The word ‘sea’ is small and easily uttered. They utter it lightly who know least about it.
— From: George Mackay Brown, “The Sea: Four Elegies” (1976).
The famous (and for some almost notorious) personal name Shakespeare is writ large in the title of the present book – a book presented by a researcher who introduces himself as a “Shakespeare friend” and who addresses “other Shakespeare friends” as his audience. I find this self-positioning of the study’s author, and this gesture of gently being pushed into a specific role as a reader, appealing: in perusing Shakespeare’s Shipwrecks we are meant to consider ourselves as “Shakespeare friends”, and (nota bene) not as “Shakespeare worshippers”. Indeed, the friendship professed by Andreas Ziegler does not consist in blind adoration and laboured apotheosis. Rather, it is characterized by the best quality of friendship. And that lies in combining a readiness for warm appreciation with the critical eye that close acquaintance may foster.
But what concretely is at the centre of the circle of Shakespeare friends whom the present study intends to inform and entertain? Clearly, the focus is not on ‘Shakespeare, the man’. While we learn a lot about the person from Stratford who had a fabulous career as a dramatist and earned quite a bit of money as a theatre entrepreneur, Shakespeare’s Shipwrecks does a particularly good job in reminding us of what we do not know – and never will know – about the poet’s life and personality. And rather than using the very nebulae of biographical criticism as a trapping for the well-tried antics of Shakespearean mystification, Andreas Ziegler starts out from a series of “Caveats” that warn us against asking questions that cannot be answered or that are beside the point.
Rather than on Shakespeare as a person, then, the focus is on ‘Shakespeare’ as a body of texts. These are intriguing not by dint of their mysterious relation to a glover’s son from Stratford but due to their dynamic relationship to the contingencies of history. As our helmsman on the ship of Shakespeare criticism—or, rather, appreciation—Andreas Ziegler does a wonderful job of freshly introducing us to Shakespeare’s oeuvre by elucidating the complex ways in which it depends on, engages and transforms inherited formulae of constructing the world and of defining the place of humanity in the world.
In re-navigating the difficult waters of Shakespeare’s works, Ziegler always manages to stay on course. He does so because his journey is directed by a clear mark of orientation. This is provided by the felicitous decision to organize the exploration of Shakespeare’s oeuvre around the twin motif of the sea and shipwreck. Following this interest, the present study finds itself effortlessly traversing a large share of Shakespeare’s works. In the process, nearly all of the poet’s key topics come to the surface. Simultaneously, we are granted important insights not only into the modalities of Shakespearean (re-)presentation but also into the daunting vagaries of Shakespearean geography. Moreover, and most importantly, by coupling the expansive promises of the oceans to the horrors of nautical hazard, the twin motif of the sea and shipwreck takes us into the heart of the early modern world view. It graphically condenses the combined sense of possibility and anxiety in which Shakespeare’s plays are steeped but which they also explore and interrogate.
Shakespeare’s Shipwrecks convincingly suggests that the sea should be viewed as an ancient means and medium of world-making. On the one hand, the sea facilitated migration, colonization and commerce, thus standing as the most important medium of connecting the human world into an ever-expanding structure. On the other hand, the sea – both as an imposing idea and as a set of definitive images – stands out as a seminal medium of representation and thought: it was in contrast to the sea as a radical ‘other’ that ‘civilization’ defined itself. The topos of shipwreck expresses the precariousness of that human self-elevation.
Indeed, the present study makes us recognize how Shakespeare not only relied on shipwreck as a handy dramatic tool but also explored it as a constitutive fascination. That fascination lies in the troubling ability of ‘civilization’ to recognize itself in the act of going under.
Zeno Ackermann Würzburg, July 2023
Shakespeare's Shipwrecks 