Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad (review)
Traversing the theories of Derrida, Marion, Levinas, and Badiou, Gallagher explores the spirituality of such a potently Christian symbol given to a Jew, especially from a giver who is marginalized in both society and the play. Recalling the agapē of Christ’s kenōsis, “The spirit of Gobbo’s gift is the impossible thought of unconditioned giving” (87). Gifts given in Love’s Labor’s Lost are overwhelmingly verbal; Philippa Berry sees this play’s spirituality in “the complicated relationship between textuality and different forms and temporal contexts of ‘salving’ or ‘healing’” (101). The echoes, puns, and lexical parallels of the play’s verbal exchanges offer a kind of redemption for its lovers. Two essays focus on Hamlet, the play most fraught with spiritual conundrums. Examining the role of memory in the play, Richard Kearny presents a fourfold analysis of the play’s “holy and unholy ghosts” (157) from psychoanalytic, existential, deconstructive, and theological perspectives. The prince’s “cathartic remembering” culminates in an “epiphanic mourning” (184). Ewan Fernie offers a complex response to Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), arguing that “[t]he existential dimension of [the play’s] immersion of divinity in the messy human element entails a more substantial human spirituality than either Greenblatt or Derrida describe” (202). In the book’s only essay on the poetry, Lisa Freinkel contextualizes the presence of the erotic fetish in the Petrarchan lyric. The sonneteer, textually hoarding objects and bodily features of the beloved, idolatrously mistakes signs for things. Her discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnet 106 is provocative but rather overshadowed by the lengthy theoretical framework which precedes it. Jonathan Dollimore’s afterword succinctly outlines the presence of the Nietzschean demonic in Macbeth. This volume offers advanced students a helpful survey of contemporary thinking about spiritual otherness in Shakespeare, while experienced readers will find in it provocative avenues for debate. The spirituality offered here is only distantly related, if at all, to more traditional religious categories such as doctrine, theology, and dogma. Rather, it is about Shakespeare’s problematized confrontation with the inexplicable, the miraculous, the numinous, those manifestations which could well take as their proof text Isaiah 45:15: “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.” CHRISTOPHER BAKER Armstrong Atlantic State University