What’s Shakespeare to Us, and We to Him? Plenty

By JANET MASLIN writing in The New York Times : December 10, 2008

SHAKESPEARE AND MODERN CULTURE
By Marjorie Garber
Illustrated. 326 pages. Pantheon. $30.

If you gave typewriters to an infinite number of monkeys, one of them would eventually quote Shakespeare. That was an oft-repeated theory, but it has now been supplanted by a timelier model. Give search-engine capability to an infinite number of Shakespeare scholars, one of them will eventually discover factoids like the following:

¶Macbare, Macbuff and Out Damn Spot are the Macbeth-inspired names of makeup products.

¶In popular films that have slight debts to “The Tempest,” Ariel has variously been played by Robby the Robot (“Forbidden Planet”) and Wilson the Volleyball (“Cast Away”).

¶It’s easier to sing, “just like Romeo and Juliet,” as the Detroit doo-wop group the Reflections did in 1964, than “just like Troilus and Cressida.”

¶Motivational speakers who provide Shakespeare-inspired lessons to captains of industry have described the Welsh forests of “Henry V” as the Silicon Valley of their day. And “while Henry doesn’t have the luxury of a policy-planning staff and off-site strategizing meetings,” a firm called Movers & Shakespeares instructs, “he proves himself a great leader in identifying and then pursuing a clear vision.”

These and many other such nuggets have been strung together by Marjorie Garber, an esteemed and apparently unstoppable scholar, in “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” the latest of her many Shakespeare-centric academic treatises. She has already written “Shakespeare After All,” not to mention “Profiling Shakespeare,” “Dream in Shakespeare,” “Coming of Age in Shakespeare,” “Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality” and at least one essay about Shakespeare and dogs that manages to mention two St. Bernards featured in “Beethoven’s 2nd,” the movie about cute canines.

Read Maslin's full story here.