A Buddhist's Shakespeare: Affirming Self-deconstructions

In this volume, James Howe analyzes nine Shakespearean dramatic texts, as well as several examples of Western visual art drawn from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries, from a Buddhist perspective. He explains in the process how this perspective parallels Jacques Derrida's ideas about "differance" and how a Buddhist approach to literature can make visible those affirmations which remain invisibly "absent" in Derrida. Assuming the relations between literature and society described by Michel Foucault and the new historicists, Howe studies affirmative possibilities in Shakespeare and disputes the pessimism implicit in much new historicist scholarship. Further, his analysis of visual art demonstrates that certain Buddhist-like positions have always been implicit in the Western tradition. The self-deconstructive nature of Shakespeare's plays brings these affirmative positions forcefully to the surface.
In this argument, Howe applies his Buddhist perspective to some key ideas of neo-Marxists, Michel Foucault, and new historicists concerning the relations between literature and society. This perspective provides new challenges to the Marxist view that society necessarily determines our consciousness, Foucault's position that everyone in society is necessarily enclosed within a power field of competing and therefore oppositional interests, and the new historicist position that a society's established authority maintains itself in part by legitimating dissent in order to contain it. Howe proposes instead the possibility of a non-oppositional, nonideological posture in which one can stand apart from the class oppositions of Marx, the power field of Foucault, and the containment of dissent alleged by many new historicists, yet in a way which actually reduces the misery caused by social injustice.
Engaging contemporary theoretical debate, Howe draws a parallel between Jacques Derrida's ideas about "differance" - in which "presence" occurs only in "absence" - and the Buddhist idea of shunyata, the fullness of emptiness. He also shows the similarities between Derrida's and Buddhism's critiques of reason and language.
The essential Buddhist perspective, Howe argues, is that "reality" lacks the solidity which we habitually assume it has, and that therefore the appropriate attitude toward life is to play it as we would a game - with unusual seriousness, for itself rather than for any ulterior motive, even that of investing it with meaning. Howe also demonstrates that the "real" subject of representational art is always just itself. The significance of such art depends upon the concession that it has no significance. In the same way, it is precisely the self-deconstructive nature of Shakespeare's plays which makes their Buddhist-like affirmative positions visible.