"The Tainted Muse, Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time," by Robert Brustein, Yale University Press, 2009, 288 pages. $26.
Once again, Robert Brustein, theater personage exemplar, has put his finger in the fires of intellectual controversy. And once again, it is a dangerous if irresistible reach. There is probably not a competition among academics on the Island about who can publish the most, as they actually continue to have new and important concepts to consider. Such literary fecundity is to the advantage, pleasure, edification, and challenge of their many curious readers.
Professor Brustein has throughout his professional life read passionately and with particular insight, into the writings, poems and plays, of the Bard of Avon. In his latest book, "The Tainted Muse," Mr. Brustein, with considerable evidence, perceives, through the characters and the tenor of Elizabethan times, the mind of William Shakespeare..
This is a shocker, its message aptly, if forbiddingly, pictured by Mr. Brustein in Hamlet's tumorous metaphor 'imposthume'.
William Shakespeare has been lionized by teachers and theater directors often to the point of idealized stupor: William Shakespeare, sainted genius with a quill. This adoration, although justifiable, can be intimidating and blinding, turning away us mere humans. Some critics have spoken of Shakespeare's humanity, but always in reference to the complexity of the characters he has drawn. Mr. Brustein humanizes Shakespeare in a radical way. He attributes several points of view of the verses' characters to their creator's world view. These points of view are not always altogether admirable, but they certainly are recognizably, fallibly human.
There may be none more qualified to delve into Shakespeare's essence than Mr. Brustein. He is a Renaissance man of theater: playwright of 11 adaptations and seven original plays, the penultimate's having perhaps the cleverest pun title on the American stage, "The English Channel;" artistic director of both the Yale Repertory and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University; director of numerous plays, and actor in almost as many; professor of theater at both institutions; long-time theater critic for the New Republic; author of, to date, 16 books; member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and recently and rightly, the theater Hall of Fame.
In "The Tainted Muse," Mr. Brustein puts that experience to grounded imagination. Six chapters of this intriguing, unsettling, extremely well-substantiated book grasp touchy concepts: misogyny ( Hamlet), effemiphobia (Osric), machismo (Hotspur), elitism (Jack Cade, Caliban), racialism (Othello, Shylock), and Intelligent Design (Lear), wrapping not only the characters who exhibit them, but also Shakespeare and his era, in their tainted colors.
In acknowledging these in contemporary terms politically incorrect views, the reader emerges with less judgmental distance and more intimate acceptance of William Shakespeare himself. Such effect may rest among the miraculous ironies of honesty.
The examples above are but a fraction of the writings Mr. Brustein cites as foundations to his arguments. Amazingly, despite, or perhaps because of its breadth of references, the book is an elegant read. Language and logic, the unexpected and the undeniable keep us on the edge of expectations, and at the undoing of assumptions. This book is intelligent fun for anyone acquainted with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare becomes, through Robert Brustein's examinations, a man of his times, and at conflict with his times. Mr. Brustein clearly and engagingly demonstrates that throughout the canon, Shakespeare sometimes overcomes, and sometimes is overcome by his era's societal slants and slights, sympathies and short-sightedness of class and race, of habit and circumstance. Shakespeare's inconstant struggle, his lancing of his cankers of bias and prejudice, which he himself does not always perceive, may make us want to check our own ethical evasions.
But Mr. Brustein is not a moralizer. His motive is to take the measure of the man, not to measure modern stated values against Elizabethan vice and virtue.
The afterword of "The Tainted Muse" is no apologia. Mr. Brustein knows what he is up to and up against in dead man mind reading. This is the same professor who dared to rail at the faddist affectations of love of the 1960s, and, in a famous debate with the late August Wilson, dared discuss the role and role-playing of race in theater, even while he must have anticipated what epithets might follow him.
Bravo again, not simply for courage, but for making us want to see, contemplate, and re-experience, as audience and theater collaborator, the works of the mighty, and mightily human, William Shakespeare all the more.
Joann Green Breuer, playwright, director, theater arts at Harvard College, an Artistic Associate of The Vineyard Playhouse and author of "The Small Theatre Handbook," and former head of American Repertory Theatre, divides her time between West Tisbury and Boston.
