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Shakespeare is the Rorschach test of English literature, a mirror for every critical obsession. Coleridge gazes at Hamlet and finds a partner in procrastination. Freud and Ernest Jones discover in Hamlet confirmation of the universality of the Oedipal complex. For Rene Girard, Shakespeare was a Girardian, and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare embodied Bloom's ludic ecstasies in Falstaff on the way to inventing the human. Shakespeare knew it would happen. He knew that lovers—including lovers of drama—see not with the eyes but with the mind.
This is in part testimony to the fecundity of Shakespeare's imagination. But Dostoevsky and Joyce are almost equally fecund, yet interpretations don't slop over the edges the way they do with Shakespeare. Dostoevsky critics work within the horizons of his letters, his journalism, his Orthodoxy, his gambling, his troubled marriage, and we know what Joyce read and how it came to be fictionalized. The problem of interpreting Shakespeare is structural. On the page and stage, Shakespeare is the undisputed master of English, even world, letters, the "man of the millennium." Yet we know comparatively little of his life, and what we know suggests he was an uncommonly litigious and grasping man. He left no letters, no diary, no confession to explain himself. It's the discrepancy between sublime artistic achievement and grubby public record that tantalizes. Shakespeare has to be understood within the horizons of the Elizabethan age and stage, but more definite constraints are missing.
That's part of what fascinates and complicates. The other part is on the page itself. Even if we had no personal papers, we'd know from their poetry that Milton detested Presbyterians and that Blake hated factories. Not Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a bardus absconditus, known only in the trace of his absence, manifest only behind his masks, glimpsed in his withdrawal behind the curtain. For biographers, this is a frustration, but some turn Shakespeare's elusiveness into a decoder ring for the plays and the life and the connection between them. In his wide-ranging study of Merchant of Venice, University of Rochester professor Kenneth Gross speculates on the theatricality that he says unites Shakespeare and Shylock. Shakespeare's rage against his uncomprehending audience, his hiddenness behind the masks of his characters, his status as an alien who, like the Venetian Jew, is forgotten in the final act of cosmic harmony, are dramatized forcibly in Shylock. Shylock is Shakespeare's commentary on his own work as a dramatist. Shakespeare is Shylock.
Gross's biographical suggestions are intriguing, but, like most suggestions about Shakespeare the man, unconvincing. Fortunately, the book stands on its own as an interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, and, fortunately again, Gross is a keen reader. He recognizes the religious overtones of the play, and he argues that Shakespeare refuses the easy options of softening Shylock to heroic victim or hardening him into devilish villain. Shylock's humanity emerges precisely in his refusal to cover his own repugnancy, and Gross sees the play as an experiment in the "aesthetics of repugnancy." Shylock turns his alien status into a performance, ironically playing the roles assigned to him by anti-Semitic Venice and turning those roles into a mirror held up to his Christian antagonists.
Shakespeare's hiddenness has recently been combined with a New Historicist fixation on his religious inclinations. Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling Will in the World and Richard Wilson's 2004 Secret Shakespeare locate the poet in the subterranean world of recusant Catholicism, which, according to Wilson, Shakespeare transformed into a poetics and dramaturgy of self-concealment. Without taking sides in that debate, the superb essays in Beatrice Batson's collection examine the echoes of Catholic and Protestant theology in the major tragedies. In Grace Tiffany's view, Hamlet is a critique of spectacle (= Catholicism) and a Protestant affirmation of the priority of the ear, the gateway either of deadly poison or painful but ultimately healing rebuke. Even the visual Mousetrap play is a dramatized sermon, intended to convict Claudius. For the authors of this collection, Shakespeare exploited the religious possibilities of the theater by consciously exploring contemporary theological concerns in dramatic form.
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