespeare, Denise Albanese Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 30 ● 31 marginalization in a university dedicated more and more to technocratic rationality. While the truth of any connection between academics (understood as

domain: literature