Plaintiff v. Bard

THE STRANGER IN SHAKESPEARE

by LESLIE FIEDLER 263 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.

It would be unjust to call Leslie Fiedler the ambulance chaser of U.S. letters, but he is something of a legal beagle. Literature seems to be more his client, or adversary, than his love. He spends half his time sleuthing for clues and the other half setting up a court case. As an advocate, Fiedler can be brilliant, infuriating, or slyly provocative. On one of his more celebrated undercover forays, he unmasked--to his own satisfaction--more homosexuals in American novels than Joe McCarthy ever managed to ferret out in the State Department.

In his current book, Fiedler is the plaintiff in a case against Shakespeare. The Bard, it seems, was viciously prejudiced on the subject of women, Jews and blacks. As internal aliens to his mind--"strangers"--they aroused his fear and consequently his hate. But after making Shakespeare out to be a conscious bigot, Fiedler argues that Shakespeare, quite unconsciously, had delved into "stereotypes and myths, impulses and attitudes" that "still persist in the dark corners of our hearts, the dim periphery of our dreams." So Shakespeare is both guilty and not guilty, a peculiar ambivalence that unsettles the whole book.

Selective evidence is the device Fiedler uses to make his case, and some of it is weirdly selective. He brushes aside Cleopatra, Juliet, Desdemona and Cordelia, since they do not bolster the antiwoman argument, and dwells on the unflattering portrayal of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part I to establish Shakespeare's bias. It is more direct and more correct to recall that France was the hereditary enemy of England, and that precious few Frenchmen are depicted with anything but derision and distaste in Shakespeare. Apply the argument in reverse. Tennessee Williams has given us remarkable and far from unsympathetic in-depth portraits of women. Does that make him profeminist? If Shakespeare did not lavish his hugest genius on women, it is probably because female roles were played by boys on the Elizabethan stage, and not because he was a homosexual, a supposition Fiedler makes yet again on the basis of the sonnets.

To Fiedler, the portrait of Shylock is proof positive that Shakespeare is antiSemitic. But is it? Shylock was a moneylender, and usury was long held by Christians to be a horrific sin. In deed, Jews entered the field by default rather than design. Is the Mafia loan shark or the friendly neighborhood bank really less intent than Shylock on getting its pound of flesh? In addition, in the matter of both women and Jews, one should always remember that Shakespeare's world was the world of Christendom. A mind steeped in the Christian tradition had to be wedded to two propositions: that woman was the first occasion of sin, and that the Jews delivered Christ to the cross.

To Fiedler, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello represent "the paranoia about blacks which Shakespeare shared with the pit," that is, the commoners in the audience. Now Shakespeare and his audience could have spent a lifetime without seeing a black. Only in Hitch cock or Pinter can one develop paranoia over an unseen "stranger." In Othello, black and white are not racist, but imagistic counters. It is Othello who is white in his innocent gullibility and Iago who is black in his "motiveless malignity." Both men are complementary halves, like day and night.

What is really perverse in Fiedler's book is that Shakespeare should be its target. Of all playwrights, it is Shakespeare who healingly knits man and woman, Jew and Gentile, white and black, together in a bright, profound and moving vision of our common humanity. His spirit is as generous as the sea. Perhaps it is this spirit that is Fiedler's "stranger."

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