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Loving 'Shakespeare in Love'

By Edward Rothstein
Posted Monday, March 8, 1999, at 3:10 PM ET

Dear Sarah:

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I'm not sure how I ended up leading us into the heart of darkness this morning, but before emerging, let me try to respond. About the nuances of Mexican atrocity, I am hopelessly out of my depth, but nothing you say surprises me. And I don't want to treat all of these cases as identical: Some are clearly attempts to terrorize a population and quash dissent; some are genocidal or attempts to "cleanse" a territory; some are the results of power plays between armed factions; some have a millenarian or utopian character.

But what I have been brooding about is that this kind of hand-to-hand atrocity has been the rule in human history, not the exception. These events should not seem so startling, but they are, partly because they are premodern, atavistic. The major political lessons about violence in this century have been about totalitarianism, in which tribal (I'll keep that inadequate word for a moment) hatreds are harnessed by a highly bureaucratic, modern system for the sake of maintaining state power. So powerful has that model become that writers like Foucault have even used it to describe the evolution of Western democracies.

When we hear about contemporary massacres, though, this political model is completely inadequate (even if the state is behind some of these massacres, like the Cossacks in the old Russian pogroms). We are not seeing the overwhelming power of the modern state (as in totalitarian violence) but the underwhelming power of the rational, civil order the state once aspired to create. For me, that's part of the nausea these cases inspire; the apocalypse looms at either end.

All right, enough. I may just be restating the obvious. So onward to Shakespeare in Love, which, I confess, I loved. This may condemn me to the purgatory of the middlebrow (and I'm sorry to add to your SiL sickness), but here's my take on the movie. In contemporary democratic culture we have a lot of trouble coming to terms with the notion of artistic greatness. There is a large university-led attempt to treat even the idea of greatness as a kind of ideological construct, in which reputation is built out of an accumulation of self-interest and special pleading. But what are we to do with Shakespeare? How do we humanize the archetypal Great One? We can reduce his work (showing it as less compelling than we thought); we can fit him into contemporary categories and alliances (asserting, for example, that he was gay); we can show how even the identity "Shakespeare'' is an illusion (wasn't he really X, or Y, or Z?); or we can put the whole subject into play (not just as in theater, but as in the French word jouissance).

This last is what the movie does. It is full of knowing winks and cute allusions, improbabilities and anachronisms, but it provides some inkling about how what is great can arise out of what is ordinary. I was ready to accept all its premises just for the thrill of hearing these lovers spin poetry out of prose. I'm not sure it would have worked if the players had more charisma or seemed less ... modern. That was, for me, part of the movie's playful impact: It made greatness plausible.

Anyway, back to you, Sarah ...

Best,