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Article Excerpt
Between January and December, 2006, I received and more or less read ninety-one books that represent the year's scholarship in early modern English drama. Depending on one's age, occupation, and personal commitments, one could view this profusion either a) as a healthy display of the field's vigor and popularity; b) as a typical instance of how the civilizing process operates through infinite extension and refinement of the individual's masochistic impulses; c) as a looming crisis for scholarly publishing; or d) as proof that the end times are near. My own circumstances incline me to the first of these views, but I remain mindful of the others, knowing that I have been wrong before now, and about simpler things. My personal unscientific survey of the citizens of Leon County, Florida, comes down heavily in favor of option d.
I have divided the following survey into sections determined by the academic genre of the work under review (e.g., editions, essay collections, etc.). In the case of scholarly monographs, I have further subdivided the work by subject (e.g., genre and performance studies, cultural studies, etc.). Broadly speaking, these categories conform to the practice of previous SEL reviewers, with the additional advantage of reinforcing my own scholarly prejudices. In a single case--the first I present--I introduce an unconventional category to this system of organization, for it seems to me that the works thus grouped together represent a noteworthy and fairly new trend in Renaissance studies. I have only reviewed those volumes that were addressed to a scholarly audience or designed as textbooks for courses in Tudor and Stuart dramatic literature.
GREEN STUDIES
Robert N. Watson's Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance is a big book, both literally and figuratively. Born of "a desire to bring ecological advocacy into the realm of Renaissance literature" (p. 3), it confines itself neither to literature nor even, really, to the Renaissance, but instead ranges freely through the broad field of green and protogreen thinking from Pliny to PETA and beyond. In effect, Watson offers a prehistory of the current movement in green politics and criticism, its focus defined by English literary culture from 1588 to 1660, its impetus deriving from "the nostalgia for unmediated contact with the world of nature" (p. 5). For Watson, this latter is a special case of the broader desire for contact with the Real which figures centrally in a host of early modern social and political issues, from debates about the real presence to controversies over divine right. Watson's Renaissance is an era permeated with "representational anxieties" (p. 100), an era increasingly aware that "[a]rrogating reality to the a priori categories of the human mind resembles exploiting all nature for the immediate service of human selfishness" (p. 50). "From the moment of their conception," thus, "modern ecological and epistemological anxieties were conjoined twins" (p. 7), inspiring a series of regressive intellectual projects (the return to the primitive Church, the purging of Francis Bacon's idols, the search for Adamic language, the return to nature) whose urgency increases in direct proportion to the elusiveness of their objectives. In such a dispensation, "[o]ur efforts to return to the primal feast" become "at once tragically and farcically futile" (pp. 106-7); the more insistent our intimations of this futility become, the more desperately we cast about for some contact with the Real; and as this contact grows ever more tenuous in its spiritual dimension, we instead "confer ... on nature itself the attributes of traditional holiness" (p. 168).
Watson paints this disquieting picture "through the dark rose lenses ... of Cultural Materialist criticism" (p. 4), and he uses Shakespeare as its frame. His first chapter of close reading presents As You Like It as a paradigm-setting "acknowledgment of the desire to connect, of the failure of that desire, and of the fears aroused by both the desire and failure" (p. 101). The similes and metaphors that dominate Shakespeare's comedy emerge from "a culture ... infatuated with hopes of recovering some original and authentic reality" (p. 77), whether in the form of a weeping stag or a weeping girl. But what As You Like It offers instead is a seriocomic vision of the failure of such hopes: a world in which "pastoralism share[s] the dangers of Petrarchism" by "disguising verbal convention as individual emotion ... aggression as submission, appropriation as donation" (p. 91). Subsequent chapters move through Andrew Marvell's Mower poems and other lyrics of both the Metaphysical and Cavalier schools while offering "a Unified Field Theory of seventeenth-century English culture" (p. 140), then branch off into a study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting before returning to Shakespeare via an extended reading of The Merchant of Venice. For Watson, this play responds to early modern "mistrusts of mediation" (p. 261) by reconciling its audience to "the merely approximate character of knowledge" (p. 264). "Obsessed with how to attach financial values to human ones" (p. 267), it presents mediation as "an embodiment of love" (p. 273), bearing "the only truths people have" (p. 290). On this ground, Watson's rich and intricate study (far too wide-ranging and learned for adequate summary here) leaves readers with the equivocal hope that the things of this world "might remind us to love God, which means loving Him in the material world, not in opposition to it" (p. 321).
Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism comprises the first serious attempt to integrate ecocriticism into the broader ideological concerns of Marxist literary theory, and it makes sense that Egan should use Shakespeare as the focal point of his efforts. The integration itself requires some rethinking both of traditional Marxism and of current trends in Shakespeare scholarship. As regards the former, Egan notes that "mainstream Marxist analysis ... treats the Earth as an infinitely rich supplier of raw materials and an infinitely capacious sink for wastes," yet for Egan this attitude proves untrue to the more central Marxist principle that "the extraction of surplus value from producing workers leaves them too poor to buy back what they have made, so that capitalism is forced to scour the world for new markets and new workforces" (p. 21). On this logic, "economics and ecology are not antithetical but cognate" (p. 45), and "acknowledging the finite"--in both spheres--"ought really to be habitual for Marxists" (p. 21). Likewise, when it comes to recent trends in Renaissance studies, Egan argues against a current "rejection of the desire for unity and ... celebration of the dispersed, the indefinite, the self-contradictory, the de-centred" (p. 12). In this respect Egan particularly targets recent critiques of E. M. W. Tillyard's so-called Elizabethan World Picture, which have arguably neglected the "surprising ways" in which this "model of reality might ... be objectively true" (p. 25). In particular, Egan takes "Tillyard's version of an alleged Elizabethan concern for macrocosmic/microcosmic correspondences" (p. 26) as anticipating the ecological axiom that "the Earth is a single organism composed of the obviously alive biota ... and the parts that we have previously treated as inorganic," which latter parts "are, in a sense, as alive as the former" (p. 29).
From this theoretical vantage point, Egan offers detailed commentary on a wide range of Shakespeare's plays, focusing on those dramatic moments that employ analogies from the natural world to license particular forms of social relation: Menenius's fable of the belly in Coriolanus, Canterbury's explication of the commonwealth of bees in Henry V, the weeping stag of As You Like It, the storm in Lear, etc. For Egan, complaints about the essential conservatism of the Elizabethan World Picture miss the point of these analogies; instead, Shakespeare offers us "endless contestation about how the ... analogies are to be applied" and presents us with "awkward moments when the conventional and conservative meanings shear away and radical applications become possible" (p. 90). Egan's Shakespeare is fascinated with "the essential unity (oneness of nature) of human social interaction and our physical beings" (p. 66); through his conviction that "[o]ur bodies are structured just like the wider cosmos," he repeatedly anticipates "an essential Green insight lost in recent Shakespeare criticism" (p. 66). This Shakespeare "reworks myth to make a strikingly modern point about the artificiality of our distinction between nature and culture" (p. 128) while suggesting how "the latest materialist explanations" of humankind's place in and relation to the universe "return us to ways of thinking that have long been dismissed as mere superstition, and demand that we take the old ideas seriously" (p. 134).
Keith Sagar introduces Literature and the Crime Against Nature: From Homer to Hughes as an exercise in "the thinking and feeling of deep ecology (systemic, holistic, and biocentric thinking)" (p. xii), which he presents as endemic to imaginative literature from Homer to William Golding. For Sagar, literature functions "to warn civilization of the dangers, simultaneously inner and outer, psycho-spiritual, local, and global, of the crimes committed against Nature in its name" (p. xi). In delineating the character of these crimes (and their attendant warnings), Sagar moves from Greek epic and tragedy to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from Shakespeare's plays to Gulliver's Travels, from the verse of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, from Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joseph Conrad to D. H. Lawrence and William Golding and Ted Hughes. By and large, this breadth of scope proves unfortunate. Sagar's book is written in the tonal register of early-twentieth-century donnish universalism, as exemplified by the work of William Empson, Robert Graves, and C. S. Lewis. It moves by way of generalizations that will please few specialists in any of the literary fields it addresses. (We are told, for instance, that 'The history of Western civilization can be written as the story of the disastrous consequences of dualism" [p. 82], and that Queen Elizabeth I contained the "seething repressed energies" of her realm by resorting to "a reign of terror" [p. 85].) And it is punctuated by splenetic outbursts against "the tyranny of post-modern critical theory, 'cultural studies' and political correctness" (p. xv). This is a shame, since Sagar's interest in the environment is shared--and in some cases anticipated--by ecocritics in particular and other theorists more broadly. His quarrel with dualism--especially as manifested by the "cold fruitlessness" (p. 73) of Christian morality--was given a more nuanced voice some forty years ago by Lynn White Jr. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of "becoming-animal" and Bruno Latour's idea of a "parliament of things" arguably speak to Sagar's desire to "integrate human life with that of the non-human world" (p. 113). Other such connections could be drawn as well, but they won't be, because Sagar has determined to dwell in an intellectual universe dominated by Sir James Frazer, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, and adamantly closed to the last four decades of scholarly activity. The result is a cranky and anachronistic book. Its subject deserves better.
STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE
"For a writer," John Pemble declares in Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France, "there is no immortality save that conferred by foreign tongues" (p. 92). In telling the tale of Shakespeare's assimilation to the world of French letters, Pemble offers it as an exemplary instance of this principle; for Pemble, "French recognition transformed Shakespeare from an obscure, insular curiosity into a cosmic celebrity" (pp. xiv-xv). Yet the transformation was neither swift nor easy. England's national poet went almost completely ignored in France until the first half of the eighteenth century; thereafter, French intellectuals spent two hundred years praising and reviling him in almost equal measure. Voltaire, one of the first to bring Shakespeare to French critical attention, provides a famous case in point, doing a partial translation of Julius Caesar on one hand and dismissing the poet as a "sauvage ivre" on the other (p. 119). But when Voltaire gave voice to his ambivalence, the French problem with Shakespeare was still in its early stages. Initially, it was driven by the exquisite refinement of French neoclassical theater, which could not tolerate the poet's perceived barbarisms of plot and diction. Later, it derived just as much from a sense of national rivalry in which "Shakespeare and his nationality became so closely identified that hardly anyone could think of either except in terms of the other" (p. 47). After World War II, as French theory recoiled from traditional canons of racial and social propriety, "[t]he Anglo-Saxon dramatist who offended French taste ... bec[a]me an engage artist who assisted the proletarian struggle" (p. 179). And finally, in an elegant Derridean denial of the hors-texte, Pemble returns to Voltaire, noting that he "never said anything about Shakespeare that had not already often been said in English" (p. 206).
Renata Haublein's Die Entdeckung Shakespeares auf der Deutschen Buhne des 18. Jahrhunderts: Adaption und Wirkung der Vermittlung auf dem Theater provides a valuable Teutonic analogue to Pemble's Gallic story. Haublein's book does not share Pemble's chronological reach, but her focus on the eighteenth century parallels and confirms much of Pemble's tale from a rather different angle. Thus the German discovery of Shakespeare comes hot on the heels of the French, with Shakespeare mostly "terra incognita" in Germany until about the mid-1700s (p. 12). Indeed, it is the eighteenth-century "Interesse gerade Frankreichs an allem Britischen" that "half insulares Gedankengut in Deutschland zu verbreiten" (p. 15). In this respect Haublein, like Pemble, gives special credit to Voltaire, but ironically so, since for Germany Shakespeare came slowly, "in kultureller wie in politischer Hinsicht," to represent "eine Alternative zur franzosischen Hegemonie" (p. 14). Just as ironically, the terms in which Germany absorbed this alternative tended to replicate those of French reception practice; for the Germans of the eighteenth century, as for the French, Shakespeare was only palatable if heavily adulterated and "improved." For early German popularizers of Shakespeare such as Franz J. Fischer, Friedrich L. Schroder, and Christian Felix Weisse, Shakespeare's works merely provided the basis for "eine angemessene Adaption" answering to the adaptor's own dramatic sensibilities (p. 38). After surveying the general nature and consequences of such practice for the early German theater, Haublein concludes her work with chapters that focus on eighteenth-century adaptations of four Shakespearean plays: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice.
For its part, Don-John Dugas's Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740 approaches the making of Shakespeare's English reputation in the eighty years prior to the period of Pemble's and Haublein's studies. Dugas opens with a section on the poet's Restoration performance history, arguing that "performance had a far greater impact on the formation of taste in late-seventeenth-century England than either print or criticism" (p. 2). As for the textual circulation of Shakespeare, it "underwent only limited development before 1709" (p. 129), but this latter year proved a watershed in the formation of the poet's early reputation, for it was in 1709 that the publishers Jacob Tonson and his nephew, Jacob Tonson Jr., "conceived, planned, financed, and supervised ... the first modern edition of Shakespeare's collected works" (p. 130) under the editorship of Nicholas Rowe. For Dugas, the principal credit for this venture lies squarely with the publishers rather than with Rowe, and the innovations they introduced into the publishing of Shakespeare--"illustrations, an editor, act and scene divisions, a biography," etc.--set the standard for subsequent publishing practice while also making Shakespeare "far more accessible" than the earlier folio editions ever had (p. 179). As the Tonsons produced further collections of Shakespeare in the 1720s and '30s under the editorship of Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald, the Tonson enterprise found itself drawn into a price war with Robert Walker, who began publishing inexpensive editions of single plays in 1734. The result was that by 1740, the British publishing industry had established both the editorial framework for modern Shakespeare and the marketing infrastructure necessary to make large numbers of cheap play texts available to a reading public of limited means.
In Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, Linda Charnes has produced a series of mordant meditations on the legacy of Shakespeare's plays for contemporary political culture. Rather than pursuing a single thesis, the six essays at the heart of Charnes's book circle around certain recurrent themes, among them 1) that history is organized by "the still-swirling eddies of atavistic practices, unacknowledged primal drives and feelings, unspoken social 'contracts' ... and brain structures that are 6 million years old" (p. 25); 2) that these practices and drives link Shakespeare's work to contemporary Anglo-American political experience; and 3) that this linkage manifests itself in persistent "fantasies of monarchy," in the popular figure of the "filial Revenger," and in an ongoing "crisis of legitimacy" for English-speaking democracies (p. 8). Charnes grounds her study almost exclusively in Hamlet and the plays of the second tetralogy, which she sees as most clearly embodying Shakespeare's legacy for the political present, and as her chapters follow one another they grow ever more remorseless in their exposition of current ideologies. For my money, the two culminating essays are the best. Entitled "It's the Monarchy, Stupid" and "Operation Enduring Hamlet," they balance irreverent wit with penetrating critical insight while discussing, respectively, how Anglo-American political traditions have sought to reconcile the notions of filial entitlement and meritocratic democracy (the tension between these being thematized by the second tetralogy), and how Hamlet has spawned the cultural desire for a distinctively "American sense of justice ... inseparable from the swift action of revenge" (p. 103). In the latter case, George W. Bush's shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to Middle East diplomacy admirably expresses "the American libidinal imagination" (p. 103); for her part, Charnes offers an admirably sardonic expression of our nation's current postbellicose tristesse.
Among recent books on the intersection between early modern science and drama, Adam Max Cohen's Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions earns an honorable place. More modest in scope than Henry S. Turner's The English Renaissance Stage (for which see below), Cohen's study nonetheless delivers a fascinating account of the role assumed by five key early modern technological advances in Shakespeare's plays. These five innovations--the compass and related navigational devices, the printing press, gunpowder and firearms, the spring clock, and the mirror--supply the focus of Cohen's core chapters. For Cohen, Shakespeare's references to the compass and other early modern navigational implements lend voice to "English expansionist ambitions," while also expressing both respect for and suspicion of these new "precision measuring tools" (p. 38). The poet's allusions to printing insist upon a "metaphorical union between the human body and print technology" (p. 81) that constitutes "a response to the proliferation of printed materials during his lifetime" (p. 84). On the other hand, firearms take on a generally "repulsive" and "cowardly" character in the Shakespeare canon (pp. 96, 97), a character concomitant with the "chivalric disdain for gunpowder weapons that developed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (p. 98). The imprecision of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century mechanical clocks, Cohen argues, may leave its imprint on the "temporal relativity" (p. 146) that distinguishes Shakespeare's chronological imagination. And the mirrors that appear throughout the poet's work function ambivalently to "represent individual virtues, individual body parts, and the entire human body" (p. 168). The result is a corpus of verse that fashions new and composite relations between technology and the human body, relations that anticipate the human-mechanical amalgam of the twenty-first century "cyborg" (passim).
Working a similar vein, Arthur F. Kinney presents Shakespeare's Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama as "an attempt to join cognitive theory ... with material culture ... to advance our appreciation of certain key moments in some of Shakespeare's major plays" (p. ix). In terms of material culture, Kinney focuses upon four particularly resonant Shakespearean stage props: the mirror, the book, the clock, and the map. In terms of cognitive theory, he traces the rich and often contradictory networks of meaning that Shakespeare's contemporaries were inclined to associate with these objects. Thus Richard II's mirror provides the deposed king not only with a conventional reflection--both literal and figurative--of himself, but also with an image of others that "underscore[s] the play's movement from the old age of chivalry to the new, manipulative age of Machiavellian realpolitik" (p. 16). Ophelia's prayer book recalls varying Renaissance notions of textuality, thus suggesting how Hamlet "interrogates the uses of language" (p. 56). The insistent references to time in Romeo and Juliet lead to a "compression of events" (p. 97) consistent with early modern chronometric innovations and with "the chaotic life of tragedy" (p. 89). And the map with which Lear divides his kingdom attests to the growing popularity of chorography and cartography in Renaissance England, while introducing a series of literal and figurative divisions that "spread irrevocably" (p. 104) over the course of the play. One wishes somebody had bothered to proofread Kinney's book, but this criticism cannot detract from its ability to draw startling connections across the Shakespeare canon--and across the canon of early modern English literature more generally--against a background of highly informative historical research.
Also by Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle's Legacy and Shakespearean Drama takes up where Shakespeare's Webs leaves off, with an analysis of...
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