Fernie, Ewan. Shakespeare For Freedom: Why the Plays Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. 327 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-130852. £30.00. hardback.

In this absorbing, passionate book, Ewan Fernie ranges through the histories (and geographies) of Shakespearean appropriation, and offers insightful readings of some of the plays’ characters, in an effort to inspire contemporary audiences to revive Shakespeare’s liberating political potential now.  Concerned by ‘how far we have come from…a militant view of the Bard’ (33), Fernie aims to explore ‘conjunctions between Shakespeare and freedom’ that informed and yet seem to have been forgotten by ‘modern life’ (139).  An early chapter therefore celebrates the impact of Shakespeare on the revolutionary Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth, while also lamenting that the impact someone like Kossuth might have on how Shakespeare is read and used seems now to be diminished.  Building on David Schalkwyk’s work, and following discussion of the value of Shakespeare to those incarcerated (like Nelson Mandela) on Apartheid South Africa’s Robben Island, Fernie explores that tantalising glimpse of an inclusive and democratic model of civic identity, ‘Freetown’, as hinted at in a brief mention in Romeo and Juliet 1.1.[1]  This discussion then segues into a consideration of David Garrick’s 1769 Stratford-upon-Avon celebrations as that potential for civic freedom made flesh, through the Jubilee’s links with the likes of John Wilkes, the period’s ‘foremost figurehead for liberty in British politics’ (124). After moving beyond Wilkes to relate Shakespeare to the burgeoning Chartist movement (developing Andrew Murphy’s work in his 2008 Shakespeare for the People), Fernie then switches back to continental Europe, to consider the intellectual and spiritual emancipation experienced by German Romantics when apprehending the ways Shakespearean characters showed how we could (and might still) be ‘free artists of our own selves’ (164).  Self-conscious that he is finishing by looking at two dead white males thinking about another, Fernie nonetheless ends with a discussion of two late-twentieth-century writers – John Moriarty and Ted Hughes – who, for Fernie, seem to synthesise the opportunities, costs and challenges of political, individual, and spiritual liberty previously discussed.

As this summary – and the book’s title – indicate, freedom looms large in Fernie’s thinking, because, he suggests, it looms large in Shakespeare’s thinking and in how people have thought about his work, including, most recently, Stephen Greenblatt and Richard Wilson, as Fernie notes.  Notwithstanding the extensive subdivisions of the term in the index, for Fernie, Shakespeare’s drama makes possible for characters and audiences a way to engage with and inform several kinds of freedom that are ‘central…in the Western tradition’: ‘the freedom to be yourself…the freedom to be different…the freedom not of being (what you are) but becoming (what you might be)…the freedom to enter evil’ (2-4; italics in original).  These freedoms are not always or merely related to individuals.  In the late 1700s, inspired by the ‘jingoistic drift’ of Garrick’s celebrations, Goethe and Herder used Shakespeare ‘to consolidate German in contradistinction to French culture’ (153): Shakespeare helped ‘free’ one culture from another.  In turn, though, the results of such freedoms, and their manifestation on page, stage or ‘streets’ (119), are not always or necessarily benign: Fernie rightly observes ‘wicked real-world appropriation’ (78), by Carl Schmitt, the Nazis, or political assassins, for instance, which represent the ‘sheer negativity of freedom’ (178), and realise the ‘darker…more dangerous…more violent’ forms Shakespeare embodies in Iago or Macbeth (178).  As Kathleen Texera put it (though Fernie doesn’t): ‘Shakespeare Would have Been a Fascist’.[2]  If Shakespeare represents and fosters freedom, he is and has also been implicated in the institutions of an unfree world.  And this is where Fernie’s use of Moriarty and Hughes proves so critical to his aims, in that he suggests they offer a way ‘through the whole process of barbarism and repression’ both to acknowledge and overcome the ‘serious moral danger’ that Shakespeare’s ‘expressive freedom’ can be seen to contain or enact (245).

Fernie expresses his ‘hope’ that this book will ‘encourage a creative…orientation’ to the ‘ever-new possibilities’ of ‘Shakespearean freedom’ (7).  This will help whoever is encouraged ‘to remember and revive an important tradition of cultural critique’ (39); this aim is re-emphasised later as being ‘to recover – and, indeed, to recreate – the lost tradition of Shakespearean freedom’ (135, italics in original).  But who precisely will be encouraged, and thus who will recreate?  The book’s first page uses this repeated formulation: ‘we need…we need…we now need…we need’ (1); the book’s last words refer to ‘our responsibility’ (275).  Because it is never made entirely clear who ‘we’ are, the urgency of the ‘need’, and the burden of responsibility, are not clear either.  On that first page Fernie suggests ‘everybody without a vested interest’ in Shakespeare might be ‘getting sick of him’ and that there should be a way of ‘expressing…what Shakespeare has…given human life’ that is ‘more direct and powerful’ than an ‘academic reason’ lost in lit-crit jargon (1): ‘‘‘Aspectuality”, “performativity”, “self-fashioning” or “agency” are not what you cry when…you make your break for a better life’ (53).  True enough. Maybe then, the book is addressed to precisely those people outside the academy and Shakespeare industry. 

Fernie asserts that ‘Shakespearean freedom’ has found ‘new recognition… in mainstream literary and popular culture’ despite a ‘crippling diffidence about the good of the arts in general’ (8).  As an aside, there’s not much on contemporary politicised performance either, beyond a brief discussion (75) of the 1994 Royal Shakespeare Company’s Coriolanus (which provides the cover image), and a couple of Romeo and Juliets (89).  Yet when Fernie attends to ideas of performance, he does so in ways that might seem at odds with his project:

Shakespeare’s characters struggle to realise their freedom in various…forms: Athenian, Roman, Christian, capitalist, medieval, and (to Shakespeare) contemporary and so on.  None of them take place in the conditions of our own contemporary Sittlichkeit [Hegel’s term for ‘‘conventional cultural life”]’ (208-9). 

But, of course, they do and have to: our rendering of Shakespeare’s Athens or Rome is as much a rendering as Shakespeare’s Athens or Rome were themselves.  If Fernie perhaps misses a trick in general by not engaging with Isaiah Berlin’s models of liberty, he also never mentions Oscar Wilde on freedom, or Shakespeare, but as one of Wilde’s discussants noted in The Critic as Artist (1891): ‘there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet’.[3]  This anticipates how Shakespearean characters exist through contemporary re-interpretation, editorial, scholarly, dramatic, multimedia or otherwise.

Alternatively, maybe the book is aimed at those within the academy and Shakespeare industry.  This might account for the time Fernie spends critiquing the academy, if not the Shakespeare industry itself. Fernie says, ‘freedom…has been pretty much off the agenda in the academy’ (39), in what he terms the ‘abstracted’ critical accounts of global Shakespeare, for example, where ‘Romantic nationalism’ or ‘Shakespeare’s Englishness’ are ‘off limits’ for progressive thought (40), though this seems to overlook some scholarship in this area.[4] Even when Shakespearean criticism is explicitly politically-orientated, Fernie claims, it has had ‘much less immediate and concrete political effect’ than ‘the older tradition of bringing together Shakespeare and progressive politics’ he tries to evince (142).  This may be unarguable, but becomes a little bit inward-looking.

Fernie suggests ‘recent years have somehow mislaid’ a ‘coherent tradition of Shakespeare and freedom’ (148), but is it provocative to point the finger at Shakespeare scholars, or those justifiably querying the current role of the arts in modern culture (like John Carey) for Shakespeare not having the political impact he apparently once did?  Fernie notes that ‘today we live in a much more bureaucratic and technologized world’ than the politicised readers and revolutionaries he celebrates here (244; see also 174). Such hints helpfully remind us that nothing is in and of itself radically progressive or conservative.  Context is all, and if Shakespeare’s liberating frequencies do not now resonate as loudly as Fernie wishes they should, arguably the problem lies less in Shakespeare’s academic critics, and more in circumstances where ‘freedom’ has been ‘given a bad name’ (39), not least by the ravages caused by neo-liberalism.  Fernie knows this, but in the interests of evoking willed optimism, does not, perhaps, spend enough time here showing how inhibiting and debilitating such contexts can be.

There are other ways the book’s stimulating methodological frame raises questions.  At one point, Fernie quotes Jacqueline Rose’s reading of Adrienne Rich, who, helps us ‘‘‘to think along with the human forces newly pushing forth, in ever-changing forms’’’ (76).[5]  Fernie continues: ‘Shakespearean drama…might teach us to do exactly this’ (77).  But, given the comparison, so might Rich, whom Fernie does not deign to put in the index.  Why, then, the focus on ‘Shakespearean drama in particular’ (76)? Is there some intrinsic and unique quality to his work no one else exhibits? Often, Fernie’s history of the ‘religious awe’ (149) Shakespeare provoked almost strains to try to replicate it, making even iconoclasts and Shakespeare-haters (like Tolstoy) amenable to a neo-bardolatry that finds ‘a sort of spirituality arising out of human life’ in Shakespeare (208).

Is it possible or desirable to isolate Shakespeare, in literary or social terms? Fernie himself does at one point ask a question that could invite an answer to this query.  Considering Hegel and Harold Bloom’s affirmations of the capacity of Shakespearean characters to embody ‘the free artistry’ of the self, Fernie wonders: ‘Surely Marlowe’s world-defeating Scythian shepherd boy Tamburlaine is a much more obvious candidate for the palm of literary self-making?’ (179). Instead of answering this question directly, and thus explicating why Shakespeare is better suited to doing what he says he is doing than Marlowe, Fernie takes us back to Hegel, who ‘implicitly distinguishes’ Shakespeare from his contemporaries’ ‘“humoral” drama’ (182).  However, from a certain perspective, Marlowe is his era’s pre-eminent dramatist of freedom.[6]  Nonetheless, what happens when ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was’ from 2 Henry IV (5.5.50) is compared to ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die’ in 2 Tamburlaine (5.3.248)? The former quotation could confirm Fernie’s intimation of Shakespeare’s particularity: as Hal steps outside himself, and sees that self as a plastic ‘thing’, he embodies what Fernie identifies as Hegel’s freely self-creating Shakespearean character.  In the latter, though, a character, and a playwright, accept that a self-fashioned identity cannot survive, when faced with the pressure of what ideology, narrative, religion, audiences, imply ‘must’ happen to a heretical upstart. However, Hal’s self-refashioning is predicated on the repression of men and women he now stands above and apart from (like Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet), haunted as he is by them.  Others pay for Hal’s freedom.  Tamburlaine, of course, makes multitudes suffer to attain his exalted state, but, even against his own urges, and his otherness, his terminal lack of freedom is perversely representative of and connected to those multitudes’ own confinements and restrictions, on stage and off. In Tamburlaine’s (or Edward’s, or Dido’s) unfreedom, others would have seen their own.  While not really commenting on Marlowe, beyond the aforementioned question, Fernie approvingly quotes Jonathan Dollimore in ways that have some bearing on him: ‘“To change in the direction of emancipation meant above all that one had to understand the ideological conditions that prevented change”’ (164).  If this makes sense as a description of what Marlowe did in his own time, it also makes sense in the history of Marlovian as much as Shakespearean political appropriations, through which he emerges (rightly or wrongly) as the great dramatist of free and unfree identities, something which is obvious even to those who find such appropriations problematic.[7]

Fernie is right, of course: there has been a falling-off of Shakespeare’s socio-political impact, perhaps because of his ongoing institutionalisation, not least in formal education.[8]  But people also still think Shakespeare matters in ways similar to why they think Marlowe matters, and on a much bigger scale because of that institutionalisation.  As Alan Sinfield noted: ‘Shakespeare is, simply, the most provocative point at which to break in to (or is it ‘out of’?) the system’.[9]  A question this book raises, but does not provide an answer to, is then: what freedoms are necessary to make a liberating reading (like this, or otherwise) of Shakespeare (or anyone) possible?  To suggest a book like this could offer a roadmap for such a reading is not meant to reflect on the possible limits of its aspirations, rather to observe that achieving the ambitions it sets out might benefit from, or be alternatively achieved, with a more pragmatic, outward-facing manifesto. That said, this book could profitably be read alongside Fernie’s other activities, as designer of modern civic liturgies, or as co-curator of the Shakespeare Now! series which invites scholars and readers to ‘engage imaginatively and often provocatively’ with Shakespeare, and which accords with the view he conveys here that ‘Shakespearean freedom not only permits but actually requires more creativity in criticism’ (50).[10]

There are, indeed, some genuinely invigorating and creative close readings, of Falstaff (2-3), or Antony and Cleopatra (60-62) or, especially, the interactions of confining metre and the urge to express (55), that open up the multi-layered and suggestive possibilities of Shakespearean language. So strong is that last point it makes one wish the book had roamed beyond the plays, to incorporate much more on the Sonnets and the narrative poems.  All these non-dramatic texts work with unfreedom in their forms and content.

Whatever the questions raised here, it is hard not to experience a profound admiration for Fernie’s work in this book and elsewhere, as one might justifiably have a deep respect for and affinity with his overarching project, as he debates what Shakespeare and culture mean politically and socially, and how such meaning is enhanced or inhibited. Excepting some odd typos – Walter Scott wrote Waverley not ‘Waverly’ (48), and Jacqueline Rose wrote about Sylvia (not ‘Silvia’, 269) Plath  – Fernie’s prose is by turns demotic and erudite, but always as lucid as his approach is generous: he professes he is often intent on drawing our attention to something ‘very less well known than it should be’ (149).  This includes this great question: ‘what’s the point of Shakespeare criticism – what is it for?’ (166; italics in original).  As a great question, it warrants a great answer.  Time will tell if this also great book animates one.

Adam Hansen,

Northumbria University

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