Title: Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution
Abstract: Shakespeare and Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution, by Marcus Nordlund. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Hardback $59.95, Paperback $27.95. This in an important, brave, and urgently welcome study, engagingly written and beautifully respectful of both traditional and theory-based commentaries on Shakespeare. Attempting to bridge widening chasm between essentialists (who celebrate dramatist who was not for an age but for all time) and constructivists (who believe that he can be understood only as product of historically specific social and cultural determinants), Nordlund grounds his exploration of Shakespeare's treatment of love in a biocultural fusion of evolutionary and cultural/historical explanation (5). A longstanding humanist tradition in Shakespeare studies, unabashedly subjective in its imaginative responses, has tended to regard Darwin's world-altering discoveries as either irrelevant or hostile to Renaissance high culture, while recent materialist criticism, fearing biology as enemy of its egalitarian political agenda yet claiming to bring Shakespeare within ambit of modern sociological and psychological theory, has grossly distorted bard by presenting him as embodiment of false scientism and often as site for polemically reductive discourses on patriarchy, gender, race, class, and elitist oppression. Nordlund' s ambitious project is to restore Shakespearean criticism to its time-honored function of analyzing emotional richness and intellectual universality of plays, to show why they merit high value that readers and playgoers have assigned them over ages, and to illustrate that problems they explore often leave us with powerful sense of mysterious complexity of life. At same time Nordlund seeks to account for these properties by appropriating insights of modern science, by locating emotions and their representation in literature in context of neurochemical adaptations in limbic system and higher cortex of human brain - physiological adaptations that were same for homo sapiens in sixteenth century as in twenty-first, despite significant differences of culture and historical conditioning. As he puts it, Four hundred years is very short time in history of species, and most of cultural heritage is shared (126). In Nordlund' s approach biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and anthropology become partners rather than opponents of philosophy, literature and art; he jettisons rigid dichotomy between particulars and universals as stumbling block - fossil of pre-scientific age - and embraces Dr. Johnson's famous praise of Shakespeare as the poet of nature with vital corollary that paradox of sameness within difference or its obverse is inscribed upon human genome. An opening theoretical chapter surveys and condenses formidable complex of research on hypothesis that human emotion originates biochemically without scanting likelihood, derived from anthropology and social history, that cultural influences are almost equally important. Although Nordlund is careful to avoid impression of oversimplifying problematic, perhaps insoluble, issues of causality, he nevertheless appears to accept as his premise biological formulation about etiology of love that comes short of certainty and about which scientists themselves disagree. The body of volume then examines various kinds of love as staged by Shakespeare - intensity of parental love in conflict with Roman concept of honor or pietas in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus; filial love in relationship to imperatives of duty in King Lear; tendency of romantic love to over- or undervalue its object in Troilus and Cressida and All's Well That Ends Weiland jealous love with rage and violence it can unleash in Othello together with fruitful parallel from The Winter's Tale. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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