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Shakespeare and Modern Culture by Marjorie Garber By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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Literary criticism is an analysis of reader interpretation of literature. Now available in paperback, Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Anchor, 2009), is her analysis of ten of Shakespeare’s plays and how they’re reflected in modern culture. The reality of Garber’s “modern culture” encapsulates only a limited audience comprising of literary scholars, those who were English majors in college, and members of the Baby Boomer Generation. Only these will relate to Garber’s idea of modern culture.
A familiarity with each play is required to follow Garber’s analysis. The average member of modern culture has not read a lot of Shakespeare beyond what they studied in high school. The most commonly studied plays are Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Garber mentions prior to the 1960s, Julius Caesar was the play of choice that Romeo and Juliet later replaced in public school curriculum but Julius Caesar isn’t one of the ten so members of modern culture who were in high school prior to the 1960s will be familiar with one less play. College students who received a liberal arts degree may have read a few more plays but general familiarity is limited to popular phrases and an overall generalized term of things that are “Shakespearean.”
Garber begins her work by explaining the common usage of Shakespearean phrases and how Shakespearean concepts have made their way into our lives. This seems to be the obvious approach for her book and even her stated purpose in the first sentence of the introduction. Second she notes her “modern culture” is the culture of the twentieth century. This broad time range stretches Shakespeare’s influence to include several major wars, but is limited to assassinations of well-known American political figures in the 1960s, a handful of plays and movies (mostly circa the 1950s and ‘60s), and the viewpoints of Freud, Marx, and a few other twentieth century philosophers
There’s very little comparison between Shakespeare and his contemporaries and how Shakespeare is perceived today versus then. That could easily be attributed to the lack of knowledge about the man Shakespeare and proof that he wrote all 34 plays attributed to him. The evolution of Shakespeare’s influence is largely ignored. The chapter on King Lear has a little bit of it when Garber explores the different treatments of the play between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Another way to look at Garber’s work is psychoanalysis of Shakespeare since no play escapes Garber’s inclusion of an evaluation by Freud. Perhaps Freud’s reputation as an amateur scholar of Shakespeare is lesser known other than his use of Hamlet to build his case for the Oedipus complex.
To Garber, Shakespeare is a literary deity. There was little that influenced Garber’s omnipotent Bard. This is at least how he reflects Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Even if not everyone who is familiar with Shakespearean lines and titles studied any part of his plays, Garber’s assessment of Shakespeare’s influence stems from her being part of the minority modern culture group (literary scholars) so Shakespeare’s influence is narrowed and the big picture is skipped.
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