Paul A. Kottman. Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe.

Smith, Emma

Paul A. Kottman. Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe. Rethinking Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 196. $60.00.

The cover illustration of Paul A. Kottman's provocative study Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe comes from Geffrey Whitney's 1586 book of emblems. It depicts Hercules laboring under the burden of a globe, perhaps a version of the Globe Theatres own logo. But Kottman's globe is not primarily Shakespeare's Bankside theater. Rather his focus is expansive and philosophical: the disinherited globe is something like the social world, that world of communal ties and interconnectedness that our modern world has lost, as his opening lines make clear: "'The world, such as it is left to us, seems more unwieldy, troublesome, and broken than the world left to our forebearers" (1). Two big epistemes, ethics and Shakespeare, are thus brought into collision. Whitney's (here suppressed) original motto for the cover emblem is "Nemo potest duobus dominis servire" (no man can serve two masters), but if at times the dual ambition of Kottman's book does indeed seem too burdensome, it brings real insight along the way.

Some space for this double focus is made by leaving out many of the discussions Shakespeareans might expect. There is no mention of textual variants, even though the ending of King Lear is the subject of particular scrutiny; there is no history and no historicism. Hobbes is Shakespeare's nearest contemporary; there are no other comparable literary writers since the Greek tragedians. There is very little engagement with critics, and Kottman reads his unfashionable favorites Harold Bloom and A. C. Bradley graciously, without academic point-scoring. Aristotle and Hegel are the theorists being rethought here: Hannah Arendt, rather than, say, Levinas or Nussbaum, is the primary ethicist. Perhaps more surprisingly, there is very little theater, although productions in general are sometimes cited, and on one occasion Kottman indicates how he would direct a particular scene (Kent's departure at the end of King Lear in "his street jacket" walking through the theater to the exit, since he "sees no reason to invest one single second more in a realm he had up until then staked his life defending" (112). Here, though, the stage corroborates, rather than challenges with its own representational economy, the interpretation arrived at in the study.

So the book is a generic oddity for the literary critic, less a work of literary criticism than one of calm, methodical, yet urgent humanist philosophy. In analyzing As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest (an unexplained selection), Kottman inter-implicates Shakespeare's characters and "us," leaning heavily on the second-person plural to suggest their ethical relevance to "our" lives. Duke Senior is "stateless" in Arden, and this unsought condition of topicality, via Arendt, sets the terms for the following analysis. Having lost his social position, his ties to a community, and his capacity to inherit and bequeath, Duke Senior's position is exemplary in Kottman's compelling narrative of the fragility of social assurances. His chapter examines the play's peculiar impulse toward stasis as the dramatization of its own disinvestment: "Shakespeare's dramatic challenge is to find something for us to do--something that might matter for us--in the wake of the disappearance of any persuasive difference between the conditions of exile and those that furnish the inheritable conditions of a livable life" (37). Here that "us" is both the exiled band in Arden and we who read of them. In Hamlet, Kottman discusses rites of burial--of old Hamlet, of Polonius, and of Ophelia--as foundational gestures of culture itself, and sees the play's stress on the disinherited prince as a symbol of social collapse. In Lear, it is love, in The Tempest suffering, that pace out the limitations of previously authoritative social bonds, but while Lear dramatizes the terrible disinvestment of communal plenitude, Prospero's act of forgiveness and its disturbing proximity to his exercise of torture show us the paradoxical conditions for the "recovery of a socially inheritable world" (160). Naming Prospero's treatment of the mariners "waterboarding" (135) suggests but does not explore a contemporary analogue for this "unilateral sovereign power" (134), a pharmakon dealing out both torment and recovery. Like many of Kottman's gentle gestures toward the present, it hints at rather than labors the parallels.

Sometimes Kottman's analysis is wilfully sentimental: describing Falstaff's perspective as one in which "it is only by actively loving and being loved ... that one can come to seem entitled to anything whatsoever in the world" (17) smacks of a kind of self-help book--for fat old rogues who love too much. Like Bradley, he is unembarrassed about reading dramatic characters novelistically: "That is not to say that there is not genuine grief and love for the dead Ophelia; there may well be" (67). His stress on inheritability as the ultimate guarantor of social bonds bespeaks a sort of unexamined baby-boomer mentality. Italicized paraphrases of Shakespeare's soliloquies, rather than direct quotations, more nearly conform to his analysis of the character-in-action: "'You say the passage from life to death is mere nature? That I should not seek my noble father in the dust?' we might imagine Hamlet to be insinuating here. 'Fine, I'll leave your courtier's body under your stairs'" (52). The technique is irritating in flattening out the ambiguities of Shakespeare's verse, but the comparison is revelatory: Kottman spots that Hamlet uses against the shocked Claudius and Gertrude the same platitudes about mortality he heard from them over his grief for his father in act 1, scene 2.

Perhaps the most sustained aspect of Kottman's literary analysis concerns the genre of tragedy, about which his insights are repeatedly suggestive. He argues that Shakespeare's tragedies trouble Aristotelian connections between plot and insight, that Hamlet's Mousetrap aims to stage an investigation into the use of tragedy itself, and that Lear's depiction of blindness serves to illustrate the "tragic undoing of whatever insights tragedies themselves might afford or might once have afforded" (116). His placement of As You Like It stresses not the play's pastoral comedy but its proximity to the tragic condition of disinheritance and exile. Some of this is new; much of it is approached via unfamiliar routes. By not being hung up on the deferential apparatus expected of a monograph on Shakespeare, by thinking again about the plays through deep familiarity with them and a strongly held, unapologetic humanist methodology, Kottman lays bare some of what is unnecessary, anxious, and self-serving in conventional scholarly publishing on Shakespeare. Asking whether, and how, Shakespeare's characters still move us, he returns to questions of affect that have been critically neglected except in theater work. If many Shakespeareans feel discomforted by his stress on the ethical charge of the plays as resources to trace and to rebuild a disinherited globe, that discomfort is to be welcomed. The "human condition" is a phrase much reviled in contemporary scholarship: Kottman's study suggests that ultimately the humanities have the heavy burden of the interrogation, anatomization, and affirmation of the human as their sole master.

EMMA SMITH

Hertford College, Oxford