Something like that.
Now Ms. Garber singles out a new aspect of Shakespeare’s versatility. As her latest title indicates, she is out to assert that “Shakespeare makes modern culture, and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” In true academic fashion Ms. Garber loves that kind of commutative construction, the chiasmus. Shakespeare loved this too, and Ms. Garber has the chiasmi to prove it, straight from the source. (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?,” “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” etc.) She is happy to compound her book’s facile inversions by calling her method, at one point, “as much pedagogical as heuristic (and as much heuristic as pedagogical.)”
Janet Maslin in the NYT on Marjorie Garber's “Shakespeare and Modern Culture”.
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