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Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels

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Every once in a while in history, criticism of Shakespeare - which has so often attracted some of the best minds - sinks to an almost inexplicably low level of nonsense, grossness, distortion, inaccuracy, etc. Such a period has occurred in the recent past, and has been firmly diagnosed for what it is in a number of books that have appeared in the nineties rather than the eighties. While there were always some critics to warn us against what was happening (Richard Levin was perhaps the most conspicuous example), Vickers's book was nevertheless a milestone when it appeared in 1993. Not only did it mercilessly and convincingly expose much of the unbelievable stuff that passed for work on Shakespeare, but it diagnosed with great clarity the chief flaw of such material: its refusal actually to try and see Shakespeare for what he is doing and its determination instead to put forward the critic's own favourite theoretical (often political) beliefs, thereby "appropriating" Shakespeare for the commentator's own purposes. Thus, in reading such writings, we learn a good deal about the commentator's personal assumptions and beliefs, but little about Shakespeare. This unhealthy tendency - frequently defended by claims that "one cannot be objective anyway", should be "politically engaged", etc. - has of course not yet disappeared, and there is still a good deal of writing in the old, bad eighties mode coming out, but at least it is no longer unchallenged, and Vickers and others have certainly provided a strong antidote. The book is unusually comprehensive in its knowledge of writings on Shakespeare, and derives a good deal of its authority from that fact. In other words, it is for one thing a very full and useful reference book. Some of the reactions to *Appropriating Shakespeare* show that Vickers has made a number of the "appropriating" critics profoundly uncomfortable, and that is how it should be.