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Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare.

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Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare

By Angus Fletcher

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007

The publication of a new book by Angus Fletcher is indeed an occasion, but not one to which it is easy to rise as a respondent. One wants to find a way of expressing due gratitude and recognition without abrogating the functions of the reviewer. Performing those functions is not made easier by the simultaneous inflation and vagueness of the blurbs accompanying Time, Space, and Motion: "Orphic seer," "universal scholar" (Harold Bloom); "in a class by itself," "Olympian" (John Rogers); "a lifetime of thinking about the challenges of contemporary civilization" (Knoespel); "a radically new kind of exploration (Hollander). Admittedly, blurbs are just blurbs, the marketing necessity of which everybody understands, but the blurbs accompanying Time, Space, and Motion remain a stumbling block and a provocation. All of them elevate the book above the plane of ordinary reviewing while failing to convey a single thing about the specific character and arguments of the book.

Both those characteristics make the blurbs seem like evasively hyperbolic tributes to Fletcher's legendary reputation rather than to anything contained in this book. To set the record straight, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare is an old-fashioned book. It shows no respect for the author to pretend otherwise or to say it in code, if that is what the blurbs are doing. It is part of Fletcher's argument that books are temporally and spatially located products of the human will, and his own book is no exception. Nor does Fletcher try to make it an exception through anything remotely like Orphic posturing. Time, Space, and Motion bears the stamp of its time, which is not exactly the present. Both the book's title and the nature of the undertaking savor of a grand critical humanism with little current traction or credit. In keeping with this fact, the book...

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