Marjorie GarberReseñas

Really rather good, although - as with so many books of this type - its target audience is a little ... vague.

In terms of accessibility for a general reader, Garber gives us a neat precis of Shakespeare's life and times, followed by analyses of all the plays in the canon. No play misses out, and all are treated fairly. At the same time, this is not an "introduction to Shakespeare", no matter what the blurb may try to sell you. All of the chapters assume at least some familiarity with the play in question, or are obscure enough about plot that you'd need to have some detail to begin with. This is not an account of the play's sources, history, or fate on the stage and screen; it's a popular academic treatise. With that said, if you're building up an amateur's Shakespeare library, this is an interesting read. What may be frustrating is an inevitability: there is so much to talk about with each play that, like most books of "essays", Garber tends to pick a few points about each play and then discuss them. This is not anything like a comprehensive overview (after all, most chapters are about 30 pages), but it tackles some of the key questions academics and directors ask about each work.

For the academic reader, I'm not sure how I feel. It seems as if Garber got the commission for the book by promising a general introduction, but she can't quite keep her intelligence at bay. And, hey, I'm not complaining; her insights are valid and well-written. Unlike most Shakespeare writers, I almost never feel as if she's wandering down a rabbit-hole of philosophical ramblings. No, Garber's analyses are - although decidedly deskbound - certainly drawn from real examination of the plays in the context of William Shakespeare's time. There are a few niggles depending on your taste (for me, I dislike that old-school scholar thing of describing a character using dashes, e.g. "Lear is her father-king"), but each to their own.

The challenge is that I'm not sure if the book unites the two worlds very well. Some of the chapters are quite high-minded, and reveal little to the general reader about the play. At the same time, there were very few surprises in the book for me (and thus, I'd assume, even fewer for the full-time Shakespeare academic). It doesn't seem as if Garber is really adding to the hefty discussion on the Bard, but nor is she a Richard Dawkins, able to illuminate a fascinating-but-niche world for the general public.

I should note this is a positive review, indeed a 5-star review (well, 4.6) - in part because I admire Garber's writing, her intelligence, and her views, and in part because as a Shakespeare lover, I was engaged on every single damn page. I heartily recommend this book to people in an "in-between" stage of Shakespeare scholarship, but I'd champion the great populists like Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Wells for those looking to get their head around the plays in an intellectual-but-understandable way.

Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. Anchor, 2005.
I have been reading at Shakespeare After All for almost a year—a chapter now and then, especially if I had a chance to read or view one of the plays. So, I may have missed any general argument Marjorie Garber was making. But play by play, the discussions were engaging and insightful. She was especially good on Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. One reviewer compared the book to the work of A. C. Bradley. Yes, but of course much more current. 4 stars.

Word to the wise, have a dictonary handy when reading this one. Althought I liked the premise, the idea that the value of literature is in the questions it asks and the thinking in requires, I felt she wandered around quite a bit. I found that she expected a basis of knowledge that many a lay person would not have. I just wish spoke to her intended audience, the lay reader, in a less formal, academic way.

Bisexuality in literature, history, boarding schools, psychology, biology... This book makes the invisible and marginialized visible. Every chapter added more to my list of books I need to read (and I've even gotten around to a few of them). It's definitely one I mean to re-read; I suffered informational overload the first time through.

A collection of Garber’s essays on the humanities and Shakespeare in particular. The distinctive contribution of literary scholarship, she argues, is a way of asking questions “about the way something means, rather than what it means, or even why.” This requires “close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action.” On change over time, she argues that older authors read a “canon,” the works of accomplished predecessors, while more recent ones read “episodically and in a non-linear or non-historicized fashion, in part because there’s so much to read and ‘sampling’ it has no compelling direction.” Twentieth century authors read their peers, not their predecessors. Her discussion of the anxiety of influence, which might also be the anxiety of impotence, is too complex to summarize, but thought-provoking, bringing in big data and the lack of anxiety many authors have about the past.

Garber also discusses theater and postmodern theory as linked in their resistance to the idea of a full, complete character, rather than a fragment of identity, and then connects that to “projective identification” in current political thinking and the paranoid style. This discussion leads her, in her allusive way, to the current valorization of STEM fields over the humanities, as colleges’ ways of projecting that which is abject onto a small part of what is in fact the educational project as a whole. The humanities, “already prone to self-doubt and self devaluation (they are ‘useless,’ they are ‘old,’ they are ‘light,’ they are speculative rather than empirical, they take too long to produce degrees, they are hermetic rather than accessible), become readily complicit in the fantasy of the university that none of these attributes attach to it.”

She ends with discussing “Shakespeare” as the representative of these attitudes towards the humanities. Shakespeare is now understood as themes and plots, not language; the plays are “owned” by the humanities in general, not English departments. Garber urges a variant of “strategic essentialism” for the humanities, what she calls “strategic generalization”—affirmatively using the power of the best broad-based lecture courses (like hers, of which I am a veteran) to defend the value of the humanities. The Shakespeare lecture has, she contends, for a century been a central, memorable place for lectures and thus it is a site from which we can defend the pedagogical project of the humanities at large. (Garber recognizes that her history is a history of Harvard Shakespeare lectures, not community college or other lectures, but she sees it as a model to aspire to.) Some best practices of the past, she argues, should be understood as current best practices as well: “asking students to read the text twice through before, or perhaps instead of, reading critical essays; the memorization and recitation of passages; vivid classroom performance (by the instructor and not just the students); and indeed philology, if by that we might mean, today, among other things, an acquaintance with word history and derivation through the OED.” Grabbing onto the podium is literally a way to retake prominence in the coversation about good education. Today’s students “are often engaged by performance, more so sometimes than they are willing to admit. When performance is combined with personal commitment, an intimate knowledge of the work under discussion, and a manifest respect for intellectual exchange, the effects can be exhilarating. Add Shakespeare to the mix, and the odds for success increase, as it were, dramatically.”

Articulated Shakespeare: "Shakespeare After All" by Marjorie Garber I've always tried to avoid judging a 16th-17th century playwright by 21st century standards. To truly appreciate Shakespeare's work one has to make the effort of being conversant with 16th-17th century ecosystem (literature, culture, etc.). In so many ways, Shakespeare’s characters created the archetypes that define who we are (or at least give us a language to understand ourselves). What I liked the most about Garber's book was her ability to reading into the plays in some plays and reading out of them in some others. At the end of the book, almost all of her choices seemed right to me. In some instances I didn't agree with her reading. "Pericles" ("The Incest Riddle" seemed far-fetched to say the least) and the "Winter's Tale" come to mind.
 
Read the rest on my blog if you feel so inclined.

This book represents 30 years of teaching the Bard by a Harvard professor of English. All of the plays have a chapter devoted to them, including introductions to their content, original production, etc. My only complaint about this large book is that it isn't larger: she doesn't deal with the sonnets. Oh well, we can't have everything.

There are many, many commentaries on Shakespeare. This is one of the best, in my opinion. Far superior to Bloom's attempt.

Finally finished the book. 906 pages, not counting footnotes and index. It has an essay on each Shakespeare play. Some are longer than others. It just depends on the play. She does a good job of relating the underlying circumstances, such as political issues going on at the time, as well as Bible or other references, to get a better understanding of the play. All in all, a good introduction to Shakespeare.

An intelligent and chatty re-examination of the basics, predicated on the idea that a canon of Western literature both exists and is necessary while avoiding the cranky horribleness of someone like Harold Bloom. Yes, "canon" gets its own chapter, but just look at the writers and works that appear over and over as examples. Encourages conversation, calm disagreement, exploration, discussing things like a rational person, etc.

Accessible, enjoyable, useful... and a surprisingly good beach read :)

I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I don't really know what the point of it was in the end. Some chapters are largely about the way people talk about Shakespeare plays with almost no relationship with the text (Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth) and others are about modern interpretations of Shakespeare (The Tempest, King Lear).

For all her style and feeling (and she has a lot of both), Garber doesn't really seem to make her case here. Fortunately, I think literature pretty much makes its own case.

Serious scholarship, and sometimes heavy, but it makes me want to read more about literary criticism.

This is a hefty tome, and it explores just about every nook and cranny in pursuit of a fuller understanding of the term "bisexuality." I wish it didn't assume that I knew so much about topics like Freud and the origins of modern thinking on sexual orientation, but it was already quite long, so I can see where I'll have to look that up on my own. What this book did quite nicely was examine bisexuality as seen from every angle. Of course it discussed the Greeks, where your partner's social status was perhaps more important than their gender, and the Kinsey report, where bisexuality was a non-mentioned statistical overlap, but it also discussed the tension between gay rights and bisexuality, why the term bisexuality is so hard to define in the first place, and the reluctance of people who identify as "straight" to come forward about their desires for people of all genders. As a English major, I found the section on literature to be especially interesting. In the end, with so much information, it became a bit of a jumble, but I certainly learned a lot.

(Pardon me, but I am going to take my review of How to Read Novels Like a Professor and plug in the title of this book and create my review of this book. It rarely happens but this book made me feel exactly like HTRNLP, so I have simply duplicated and slightly revised this review for UAL.)

I love books. You know that about me. But what probably you don’t know is that there are some books that I don’t like, some books I actually hate. Yes, it’s true. I hate textbooks.

I loathe textbooks. I hate the pompous, condescending tone of textbooks. I hate the know-it-all attitude of textbooks. I hate the way textbooks act like they don’t have to try to be well-written; textbooks know people will be read them anyway because people are forced to read them. I hate textbooks.

So I will say, sadly, that I found this book to be a textbook. I felt used and abused while reading this book. This book is a case of the abuse of literature, in my view. In any case, I was bored to death reading this book and that’s a shame.

Marjorie Garber, justifiably celebrated for both her erudition and accessibility, has written a kind of meandering history of the idea (and practice) of literature and the literary. While not as innately pleasurable to read as her most famous book, "Shakespeare After All," "The Use and Abuse of Literature" is, nonetheless, informative and oddly captivating. I say "oddly" because there is a distinctively disjointed, discursive quality to the writing itself; too, her arguments, such as they are, are elusive and intentionally untethered from definitive conclusions. Fortunately, the take-away is an expanded, more inclusive (and less judgmental) view of literature than has been offered by other academics and literary critics. Her goal seems to be more pedagogic than activist, which makes it a refreshing and welcome addition to a genre rife with polemics and political score-settling. This book is the opposite of the hateful nonsense produced by charlatans like Allan Bloom.

The chapters are pure Marjorie Garber, intelligent and widely read and wide-ranging. If you’re looking for a coherent thesis about any of the plays, methodically explored, you won’t find it here, but you will find a bunch of neat points about how the plays have been received, used, and interpreted over time. Here’s what she covers: The Tempest, especially as the play has been interpreted with reference to colonialism, racism, and gender—is Prospero a hero or a villain? Romeo and Juliet and youth, including the cultural reinterpretation of a “Romeo” to mean an inconstant, indiscriminate lover, rather than the boy in the play who dies for love. Coriolanus and the self who chooses to participate in, or absent itself from, political engagement with others. Macbeth and the necessary difficulties of interpretation, the riddles of the play turning into riddles about the play and Lady MacBeth, like Romeo, losing her grounding in the specifics of the play and turning into a slur applied to any ambitious woman. Richard III and the challenge of fact: Richard tells the audience of his own interiority, but howdo we know what was true of Richard, and why and in what ways do we debate whether Shakespeare’s Richard was “real”? The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism, and intention: was Shakespeare an anti-Semite or a man ahead of his time and place in writing Shylock as something other than a stereotypical villain, given how many ways the play has been performed in the service of anti-Semitism and of recuperation? Othello: how did Iago’s conniving words about reputation, uttered in bad faith, come to be understood as important truth (as many of Shakespeare’s phrases said by people who are figures of fun or evil in the text are), and who gets to play Othello in the context of racism and the extensive historical debate about how black Othello really was? (This was probably the least coherent chapter, but they’re all, um, wandering.) Henry V as exemplar of leadership, as shown by his repeated presence in business texts—even though the play itself ends by telling us that his victories were quickly dissipated by his early death. Hamlet and the problem of “character,” including interpreters’ tendency to see themselves in Hamlet and Hamlet in themselves. (My favorite, because Hamlet’s my favorite.) King Lear and its rise to outpace Hamlet as indicator of the despair of the modern condition (as opposed to the modern character).

Wonderful historical, social, and technical commentary on Shakespeare's plays. Great for supplementing for educational purposes, or for the casual reader to get the most out of the Bard's plays.½

A play by play treatment of Shakespeare's drama. An intelligent commentary for the general reader, not academic though the author is an academic who has taught Shakespeare for years. The kind of book a reader might keep in her library, and pull down for the appropriate chapter just before or after seeing a Shakespeare production.

Hands down, the best book on Shakespeare's plays I've ever read. Profound and concise, witty and easy to read, this is a book you can curl up with for fun or use to write any paper or understand a play. Her essays on Hamlet and Twelfth Night are especially intriguing.

Excellent combination of shakespearean criticism and American studies.

Amusing and well written - I picked it up primarily to see how and English professor conveys such a topic. She offers a solid variety of ideas about the psychology of our homes and our relationship with them. It's a fun read but neither critical nor startling.

In the very first paragraph of Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber sets the caliber for the insights that fill her book:

What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised around the world across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness….the plays and their characters seem always to be “modern,” always to be “us.”
Shakespeare After All is a masterpiece of explication. Its genesis was is in the undergraduate Shakespeare course the author taught at Yale in the 1970s. At Harvard since 1981, her lectures became so renowned that she began to give them in a campus theatre that could accommodate interested alumni and the general public. The book takes the form of a close reading of all Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. Preceding coverage of the plays is an introduction covering Shakespeare’s life and career, the culture and theatre of his times, and a survey of the ways audiences and readers have responded to him over the past four centuries.

One important point Garber makes is that Shakespeare’s plays have always invited quotation, whether for the beauty of selected passages or for their cultural authority in reinforcing a point. However, taking words out of context is never so dangerous a business as in Shakespeare, where in the context of the play, the words can have quite a different meaning. One classic example of this is Polonius’s parting advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet (I.iii.58-80). Polonius’s words, so often taken to be Shakespearean proverbs on the proper comportment for a young man, are within the context of the play, a weary collection of platitudes from a tiresome old fool and court spy.

One way of measuring the strength of Shakespeare After All is to compare it with Harold Bloom’s study of the plays, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. Garber’s work is at once more accessible and more demanding than Bloom’s. Bloom’s book is the reflections of a great critic on the works that have occupied his mind for over fifty years. Garber’s is the work of a great teacher who leads the reader to look ever more deeply into the texts of the plays. Her analyses recall Hamlet’s advice to the players about “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature…” Garber’s method is to hold up a mirror to Shakespeare’s plays, revealing their multiple facets and levels of meaning. She does not give her personal interpretation, for that would end the active participation of the reader to discover meaning through multiple readings.

On the final page of her study, in the acknowledgements, Professor Garber finally explains the evocative title of her book: “Shakespeare After All. After centuries of discussion, production, and analysis… we return, always to Shakespeare’s plays. Critics come and critics go; so do literary movements and theories. But the rich world of the plays—plays approached of necessity, differently in every generation—remains.” Critics and movements may come and go, but Shakespeare After All seems destined to live on in the permanent canon of Shakespeare criticism.

Published in Regent University Library Link, June 2006 (http://www.regent.edu/lib/news-archives/2006_06.cfm#book)

With her comprehensive knowledge, insights and close reading of the Bard's plays, Professor Garber reveals deeper meaning and broader context to captivate and delight the reader.

Erudite yet accessible, insightful and knowledgeable, Professor Garber has produced a veritable tome that's indispensable to the bookshelf of Shakespeare aficionados.

Read the Full Review here: http://www.epinions.com/content_239401733764

This book starts out well enough. In the early chapters, Garber makes some points that I nodded along with. However, she runs out of anything interesting to say a few chapters in, and from that point draws on her experience as an English professor by going into mind-numbing literary analysis: this is what Tiresias did, this is what Freud said, this is what a novel no one's ever read talks about. It becomes excruciating to read, and it really makes no sense why it's there. The book would be a lot better, in my opinion, if it only comprised of the first quarter.