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Shakespeare and his Biographical Afterlives ed. by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson

2022; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 117; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2022.0128

2222-4319

Andrew Hiscock,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and his Biographical Afterlives ed. by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson Andrew Hiscock Shakespeare and his Biographical Afterlives. Ed. by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson. (Shakespeare &, 6) New York: Berghahn. 2020. £89 (pbk £19.95). ISBN 978–1–78920–687–6 (pbk 978–1–78920–688–3). Shakespeare and his Biographical Afterlives is the sixth volume in Berghahn’s ‘Shakespeare &’ series unveiling the bard in a host of differing contemporary contexts. More than measuring up to this challenge, the collection assembled by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson has its centre of gravity firmly in modern responses to the early modern dramatist by exploring the ways in which he has been pulled this way and that by succeeding generations of prose writers, biographers, and film-makers. The editors’ Introduction sets the standard for a critical collection that neither gets waylaid in impenetrable jargon nor ceases from offering up neglected angles of vision on the dramatist. Biography, speculative and/or evidence-driven, is an ongoing theme of interest as the discussions unfold and the reader is constantly confronted with the multiplying ways in which Shakespeare’s chroniclers negotiate the challenge of making bricks from often slim pickings of straw. In ‘Shakespeare’s Afterlives: Raising and Laying the Ghost of Authority’, Franssen initially acknowledges the critical work that has already mapped out the figure of Shakespeare-as-spectre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the discussion comes into its own when the many and various German contributions to this tradition are examined. Instead of detailing the achievements of the editorial contributions, translations, and Romantic panegyric that are familiar areas of interest in existing accounts of the rise of this (inter)national poet, Franssen concentrates on creative imaginings from the period, such as Schink’s Shakespeare in der Klemme (Shakespeare in Trouble, 1780) and Schiller’s ‘Shakespears Schatten: Parodie’ (‘Shakespeare’s Shade: A Parody’, 1804). Subsequently, Franssen makes the telling point that the raising of ‘Shakespeare’s spirit only to ridicule him seems to be largely a British phenomenon’ (p. 21) and this key principle of difference in European cultural reception might have been developed even further—this was a phenomenon that was already well established by the nineteenth century. Next, Wolfgang Weiss’s ‘The Debate about Shakespeare’s Character, Morals and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ maintains the focus on the ‘naturalization’ (p. 31) of Shakespeare in the cultures of continental Europe, again foregrounding the creative and speculative work accomplished by biographers of the bard. We learn [End Page 699] in Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s six-volume Shakespeare-Vorträge (1899–1905) that ‘We Germans are now used to consider Shakespeare as one of us’ (p. 32), whereas Ludwig Fulda unexpectedly proposed in 1916 that ‘if we succeed in defeating England, then, I think, we should insert a clause into the peace treaty, that William Shakespeare has to be formally transferred to Germany’ (p. 33). The material here is rich and continues to yield delights for the reader as Weiss maps the ways in which German writers drew Shakespeare back and forth across the faith communities of the Reformation. However, with Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s four-volume Shakespeare (1849–52) we are placed in the company of a bard who is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but an ‘enlightened intellectual’ (p. 38). Reiko Oya’s ‘“Talk to Him”: Wilde, his Friends and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ organizes a fluent and illuminating discussion around the four figures of Wilde, Shaw, Frank Harris, and Alfred Douglas. The careful account of the ways in which analysis of the Sonnets relates to declarations concerning the speculated sexual persuasions of the bard himself remains very readable throughout. Particularly well related are the accusations and counter-accusations which abound as Wilde is committed for trial and then remembered by the other figures after his passing. Clara Calvo’s ‘Fighting over Shakespeare: Commemorating the 1916 Tercentenary in Wartime’ offers a timely examination of a cultural moment, just over a century ago, when the bard was being fought over, and thereby, tangentially, allows us to reflect upon the status and functions of more recent bardic festivities in 2016. Drawing initially upon the weekly Espa...