Exclusive interview with Kenji Yoshino and review of his novel on Shakespeare and justice
By Gabrielle Pantera
Rating: Four Stars
“As word trickled out that I was working on a book on justice in Shakespeare, I got a increasing sense of how many Shakespearean justicers, to use a term from Lear, there are,” says A Thousand Times More Fair author Kenji Yoshino. “In Manhattan, a group of lawyers and judges have been meeting to read a Shakespeare play aloud together each month. They are now on their second run through the canon.”
Yoshino’s approach is to make controversial statements to stimulate thinking and debate about happenings in our world compared to Shakespeare.
Kenji Yoshino is a constitutional law professor at NYU. He compares Shakespeare’s justice against law in today’s society. Starting with Titus Andronicus, a very violent play that is all about revenge, he compares the play to America’s wars against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is America waging a war for safety or is it an act of revenge? Yoshino examines Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest and more. If Yoshino classes are half as good as this book no wonder he’s got students vying to get in his class.
Yoshino had always taught classes on law and literature, and got a surprise when he switched it to Shakespeare and the law. “The response was immediate and extraordinary. The demand for spots in the course jumped to six applicants for every spot. The students who enrolled were passionate beyond anything I had experienced. Their passion moved me to memorialize my thinking in this area in a book.”
“Last year, a federal judge called me to ask for advice on some questions of law in Shakespeare in advance of his participation in a Shakespeare moot court exercise,” says Yoshino. “This was, frankly, the phone call I had been waiting for all my professional life. There were invitations from around the world…Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan. It has been inspiring to see how much great works of literature still inspire so many of us, and how clearly applicable they are to contemporary issues of law and justice.”
Yoshino says he had a surreal moment kneeling in a Tokyo theater during a Noh performance of The Tempest. “Unaccustomed to sitting on my ankles, I was in agony by Act III. My Japanese is rusty and Noh is highly stylized, so I had difficulty knowing where we were in the play. I decided to focus on the moment where Prospero breaks his staff, as that seemed to me to be an unequivocal sign that the play was nearing its end. When Prospero threw said staff over his shoulder, I had the hopelessly philistine response of wondering whether that counted…whether they were economizing on the props, or whether this was a digression. I loved every dimension of the performance except for the seating arrangements.”
For research, Yoshino first read through all the plays again, something he had not done since college. After that he picked out the dozen he wanted to discuss and began to work through the secondary literature as well as watching film and stage adaptations. There are 400 essays published on Hamlet alone each year). “At some point I let the fact that no one could read it all be the ground to trust my instincts about when I had done enough. The problem about knowing when to stop was not just about anxiety, but also about pleasure. It was inspiring to read all the literary greats…Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Auden, Twain…having a critical conversation about Shakespeare across the centuries. I didn’t want it to end.”
At this time A Thousand Times More Fair isn’t being adapted for film or television.
Yoshino is based in New York City. He was born in Los Angeles. He’s currently working on a book about the transition in U.S. Constitutional Law from group-based civil rights to universal human rights. www.kenjiyoshino.com.
A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice
Kenji Yoshino. Hardcover, 320 pages, Publisher: Ecco (April 12, 2011), Language: English. ISBN: 9780061769108 $26.99
