J. M. Synge Literary Companion Book

The first chapter asks a good question about why people care so much about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays when people don't seem to dispute it as much when it comes to any other author. Rather than try to answer that question, the book is more interested in how the question of false authorship is dramatised a lot in the content of Shakespeare's plays preempting those discussions. There's this nice reversal about how we are tempted to retrospectively see the influence of Freud, Marx, Derrida, etc, in Shakespeare and think of his work as uniquely modern; but actually those authors were all influenced by Shakespeare and modelled a lot of their ideas on him. It kinda culminates in this quote from Shoshana Felman on Lacan: if the unconscious is structured like a language, then literature is the unconscious of psychoanalysis. The book is fun and thorough but the argument seems a bit too cute for me. It lost me a lot in the psychoanalysis nittygritty. Might revisit the last chapter after reading Fink's Lacanian Subject. I give it 5 out of 10 rubber chickens :)