The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare’s Works and Times by Robert Brustein
Yale University Press, £18.99
On the whole, William Shakespeare has received little benefit from any of the currently flourishing isms – such as Marxism and its multifarious Gallic distortions; structuralism; post-modernism; feminism – available on tap in our centres of learning. The author of this new study, Robert Brustein, is an experienced man of the theatre – a producer, playwright and critic – but this is his first book on the Bard.
The case is clear enough but Brustein’s deployment of the evidence is scarcely convincing. It’s usually argued that there is little sense in attempting to come to any useful conclusions about Shakespeare’s beliefs, opinions, attitudes, etc, by using what his characters say. This much Brustein himself admits: “Normally, we think of Shakespeare as standing apart, detached and aloof, paring his nails – the classic example of the detached observer.”
But Brustein is convinced, and The Tainted Muse seeks to convince the reader, that beneath the objective neutrality of poetic drama, old Bill had what Hamlet called an imposthume, a canker or tumour, “that can deeply affect one’s health without showing any outward sign or apparent cause”.
And then he’s off, showing us that Hamlet is full of evidence of deep-felt misogyny; that the portrayal of Osric and other characters is evidence for the playwright’s distrust effemiphobia and by now he’s in full flight, exhibiting the machismo in Hotspur, the fear of mobocracy as exemplified in Julius Caesar and Henry VI Part Two, the racism in Othello and The Merchant of Venice and on to a veritable grand display of damp squibs in attempting to establish a coherent theology in King Lear.
This is a puzzling book, for all the while the author seems fully aware of the tenuousness of his own case and says so in so many words: “Of course, it is possible to argue that the religious attitudes of each play are dictated by the demands of the play itself, and do not reflect the opinions of the playwright…”
Why yes, of course! And what made me continuously dubious about The Tainted Muse is Brustein’s all too frequent reliance on the evidence of stage and screen productions and lengthy quotations from 16th and 17th century political and social commentators that have little demonstrable connection with Shakespeare’s actual plays. Stick to the text. What was it that Hamlet had to say about speaking by the card lest “equivocation doth undo me”?
Robert Giddings
