Revenge is a dish best served cold, but how cold' Can we set that dish to cool for 400 years' Satisfaction so long deferred might seem beside the point. We want to watch our enemies humbled in an instant, to see their heads bowed low before our rage burns clean. In A Treacherous Secret Agent, the prominent Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber proposes a subtler and far slower model of revenge. Garber's subject is the role of literature in the Red Scare of the 1950s, a period during which artists and writers suspected of Communist sympathies were scapegoated, blacklisted, and hauled in front of investigative committees. In transcripts of hearings of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Garber finds an upwelling of voices from the literary past, among them Christopher Marlowe, the revenge dramatist Thomas Kyd, and, from first to last, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. The words of these long-dead playwrights and poets, Garber argues, 'echo and reecho...
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