Big Willie Styles

To kill time before my shift began, today, I wandered past the history section at work--Chapters. I glanced at the shelf, always curious, and came across a book on Shakespeare: Clare Asquith's Shadowplay. After reading the excerpt on the inside leaf, there is no doubt in my mind this book will infuriate those who declare New Historicism anathema in scholarship. You can read the following summary and recognise anon:

The wife of a British diplomat who was posted to Moscow during the Cold War, Asquith first started to suspect that Shakespeare's plays possessed an unexamined political and religious subtext while watching a seemingly innocuous performance in a Soviet theater and realizing that it was embedded with secret meanings and double entendres. In a tome both literary and dense, though thankfully not prohibitively so, Asquith shines an extraordinary light on the symbolism and possible intentions of Shakespeare's work. The Catholic playwright, Asquith contends, wrote to outsmart the "Queen's men," who caught up to him only after he had written dozens of plays reflecting the mournful frustration of Catholics oppressed by Elizabethan Protestantism. Asquith uses Shakesepeare's plays as prisms through which to observe the tremendous upheaval of the times. A second look at Julius Caesar reveals the Roman conspirators to be Protestant instigators, and Troilus and Cressida is, according to the author, a commentary on the state of Catholic opposition to the Reformation. Described as "an upstart Crow" by Robert Greene-playwright for the rival theater company Queen's Men, which Asquith characterizes as a Protestant propaganda machine-Shakespeare found protection in the patronage of Lady Magdalen Montague, a Catholic, and even worked her into a number of his plays, including A Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet and Comedy of Errors. Though occasionally didactic, Asquith's multifaceted examination reveals as much about the history of 17th-century England as it does about the playwright and his plays, and should intrigue admirers of both.

The significant tip-off that this book takes a New Historical approach, ala Greenblatt, could be that Amazon.com offers this book in tandem with Greenblatt's Will in the World. That, and Asquith suggests Sir Philip Sidney as a model for Shakespeare's Hamlet--for example, "Was the 'wavering soul' of this remarkable and highly intelligent man a model for Hamlet? Shakespeare surely meant his audience to think so, and therefore to identify Hamlet with the man who more than any other embodied a covertly disaffected group of what we would now call England's intelligentsia." (150). Apparently, too, the reference made by the ghost in Hamlet to Hamlet's hair standing on end like a porcupine is a covert reference to the heraldic symbol, or family crest of Sidney, which was a porcupine. These ideas are quite certainly far out there, if not far-fetched by most scholarly standards I've met. However, I can't deny that I am not interested in reading this book, pungent as it seems, especially after reading Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory for an assignment months ago. While I overtly disagreed with much of that book, I cannot deny that it did not shape my take on the ghost in Hamlet. The fact remains, New Historicism critics, such as Greenblatt can shine a new light on a text--though the path that leads to these claims tend to feel like shortcuts, otherwise known as a stretch of the imagination. Perhaps these stretches are causing cramps in the minds of scholars because their minds are out of shape, or no longer fit for such a strenuous intellectual workout.