Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares by Jeffrey Butcher
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Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares by Jeffrey Butcher B.A. in English, June 2007, The Ohio State University M.A. in English, June 2009, Eastern Michigan University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 18, 2014 Dissertation directed by Ayanna Thompson Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Jeffrey Michael Butcher has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 25th, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares Jeffrey Butcher Dissertation Research Committee: Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Alexa Huang, Professor of English, of East Asian Language and Literature, and of Theatre and Dance, Committee Member Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Committee Member ii ©Copyright 2014 by Jeffrey Butcher All rights reserved iii Dedication The author wishes to dedicate “Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares” to Mom iv Acknowledgements The author wishes to give special thanks to Dad, Ayanna Thompson, Alexa Huang, Daniel Gilfillan, Michael Noschka, Karen Lehman, Geoff Way, Patrick Blackburn, Mehreen Arif and Comrade Sandie (Kitty) v Abstract of Dissertation Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares Even though the name Karl Marx has survived in Shakespeare studies, more than two decades removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Marxist Shakespeare scholars tend to shy away from deep political polemics. Marxism, in general, has lost its political charge in academia as it has become canonized as a cultural and intellectual tradition. In “Recovering and Reconstructing Leftist Shakespeares,” I aim to recover a neglected Marxist history and reconstruct a Leftist political discourse in Shakespeare studies by retrieving the politics of Vladimir Lenin. To accomplish this, I turn to Shakespeare’s history in the American proletarian movement of the 1920s and 1930s—a Leftist movement characterized by its support of Marxism-Leninism. By examining American proletarian literary theory, appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare, and creative writing, I exhume this buried tradition and provide a corrective history of Shakespeare’s cultural authority. I examine the relationships between art and propaganda and between proletarian culture and popular culture, and I advocate an active Leftist partisan approach to Shakespeare studies. A Leftist approach will take the intellectual Marxist tradition and re-politicize it by focusing on economic and political class relations that will complement gender, race, religious, and materialist theories. I argue that class is a social dynamic that is not mutually exclusive from any form of discrimination, and a shift to class-specific relationships with Shakespeare will ultimately complement progressive theoretical discourses.* * All citations of William Shakespeare’s plays are based on the texts as they appear in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008). vi Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... v Abstract of Dissertation ................................................................................................. vi Introduction: Re-Versing Political Shakespeares ............................................................. 1 Part I: Recovery Chapter 1: A Revived History: Shakespeare’s Proletarian Cultural Authority ............... 33 Chapter 2: Leftist Hamletism: The Exorcism of the Bourgeois Spirit ............................ 69 Part II: Reconstruction Chapter 3: Hamlet and Shylock; Revolutionists and Artists ........................................ 102 Chapter 4: The “Non-accommodated” Proletariat: A Leftist Shakespeare Narrative ..... 134 Conclusion: Go Left, Young Scholars! ....................................................................... 165 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 186 Introduction: Re-Versing Political Shakespeares Marxism Sanitized An uncommitted Leftist political perspective currently plagues Shakespeare studies. Even though the name Karl Marx has survived in Shakespeare studies, more than two decades removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Marxist Shakespeare scholars tend to shy away from deep political class polemics. In the 1980s, cultural clashes between Western capitalism and communist ideologies of the East provided a political link to Marx that carried over to Shakespeare criticism. With the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and cultural materialism of Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, we saw the emergence of innovative ways to approach Shakespeare.1 But now, many liberal Shakespeare scholars retreat from the political controversy inherent in these theoretical discourses. It appears that Marxist methods applied to Shakespeare scholarship more often than not are concerned with subject-object theories, re- historicizing early modern material culture, and fetishizing commodity fetishism—rather than concerned with a return to Marx as a guide for political practice. The absence of a firm left-wing political role for Shakespeare in Marxist contexts is apparently still due in large part to the specter of Stalinism. In the introduction to Marxist Shakespeares, Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow maintain that Marxism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet understandably they feel the need to make a distinction between Marxism and Stalinism: 1 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 1 Marxism was used by repressive regimes; and there is no dodging that part of its complex history. But the sclerotic form of state socialism developed by the Soviet Union is not equivalent to the varied body of Marxist thought, an intellectual tradition that not only provides the most trenchant analysis of the operation of capital that we have, but also a highly developed body of work on issues such as the operation of ideology, the constitution of class societies, nationalism, historical periodization, and the historicity of literary forms and genres.2 I take away two crucial points from this passage. The first point is that Marxism does have a complex history. Howard and Shershow rightfully respond to critics that the Soviet Union is not a universal signifier for Marxism. The next point I want to make, which becomes somewhat problematic, is that they endorse a Marxism that has been reduced to an “intellectual tradition.” Howard and Shershow state, “The collapse of authoritarian communist regimes offers a perfect opportunity for a fresh examination of Marxist writings on a host of often neglected topics.”3 These topics, to name a few, include chapters on historicizing the early modern moment, discovering more about mercantilism and geography in Renaissance England, rewriting Marx into a textual representation of Hamlet, and illustrating women’s roles in material production during the early modern period. All of these are compelling analyses and are extremely useful to Shakespeare and early modern studies, and they do well to complement the intellectual tradition of Marxism. With an addition of a framework that includes class politics, these analyses could really flourish. 2 Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, “Introduction: Marxism Now; Shakespeare Now,” Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001) 5. 3 Ibid. 2 When I say class politics, I am referring to social stratification based on how the economic mode of production affects economic consumption. In other words, I do not mean universal classifications, but rather class organized by economic conditions. Because economic advantages and disadvantages impact collective liberties at large, I use the term class to make distinctions between overrepresented and underrepresented groups that respectively share social privilege or social inequality. Vladimir Lenin claimed that the working masses must “learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.”4 Keeping this in mind, we can comprehend that factors such as race, gender, disabilities, and religion are not mutually exclusive from economic class stratification. In most cases, they are mutually determining. Shakespeare scholars have touched on this determining relationship. I believe that a Leftist approach to early modern studies will make it even clearer than it already is. In her book, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, Sharon O’Dair claims, “Speaking practically or empirically, this is to say that in the thirty years since the Left has pursued the politics of race