Cursing the Queer Family: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis and My Own Private Idaho

Abstract

What makes a given appropriation of Shakespeare, a given echo of Shakespeare, worthy of a literary critic’s attention? What makes a critic ponder the Bard’s appearance on a calendar or a credit card, in ‘Fever’ or ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ in Forbidden Planet ox The Last Action Hero, in A Thousand Acres or Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)? Until recently — say, the 1980s — to attract a critic’s attention, an appropriation had to be located, like Shakespeare, within high culture, and was judged according to aesthetic standards applicable to any work of art, standards of beauty, coherence, suppleness, complexity, intelligence, and so on. Since the 1980s, critics have been attracted by appropriations of Shakespeare located outside of high culture, although, as Richard Burt points out, this attraction has not led critics to abandon the standards that previously demarcated these appropriations as out of bounds. Rather, if critics cannot assess appropriations according to the standards of high culture, they ‘try to reclaim’ them, ‘by showing that they are actually intelligent (that is, politically subversive, as present cultural criticism typically understands popular culture)’ (1998, p. xxix).