Hugh Grady's book makes the case for seeing Shakespeare as an ultimately hopeful author. This hopefulness is perhaps surprising in that it stands as an “inverted pattern” of the “traditional life-story”: a certain march of impending death and demise (3). But Shakespeare, according to Grady, is more like the old shepherd from The Winter's Tale who, upon discovering the newborn Perdita, tells his companion, “Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn” (3.3.110–11). Rather than dwell on a seemingly inevitable decline, Shakespeare eagerly looks towards new possibilities. It is delineating this career trajectory that is Grady's primary interest in Shakespeare's Dialectic of Hope, and he offers an illuminating account of how Shakespeare's later plays move away from a preoccupation with an empty, destructive politics and come to articulate an increasingly “utopian vision” (4).
Shakespeare's utopianism is in one sense an optimistic challenge to instrumental politics, and Grady is forthright about his book's interest in engaging with longstanding discussions about Shakespeare's own political sympathies. Yet in contributing to the construction of a political Shakespeare, Grady seeks to go beyond the potentially reductive identification of seemingly progressive or conservative values in Shakespeare's work. Instead, he stresses the playwright's larger “dialectical negation” of the political, a negation that produces a “utopian response” that is found in an aesthetic imagining of “alternatives to existing reality” (5).
Grady traces this evolving dialectic through a two-part analysis of five plays. After the introduction, part 1 opens with a chapter on Julius Caesar to establish Shakespeare's mid-career emphasis on Machiavellian “objectified political power” (39) and worlds devoid of any utopian possibility. Chapter 2 argues that Macbeth depicts a “more value-laden treatment of political power” (42) in which a glimmer of the utopian is found in its tragic hero's registration of fates alternative to the one he chooses to enact. Chapter 3 details how most of the utopian possibility in Macbeth manifests through the “Baroque aesthetics” (60) of the witches. Their ambiguous gender, sexual, religious, and heroic signification calls into question the stability of the world and its “politics of force” (83).
Whereas part 1 primarily uses Machiavelli to articulate the bleak political circumstances of Shakespeare's tragedies, part 2 takes inspiration from the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Ernst Bloch, to define Shakespeare's “aesthetic-utopian” outlook: a projection of neither an Edenic past nor heavenly providence but a better, “undefined future” that is earthly and achievable (94). As chapter 4 argues, such an ethic is first observable in Antony and Cleopatra. The play's Roman context evokes the familiar Machiavellian power dynamics, but the play's radical commingling of the political and private yields an enduring pro-sex eroticism that eclipses the protagonists’ superficially tragic downfall. Chapter 5 and chapter 6 focus on The Winter's Tale and The Tempest respectively. Both these tragicomedies offer the most overwhelmingly utopian visions through an emphasis on art's ability to “present imaginary, alternative modes of life” (152), and in some cases overturn initial political jealousies and abuses.
Grady is explicit about his belief that Shakespeare's increasingly utopian perspective can and should be a source of hope for us today. At various points, he catalogues the worrisome political circumstances that girded the book's composition—the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, racist police brutality, the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, increasing economic inequality, global warming—and he ultimately asserts that Shakespeare's “trajectory of hope” should be a “provocation for [Shakespeare's] readers and auditors to apply similar values to [their] own lives and politics” (99). While this imperative to hope can at times feel overly abstract, Grady does make more helpful, tangible nods to Shakespeare's concern about capitalist commodification and political disenchantment in his chapter on The Tempest.
Grady's selection of plays is schematic, but effectively so. His articulation of an aesthetic-utopian emergence offers a potent means for conceptualizing the unwieldy and lesser-attended late plays he does not focus on, especially Pericles and Cymbeline. The book is also peppered with references to the early plays, and these references help to flesh out both the intricacy and comprehensiveness of Grady's vision. Overall, the book leaves us with a useful means to conceive of Shakespeare's career and the works within it, as well as a reminder of the broad inspirational potential that Shakespeare's works possess.
