Reynard the Fox: A New Translation
translated by james simpson
liveright, 256 pages, $24.95
A few weeks ago I found in my mailbox a brand-new, plastic-sealed, hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, sporting on its cover a close-up hellfire picture of a jester’s cap and bells, which looked for all the world like an instrument of torture. It was the 3E—that is what the cover reads—of the Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, probably the most celebrated Shakespeare scholar in America, and the senior editor of that college standby, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Greenblatt is a reductive New Historicist into whose mill a thousand works can go, and all will come out sounding like a cross between Leviathan and Heart of Darkness. So I left it on my desk unopened, and when one of my students, a regular visitor to my office, asked me if I was actually going to give the book away as of no use or delight to me, I let him take it, though with a bad conscience.
Greenblatt has now written the foreword to a new work by James Simpson, his Harvard colleague and a fellow editor of The Norton Anthology. The two men agree as well as a gray sky and a gray moor; for both scholars, human things are best understood as plays for power, with religion merely one of the more contemptible forms of the game.
