After Shakespeare After All

Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York: Pantheon, 2008.

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The New York Times recently reviewed Marjorie Garber's new book, and it sounds very interesting, despite the mixed critique the article gives it. Her previous book, Shakespeare After All, is enormous—and well worth reading (which isn't to say I've finished it). Like Harold Bloom's The Invention of the Human, Garber considers each of the plays in turn in that copious volume.

In this book, she deals with ten plays. According to the review, the scope is enormous. It also indicates something of its thesis:

Shakespeare and Modern Culture is founded on proving the truth of a mind-bending formulation, that “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” The history of the plays as they have been performed and debated across the centuries is “the story of a set of mutual crossings and recrossings across genres, times and modes.” The book’s overarching idea derives from the rhetorical device known as chiasmus, or “crossing of words”—the theoretical two-way street illustrated by that phrase about Shakespeare both making and being made.

It's intriguing, and I'm asking my library to buy it for me (as a late Christmas gift). Any book that quotes from Dire Straits and Ali MacGraw— well, from Dire Straits, at least—is all right in my book.

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