Buy low, sell high, sez Bard

In the latest cash-in-on-the-Bard book, the tragic heroes of Shakespeare are just losers who failed at crisis management.

By Ron Rosenbaum

  • Pages 1 2 3

Nov 11, 1999 | So what's next, after "Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage"? How about "Shakespeare in Shape: Great Abs and Buff Bods From the Bard"? (You know, a dueling- and jousting-based exercise program.) Or maybe "Shakespeare in Therapy," or "Shakespeare in Recovery: Twelve Steps to Turn Your Tragedy Into Comedy"? Or how about "Chicken Soup for the Shakespearean Soul"?

I could go on, and you could make up (and probably get a publisher for) your own schlocky cash-in-on-the-Bard book. But that's a little unfair to this one. It's unfair to look upon it as merely a hurried effort by the Miramax publishing division to extend the brand franchise of "Shakespeare in Love." No, it's more than that. I think the best way to look at this book is as the last gasp -- a kind of parodic consummation -- of academic postmodernist literary criticism of Shakespeare.

True, it seems on the surface to be targeted at non-academic types, at middle managers so desperate to "lead and succeed" they'll buy any kind of packaged malarkey if it comes, as this one does, with a blurb from the Great God, Warren Buffett. It seems to be targeted at the kind of guy who goes to "power leadership" seminars at airport hotels with Tony Robbins-type motivators.

And it's true the authors of "Shakespeare in Charge" don't seem like academic literary theorists, fools for Foucault. Corporate big-shot Norman Augustine was CEO of Lockheed and Kenneth Adelman was a Reagan-era arms control director and U.N. ambassador. But they have the exact same view of Shakespeare as neo-Marxist "cultural materialists" and New Historicists: They view Shakespeare as purely a handmaiden of power.

The big argument over Shakespeare in fashionable academic circles -- well, one of the big arguments -- is the contention by leftist acolytes of Michel Foucault that Shakespeare's plays should not be considered as works of literature so much as instruments of state power, one of the means by which the Tudor monarchy used spectacle to inculcate unquestioning reverence for established authority and to make rebellion seem futile. Shakespeare in this view was a propagandist for power; his plays were the aesthetic equivalent of brainwashing, implanting an ideology that bound spectators to the prevailing order with chains of pentameter lines.

Of course, this position is itself a narrowly ideological, reductive (not to mention tin-eared) view of Shakespeare. It's a position deaf to the voices in Shakespeare that encourage skepticism and doubt, that question "the hollow crown" of established authority, question the intelligibility of the moral order of the universe ("a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"), question the purported benevolence of even the divine authority ("Fortune is a strumpet" and the gods are like "wanton boys" who tear the wings off flies "for sport").

It's a stance insensitive to the complexity of the tragic, or to the subversiveness of the comic in Shakespeare. It's a view of Shakespeare -- a view of the world -- in which power is the only value. It's exactly the same reductive view our two "Shakespeare in Charge" authors take as they strip-mine the rich mother lode of Shakespearean language for petty lessons in corporate climbing.

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