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A Mirror of Plays, a Play of Mirrors
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18649 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1991 |
2,045 Words |
| Author
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Frank Menchaca
Frank Menchaca is the author of the book-length poem Nicolo G--
-- and the Days of November. He has written reviews and essays
for many publications including the Village Voice and Elle. |
THE LAST DAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Vlady Kociancich
New York: William Morrow, 1991
298 pp., $20.00
Poor Shakespeare. Probably dazed from just having died, he arrived before God only to find his worst fear confirmed--that he had never lived to begin with.
There was a William Shakespeare, to be sure. And he did exist in Stratford and, later, in London where he gained a reputation as a playwright.
But he was no more than a shell for the inspiring voices of those who really lived. And according to Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges they were "Caesar, failing to heed the augurer's admonition, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the health with the witches" and others.
Indeed, had you held a mirror up to the man and looked closely, you would have seen the faces of all the characters from his plays rather than one of a balding, modestly mustachioed man that appears in schoolbooks and encyclopedias.
That is, at least, how Jorge Luis Borges imagined it. In his brief, fantastic biography Everything and Nothing, the Bard shares this ironic ignominy with God; both being history's greatest nobodies. Both are makers, representing multitudes, whose creations are more real than they.
Vlady Kociancich, a new Argentinian writer, has written a charged political satire involving the paradoxes of creativity and representation in her fourth novel--the first to be translated into English--The Last Days of William Shakespeare.
Cultural gangsterism
The Shakespeare of Kociancich's novel is a victim--but not of his ability to create representations that assume a reality greater than his. Rather, of a mob of cultural gangsters who launch a crusade against his work because it fails to represent what they call the "foundations of the traditional style of life in our country."
The novel takes place in the capital of an unidentified Latin American nation. The country's National Theater--named after a president whose tenure in
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