[The Stranger in Shakespeare] can be read in two quite distinct ways. The book may be regarded as epiphenomenal, an outgrowth of his previous theories, assumptions and fixations about American literature, extended back into the Elizabethan past. In other words, it might serve as little more than a rag with which to wipe the ankles of our greatest literary monument. On the other hand, it could be read as the author's most important critical statement, a bold book about the boldest of artists, in which everything the critic holds most dear is thrown into the battle, tried by fire. In his preface Fiedler speaks of writing this book in order to keep a twenty-year-old promise to himself. He asks us, in other words, to consider the book as if it were his major work, the final fruit of a lifetime's exploration of himself and the literary texts he finds most challenging. Though it is very probably not his final work, I think we must try to read the book as if it were, since it is a book marked with, indeed made out of, a man's obsessions.
Current mythographers as diverse as Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye implicitly argue that myth making is a socially creative activity. Fiedler agrees with that view to a large extent, but his own work raises its most serious questions when it deals with the way in which an individual author reshapes and transforms the communal archetypes…. [D. H.] Lawrence once said that an author sheds his sickness in his books, and this statement may be taken as the touchstone of Fiedler's work. His book on Shakespeare is certainly no exception to this, since what emerges from it is a picture of Shakespeare haunted by his own erotic mythology.
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