Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (Literature as Uncanny Causality) by Marjorie Garber

Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (Literature as Uncanny Causality) Reviews

• 
  Alan

  Garber takes up the old question of who wrote the plays, if the property owner in Stratford was not known to his neighbors as a writer, and lacked the court service where he would know the rulers of the realm, or even the Justice Court service for the legal knowledge of the Bard (though this is remedied by thinking he served in Coventry canon courts for the two early unknown years—after all, his scrivener hand was for such courts).
  A superior punster, as I learned in one of her post-doctoral seminars,* Garber shows her wit in merely citing the anti-Stratfordians. One defender of Earl of Oxford’s authorship is named Looney (Life magazine says an “unfortunate name”, but respectable on the Isle of Man, where it’s pronounced “Loney”). Nor is Mr Looney a-loney in such a name. “A zealous Shakespearean cryptographer, who proves by numerological analysis that the real author could be Bacon…is George Battey”(3).
  #Battey and #Looney, we could all wish our critics such names.
  Until Schoenbaum’s formidable Shakespeare’s Lives, many claimed that too little was known about the Man of Stratford for him to have been the famous writer. Shoenbaum presents fifty pages that we know about William of Stratford, more than about any other 16C Warwickshire resident except an aristocrat. But in the Nineteenth Century, the time of biographical criticism moreover, the Stratfordian’s biography was thinner; and those skeptical of lower classes or the less literate found it hard to believe the Latin grammar school in Stratford, albeit under a Master from Oxford who achieved his M.A., had prepared the schoolboy (“with his satchel /And his shining morning face, creeping like snail/ willingly to school”) to read French and Latin-Plautine sources for the greatest player ever written.
  Oddly, Americans played a large role in class-condescension. Following Delia Bacon, Whittier and Twain, Hawthorne and Emerson all expressed doubts about the Man of Stratford, though Twain claimed he was a Brontosaurian, not knowing, but guessing that William of Warwickshire didn’t, and possibly Bacon did. (8)
  Garber’s overall argument here is abstruse, too elevated for me, including the ghostly nature of printing and reproduction, though in the text, the ghosts are unique individuals like Hamlet’s father, or Julius Caesar, who in fact appear in or near scenes of writing. Hamlet records what his father tells him asking for his tablet, “My tables! Meet it is I set it down.”(18).
  On the other hand, Garber fills her book with memorable theatrical details. Of the supposed curse on MacBeth, one young actress didn’t believe a word of it. She had not been happy with her previous day’s sleepwalking scene, so “she entered with her eyes closed, and fell fifteen feet into the orchestra pit.” Stanislaski admired the play and mounted an elaborate production for the Moscow Arts Theater. During dress rehearsal the actor playing MacBeth forgot his line and came forward to the prompt box to get his cue. No word from the prompter. He tried three times with growing irritation. “Finally he peered into the box, only to find the aged prompter dead—but still clutching his script.”(90) Stanislavski, no less a fatalist than Chekhov and Dostoevsky, immediately cancelled the production.
  
  *I'm sure some of her 1984 lectures to our seminar--and her papers we could read in her outer office-- were publishd in this book.
• 
  Sam Crisp

  The first chapter asks a good question about why people care so much about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays when people don't seem to dispute it as much when it comes to any other author. Rather than try to answer that question, the book is more interested in how the question of false authorship is dramatised a lot in the content of Shakespeare's plays preempting those discussions. There's this nice reversal about how we are tempted to retrospectively see the influence of Freud, Marx, Derrida, etc, in Shakespeare and think of his work as uniquely modern; but actually those authors were all influenced by Shakespeare and modelled a lot of their ideas on him. It kinda culminates in this quote from Shoshana Felman on Lacan: if the unconscious is structured like a language, then literature is the unconscious of psychoanalysis. The book is fun and thorough but the argument seems a bit too cute for me. It lost me a lot in the psychoanalysis nittygritty. Might revisit the last chapter after reading Fink's Lacanian Subject. I give it 5 out of 10 rubber chickens :)
• 
  Michael

  Brilliant gothic analysis of Shakespeare tragedies.
• 
  Paul O'Leary

  I have heard that Garber is a master in her field. That field is the plays of Shakespeare. I have heard that when she leaves that field to discuss other topics, like lit theory in general, well, your mileage can vary. I got this book for the title essay. A small guilty pleasure of mine is wondering who wrote those darn plays? Bacon? Oxford? That precocious high schooler, Shakespeare himself? Many look at how intelligent and well-informed the author must have been to produce the plays. Few actually point out the interesting errors, which may help determine the author's identity more accurately. That isn't discussed in the book, however. The title essay does go into that controversy, somewhat. Mostly Garber sorts through it by pointing out enthusiasts of that controversy have typically been Americans, crazy, or crazy Americans. She then conveniently slides over into what the book's essays are basically about, the uncanny present-soon-to-be-unpresent-while-present tropes rampant through Shakespeare's plays, but often embodied? In the form of ghosts. She unpacks Freud, which is tolerable; she unpacks Derrida, which is much less so; she unpacks Lacan, which I find absolutely cephalically destructive to my sanity. If you enjoy turgid & viscid lit crit, then portions of this book will undoubtedly enchant you. Some chapters aren't overly leavened with literary verbosity. The chapters dealing with Richard III and Julius Caesar are pretty good; their respective ghosts of deformity and treachery handled lucidly. Other chapters were more difficult to get through. The chapter devoted completely to Hamlet was a strange chore as I'm extremely fond of that play. The treatment of Freud's relation to the play through his personal life and the origin of the Oedipus complex prompted me to check my E mails regularly. Also, the play's theme of ghostly revenge intersticed between remembering and action, with frequent references to Nietzsche, seemed less than innovative to me. By the way, I do understand that interstice is not a verb, but the lit critters have inspired me. I wish I enjoyed this one more, but a sign(watch out for the signifier a la Lacan) that most of the time I was reading it I felt the sudden urge to check Facebook clearly indicates I did not.