The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Valerie Traub, ed. Oxford Handbooks of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxvi + 782 pp. $160.
aptation of Coriolanus, Biberman notes how “Otway handles the eruption of hate as a comprehensible phenomenon” (38) without taking the logical step suggested by his own thesis: exploring how a Restoration understanding of this eruption might be relevant to the period’s backward glance at the English Civil War. And in his concluding reconstruction of Garrick’s 1772 reworking of Hamlet (here and elsewhere no explanation is provided for the inclusion of non-Restoration texts), even as he cites Garrick’s interest in howHamlet explores a “vanished order now replaced by a new system” predicated on survivors newly “united through civic virtue, committed to preserving the country” (117), Biberman doesn’t see any necessity to relate this assertion to one of his own foundational claims. This lack of interest in the defining rationale of the study extends to the other side of the Restoration, the notion that these adaptations served some critical function in the historical evolution of “the notion of a therapeutically ‘centered self ’ that Freud . . . [and] Lacan . . . labored so mightily to overturn.” While it may be that, taken as a group, Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare presented “the abstract codification of human behavior and happiness [later] enshrined within American ego psychology” (31)—and it should be noted that the collective influence of the plays in question is nowhere addressed—Biberman never takes up the historical emergence of ego psychology nor does he make any effort to explore how the specific aesthetic vision of Restoration (adaptive) theater might have served a role in this emergence. For this reason, while there are many citations of Freud’s and Lacan’s writings (rather scattered and never unified around a central theme), the ultimate claim that Freudian thought in its French (Lacanian) form was somehow responsive to Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare is given no conceptual foundation. We get many hints of this process but no consistently presented evidence on either the historical or the theoretical level.