Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003

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Lehmann, Courtney, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2002, 265 pages, ISBN 0-8014-3974-4/ISBN 0-8014-8767-6.

Reviewed by

 Ken Wong

Although the death of the author has been pronounced by post-structuralists in the 1970s, the author has remained very much alive – the author’s name is still as significant as it has been. It seems we have never let the author rest in peace. Today, publishers still rely on the author to provide an insurance value that guarantees readership, and readers trust that the author will carry a production value that promises a definite narrative style and technique. Most of bookshops worldwide still base their indexing system on the name of authors rather than book titles.

The issue of authorship – its history, meaning and significance – is what Courtney Lehmann explores in her book Shakespeare Remains: Theatre to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern. Her focus is Shakespeare, a name that has dominated the literary scene for centuries, a name that has been very much praised, discussed and criticized.

But what is in a name? Lehmann turns round this Shakespearean question and asks why Shakespeare instead of who or what Shakespeare was. The Bard’s enduring presence – in school syllabuses, on bookstore shelves, as well as in popular cultural forms such as television dramas, films, and comic books – makes the question a relevant one. And of course, ever since the emergence of cultural studies in the academia in the 1980s, new perspectives have been opened up for inquires relating to Shakespeare. Instead of his authority, alternative discourses discuss what constitutes his authority, suggesting a spirit of interrogation, even contestation.

However, as Lehmann rightly observes, these alternative discourses have failed to remove Shakespeare completely from the ranks of the “sublime object”.  Contemporary scholars “continue to take particular, even paranoiac, pains to deconstruct the mythology of Shakespeare the Author” (6). Shakespeare, or the Shakespearean corpus, as suggested by Lehmann, has remained.

A further focus of Lehmann’s investigation is to study Shakespeare’s authorship through the lens of film theory. According to Lehmann, “[I]n contrast to literary paradigms of authorships, film theory’s concept of ‘auteur’ situates Shakespearean authorial practice within a collaborative, performative, and commercial medium, while simultaneously enabling us to imagine ‘Shakespeare’ as something more than an incidental textual effect”(Preface). The new paradigm provides an appropriate and timely assessment of the Shakespearean corpus, for Shakespeare and his works have already joined the multi-media bandwagon through film and television adaptations and reinventions – contemporary cultural productions that successfully sustain the name and fame of Shakespeare. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (Miramax Films, 2000), Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (Samuel Goldwyn, 1989) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Miramax Films, 2000), Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Twentieth Century Fox, 1996), and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (Miramax Films, 1998) are some of the recent reproductions of Shakespeare’s works in the popular media discussed by Lehmann.

Lehmann argues that although these unauthorized authors – film directors to be more exact – are producing their own versions of Shakespeare’s works, the original author remains undead. Though their works the author Shakespeare is reincarnated as a privileged rather than an abandoned “ghost”. The author still haunts the work as this ghost while the unauthorized author tries to talk back to the authority by playing with its ambiguities and silences.

The idea of a ghostly author who is both there and not there at the same time sheds light on how to understand authorship in postmodern times. In Shakespeare’s case, what we have now is not Shakespeare but Shakespeare’s remains. As Lehmann describes it, the “remains” of an author implies “a peculiar inheritance, one that is both permanent and unfinished” (234). The unfinished part awaits interpretation and construction by the other authors as auteurs, – the film directors that work to assemble together the remains.

Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern provides a thoughtful discussion that may help to fill the gap created by the death of the author and the collapse of the canon vis-à-vis the still powerful presence of the author. It suggests an alternative to understanding authorship as neither absolute authority nor total triviality. Authorial possibility lies in a process of continual construction which acknowledges and challenges the authorial presence at the same time.