Investigations of a Dog

Beginning Shakespeare (2005; ISBN: 0719064236) is a brief and accessible introduction to Shakespeare criticism aimed at first year undergraduates. I had high hopes for it because it’s in the same series as Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory (2002; ISBN: 0719062683), which I found very useful and informative despite (or perhaps because of) it being written for first year English Literature undergraduates. Beginning Shakespeare turned out to be not quite as good. Although I got some valuable things out of it, there are some shortcomings which can’t all be explained away by it being a basic introduction for 18 year olds.

The biggest problem with Lisa Hopkins is that she allows her own opinions too much influence. While I accept that true neutrality and objectivity are not necessarily attainable or desirable, I think that a book of this kind needs to take extra care to explain a wide range of opinions without privileging some over others. Peter Barry is very good at this. In Beginning Theory he admits that he finds structuralism more interesting than post-structuralism or postmodernism but still manages to present a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of a wide range of theoretical approaches. In contrast, Hopkins dismisses computer based analysis of texts apparently because she finds it boring and doesn’t understand it. By her own admission, seeing numbers makes her “feel faint” (p. 124), and after quoting Thomas Merriam she responds (p. 122):

Few literary scholars will be able to respond to this, because most will be hopelessly lost after the first sentence. Certainly when Merriam goes on to suggest, on the basis of this methodology, that the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus may well be by Marlowe rather than by Shakespeare, I have no idea whether this is plausible or not.

Ignorance is nothing to be proud of. If Merriam is wrong (and the hypothesis that Shakespeare used the letter O more frequently than Marlowe has some obvious limitations) then he needs to be refuted by a critical examination of his evidence and methodology.

Hopkins fails to mention post-structuralism despite its very obvious influence on her thinking. She repeatedly points out that readers can find many different meanings in Shakespeare’s plays, and that the texts do not necessarily tell us anything about the author, but the theory behind this is never explained. The absence of structuralism is more understandable, because it isn’t a very fashionable theory now. Although it’s an important ancestor of many other branches of theory it’s covered adequately in Beginning Theory and isn’t directly relevant to current Shakespeare criticism. However, I find it quite shocking that a book on literary criticism published in 2005 doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of eco-criticism. Peter Barry managed a whole chapter on it in 2002, and Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among The Animals (also published in 2002; ISBN: 0312293437) made a direct link between eco-criticism and Shakespeare.

Overall I find a disappointing lack of eclecticism in this book. Hopkins is very deeply entrenched in her own discipline and dismissive of anything outside it. After asking students to stop and think whether history and literature are separate categories, she confidently states that they are and falls back on the holocaust (does Godwin’s law apply here?) to “teach us the dangers of failing to realise that some things are facts” (p. 82). This seems like a very old fashioned liberal humanist view (history is about facts, literature is about fiction). Some historians have started adapting literary theory and applying it to their work, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between documents and reality. The growth of cultural studies shows that there are many potential benefits of merging history and literature. Cultural history arguably makes literary texts more important than a purely aesthetic approach does.

One final limitation is that the book is mostly about what other critics have written. It offers little practical advice about how to apply theory to Shakespeare’s texts yourself. This will be useful for undergraduates who need to know who has written what in order to discuss it in their essays, and provides plenty of further reading. However, Peter Barry goes much further by providing helpful examples of critical theory in action which show you how to do it.

This is definitely a useful book for the target audience, but I didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped. I would recommend Beginning Theory much more highly because it covers a wider range of theories, providing a balanced view of each one, and practical examples of how to apply them. Given all this it doesn’t take much imagination to transfer any of these theories to Shakespeare, or to history.

Bibliography

1. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2002).
2. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
3. Lisa Hopkins, Beginning Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, March 2005).