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Of
Human Kindness What
Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy
Paula
Marantz Cohen
Newhaven
and London: Yale University Press, 2021 Hardcover. 159 p. ISBN 978-0300256413. $24/£20
Reviewed by François Laroque Université Paris III – Sorbonne nouvelle
Paula Marantz Cohen, Professor of English
at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is also a novelist, playwright and host
of a cable television show, dedicates this book to her students. The classroom
is indeed Cohen’s main reference and replaces here the usual critical
references, footnotes as well as bibliography, but this is obviously not a
scholarly essay as the book has been intended for the general public and
undergraduate students as an initiation to Shakespeare with very little that is
ground-breaking or even new. Its eleven
chapters deal with one or several Shakespeare plays, thirteen in all out of the
thirty-eight in the canon. Each chapter has a specific subtitle: “Richard
III : Unrealized potential”, “The Merchant of Venice :
Blueprint”, “Hamlet : Self”, “King Lear : Age”, etc. The author does not explain this
particular selection of plays (why not Macbeth, for instance, since part
of the book title (“Human Kindness”) is a quotation from that particular
tragedy (“[thy] nature / […] is too full of the milk of human kindness”, Macbeth,
1.5.14-15)? Probably because the title part moves from war hero to inhuman
monster, something which works contrary to the author’s theory (see below).
Though no Shakespeare ‘expert’, as she herself writes in the Introduction,
“[t]eaching Shakespeare on a regular basis, [she] came to appreciate his
greatness in a new way” [2] which, up to a point, explains the subtitle “what
Shakespeare teaches us…” with perfect circularity, ending her introduction on
“the lesson that Shakespeare teaches”, namely “how to recognize our own divided
nature and embrace the human condition in which we all share” [5]. Her main argument, after Harold Bloom’s
idea that Shakespeare invented the human is that “Shakespeare invented complex
individuals who elicit empathy” [3] And when she says that her “reading of
Shakespeare has made [her] a better wife, mother and teacher” [4] I can only
think of the late Philip Brockbank’s tongue-in-cheek statement, in his
inaugural speech as Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham and
Stratford-Upon-Avon, that “Shakespeare makes us better citizens and better
communists!”… We find more
surprising formulations, as on p. 11 (“Shakespeare’s Emphatic
Imagination”), where the author writes: There is no denying that Shakespeare was the product of another time
and, as a result, implicated in the sins* of that time—that is the
patriarchal, colonialist, misogynist, and racist aspects of his society and
culture. Such a treatment of history which judges the early modern period in terms of the current ‘woke’ ideology and cancel culture makes one realize that the author, who is otherwise well-intentioned since she began teaching Shakespeare “when his place in the university was being questioned” [2] and ends on a plea “to place Shakespeare at the center of the academic curriculum” [146] takes a presentist stance which of course corresponds to her idealistic views and—one might add—fairly naive approach to Shakespearian tragedy. Besides the banality of remarks which often serve as commentaries in the book (“The poetry
of Richard III is also wonderful…” [20]), the author seems to treat characters
in a play like real human beings and to indulge in psychological analyses
(“Hotspur is transparent and upright where Hal is covert and devious” [30])
that pass judgement on them. Rather than as a playwright trying to please or
terrify his audiences, Shakespeare here becomes a therapist of sorts teaching
us empathy and humanity. Of course this does not work with such early plays as Richard
III with its villain crookback, but then Shakespeare came to develop more
likeable characters: ‘[…] after the creation of this character, Shakespeare
went on to depict marginality from a far more humane and empathetic perspective’. Comparing
Falstaff with Lear because the former “occupies a paternal relationship to
Prince Hal” [88] certainly fails to convince (Lear is indeed dead serious in
his relationships with his three daughters and does not share at all Falstaff’s
wit and comic repartees) just as the emphasis put on Iago as “a victim of class
prejudice” [144] is another fairly questionable assertion since evil is
obviously not reduceable to social and economic circumstances. All in all this
book, written in a simple and clear style, will certainly be useful to American
undergraduates with its various caveats and timid attempts to counter the
current frightening climate created by wokism and cancel culture, but it remains
sadly unconvincing and rather useless for Shakespearean scholars. _ *My emphasis
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