But van Oort’s book can also be read in another way, as exemplifying an important response to another first-order question in the humanities:How does one put theoretical reflections by cultural anthropologists or linguists or philosophers and poetic works, like Shakespeare’s plays, in profitable conversation with one another around a common first-order question, such as humanity’s relation to its own violence?
After all, van Oort’s suggestion is that Shakespeare has something crucial to say to an anthropologist like Eric Gans, not just something to say about debates in which cultural anthropologists can and do engage without ever mentioning Shakespeare’s work and which might be thought to get along just fine without whatever Shakespeare’s plays are capable of teaching. At the same time, what Shakespeare has to teach us, van Oort thinks, can only be properly appreciated if we also bear in mind ways in which linguists or cultural anthropologists independently articulate their questions, shape discourses, and generate concepts.
One obvious but underappreciated fact to bear in mind is that Shakespeare cannot, so to speak, put himself into those contemporary conversations in which his words might be most useful. For one thing, Shakespeare is dead—and so whatever insights his work might bequeath are wholly dependent upon engagement with it by living readers, audiences, theater practitioners, students, and teachers. For another thing, and just as pointedly, contemporary conversations—in the written work of anthropologists or philosophers but also in the mouths of thoughtful people who talk with one another about human life and its violence—occur every day without unfolding as the production of a work of dramatic poetry.