Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.

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).