I note that there is a less than positive review of my book, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, in a new review print publication, with a website as well, named NEW CATHOLIC BOOKS & MEDIA.
Here is the link to the review:
http://www.newcatholicbooks.com/book-on-shakespeare-and-catholicism-does-readers-a-disservice/
It’s often best to avoid responding to poor reviews but the utter lack of logic in this particular review forces me to respond. Here’s the response I posted to the review. I begin with a quote from the review, which misconstrues the opening lines of my preface:
Please allow me to quote from the review above:
‘Seeing the Catholic presence is one thing; being told in the first sentence of the preface that “the historical, biographical and documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism” is given is quite another … This is sheer hubris.’
Now, please allow me to quote the whole of the first sentence from my preface: “This volume is intended as a companion to The Quest for Shakespeare, in which the historical, biographical, and documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism is given.” Your reviewer does not mention the fact that the evidence is given in an earlier volume, a volume which she fails to even mention anywhere in the review and a volume which it is safe to presume she has never read. Nor does she mention that I state in the very opening sentence from which she cites that this is a companion volume to the earlier one in which the evidence is given. Yet she lambasts me for failing to show evidence in this book that I have shown in the earlier book. She has clearly not read the earlier book and is, therefore, presumably unfamiliar with the evidence contained therein. As such, her sweeping assertion that there is no evidence is rooted in ignorance.
I wish this journal well but hope that in the future you will be more diligent in your choice of reviewers.
The response of the editor-in-chief to your comment reveals that he apologetically agrees with you. In Ms. Rackover’s excerpt from the preface of the book, we find that she does—with far more particularity and intentionality—exactly that of which she accuses the writer, illogically extracting words and phrases that will affirm her own thesis (the condemnation of “thesis”), which, one suspects, was formed beforehand.
There are perils in being a freelance writer who must necessarily write for a market.
But that’s a consideration that says more about “the market” than it does about the freelance writer. There is a universal distaste for thesis itself in that market. In a philosophical age that asserts “there is no truth” as the only truth, a thesis is unacceptable before it is read. Just as Rackover must acknowledge the depth of the scholarship she found in Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, she must also chastise the thesis to which that scholarship points. It’s as though she wants to praise the support of the thesis while condemning the very idea that there should be a thesis.
Sans Logos, there is no logic.
A copy of my response to the editor:
Dear Mr. Fenoglio,
You expressed the hope that your readers will read both of Professor Pearce’s books on Shakespeare and come to their own conclusions. I’ve read them both. For critics, scholars, teachers, and for any lover of Shakespeare, neither book can be recommended too highly. I think the real difficulty in this review is that Ms. Rackover falls into none of those categories. Otherwise, she might have known that the newest Shakespearean scholarship from the most widely accepted authorities now acknowledges the Catholicism in Shakespeare’s plays and, in the absence of absolute biographical evidence, speculates very strongly in favor of the theory that he was in fact a secret Catholic. It’s for that reason precisely that the two books have so much value: the historical and biographical research–which Ms. Rackover recognizes and praises while, oddly, dismissing–is now collected in these two volumes and presented for the ordinary non-scholarly reader as well as those whose own research has already pointed in that direction.
So many reviewers and critics insist on a writer’s affirmation of their own uncertainty as a criterion for their approval or agreement. It’s foundational to the unacknowledged creed of this age of uncertainty, which regards all truth as subjective, anyway. Ms. Rackover is no different in that way and can hardly be held accountable. However, that a writer may sometimes fail to comply with that insistence does not constitute “hubris.” It means, rather, that the reviewer has a pre-formed thesis and approaches the text with a demand for agreement. And under that circumstance, Professor Pearce’s book was bound to disappoint.
Dena Hunt