Recent studies in the English Renaissance.

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 01-JAN-04

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We seem to inhabit a moment in the field of nondramatic early modern studies in which there is no dominant paradigm, no sense of a narrow series of necessary texts and urgent engagements coalescing around a single theoretical model. This is not, I would argue, a bad thing. What we do see is a large-scale assimilation to canonical and non-canonical literature of the major theoretical discourses of the last twenty years--discourses that demanded we attend to issues of race, class, gender, and colonialism. In place of a dominant paradigm, then, is an impressively thorough conviction that literary meaning is anchored in various contexts requiring rigorous archival and interpretive labor.

One decidedly salutary trend is a warping of theoretical models by specific archival evidence. Work that interrogates or refines theory, we need to remember, could never have been done without the impetus of theory. With this year's crop of books, history is less likely to be deployed in uncritically anecdotal form, or to be utilized as a reservoir of grand generalizations, than it would have been twenty years ago. A related trend is a greater specificity in scholarship. Where ten years ago we celebrated breakthrough studies of that abstraction called "the body," we now possess a fascinating anthology on the specific corporeal phenomenon of touch. Where ten years ago we would have admired a reading of Milton against a simplified version of the larger movements of seventeenth-century English history, now we have one against specific seventeenth-century economic theories. Where fifteen years ago we were seeking "histories of sexuality," we now have a wonderful book that explores the explicit pedagogical situations by which early modern male writers imagined sexual knowledge to be imparted. Where fifteen years ago we would see a book published critiquing the idea of the author as a subject, this year sees a book published on specific authorial deployments of anonymity. Where twenty years ago there were several books engaged in discovering the origins of early modern subjectivity in literary texts, this year sees several books exploring the particular cultural elements that provided the parameters in which something like literary subjectivity might be made manifest. This increasing specificity, I want to emphasize, is not a narrowing of our interests, but quite the opposite: it is a strengthening of our disciplinary claims to be doing work with genuinely historical and theoretical importance. Like Milton's God, who "by small / Accomplish[es] great things" (Paradise Lost, 12.566-7), these works actually produce greater depth and breadth and power by narrowing their critical and historical focus.

The books under review, then, are less about theory per se than about the scholarly and archival work that the questions and concepts of theory demanded that we do. As we might expect, "culture" is big this year (the word and its variants occur in seven titles, and the concept underpins several more), probably because the term allows critics to explore the various networks of reference, relationship, and meaning in the period. There is not as much work explicitly on form as I might have hoped for and anticipated, since the return of formalism has been predicted for quite a while. Nevertheless, this four-letter word has not been completely banished. I was also surprised there was not more work on precolonial encounters, since that has been such a fertile area in recent criticism.

A welcome development in this year's books is the fact that religion is back with a vengeance, not as an alternative to historicism but rather as its necessary medium. Perhaps appropriately in a year in which major Hollywood releases include films entitled Luther and The Passion, religion is finally coming into its own in literary studies--not just as the exclusive purview of Reformation scholars, or as a disguised discourse of political power, but rather as an element that pervades almost all aspects of early modern culture. One fascinating and productive development is a surprisingly large body of work that either deliberately breaks down the wall dividing medieval from early modern studies or rigorously interrogates the processes that originally produced the wall. This development has I think been assisted if not enabled by our deliberate change in nomenclature from Renaissance (a French word made popular by a German historian for an Italian phenomenon, and nearly dysfunctional for England, where the Reformation, as many of the books under review attest, changed everything) to early modern. Because this demolition of the wall demarcating the commencement of our period proves to be so creative in this year's crop of books, one can only hope that a similarly sustained process will ensue in scholarship at the end of our period, on the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

BOOKS ON SINGLE AUTHORS

Spenser -- It has been a good year for work on Spenser, with three books devoted exclusively to him. In Spenser's Underworld in the 1590 "Faerie Queene," Matthew Fike demonstrates just how hell functions for Spenser both as a place and a state of mind. Fike does a fine job of showing how the downward trajectories of Spenser's central figures echo both the classical motif of the journey into the underworld and Jesus' descent into hell. By attending so fully to the comparative resonances of this motif, moreover, Fike gives us a clear picture of the corporeal vulnerability and ethical weakness that is the essential medium of Spenserean heroism. Where Fike focuses on Spenser's relations with his literary precursors, in Spenser's Forms of History, Bart van Es explores Spenser's engagements with history. Van Es argues that history for Spenser is neither transparent nor univocal but rather is continually infiltrated by questions of genre. Identifying six overlapping forms through which Spenser would come to conceive the past--chronicle, chorography, antiquarianism, euhemerism, analogy, and prophecy--van Es shows how Spenser deliberately exploited the different resources available among these forms. Although Sir Philip Sidney had argued that the poet and the historian inhabited different discursive domains, van Es shows that historical writing is always shaped by literary and generic concerns, however unarticulated. Along the way, van Es offers some rich and original readings of Spenser's engagements with history, including a fascinating account of the bizarre episode of the chamber of Eumnestes in book 2 of The Faerie Queene.

Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference by Richard McCabe is an important addition to the widespread recent reconsideration of the significance of Spenser's Irish experience to his nationalist poetry. McCabe, though, wants to demonstrate not just the violence that Spenser's presence in Ireland inevitably entailed but also the ways that the indigenous Gaelic culture in Ireland suffused and enriched The Faerie Queene. Emphasizing that the epic is composed in a situation of alienation, even exile, from the Court and female queen it ostensibly praises, McCabe argues that "Spenser's imaginative response to the twin pressure of colonial conquest and female regiment is largely responsible for transforming England's first national epic into its first colonial romance" (p. 15). I found particularly fresh and illuminating McCabe's account of how Spenser's effort to create a myth of the origins of the English requires that he discredit competing Gaelic accounts of such origins. The book offers a major reorientation of the conversation on the meanings of Spenser's Irish experience; the yield in fresh contexts and vigorous interpretations is great.

Milton -- Milton studies seem to be going in several different directions at once. One notable trajectory is a meditative glance back at where we have been. In Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting "Samson Agonistes," Joseph Wittreich offers his latest thoughts on Milton's Samson Agonistes--a poem on which he has been one of our most provocative interpreters. This familiar territory is decidedly worth revisiting, particularly in this period after 9/11, when the revisionism that Wittreich champions seems all the more timely and compelling. Wittreich locates the poem's final act of violence not in the claim that this gesture redeems Samson but rather in the argument that it encapsulates the worst nightmares of tribal warfare. Indeed, the assertion that Samson is unequivocally glorified at the end of the poem seems redolent of the bad faith that underpins ethnic violence. This book has an impressively wide range of reference--Wittreich can cite either Toni Morrison or the Talmud with ease. Wittreich, moreover, is in complete control of a large and explosive body of criticism and biblical commentary, and moves with great agility and diplomacy among various interpretive possibilities.

Milton's experience of the Restoration is also the subject of The Endless Kingdom: Milton's Scriptural Society. In this book, David Gay demonstrates how the late Milton utilized the Bible to generate the terms of opposition to the Restoration settlement, many of whose defenders also had recourse to biblical interpretation. Its close attention to Milton's carefully subversive readings of biblical passages apparently supporting royal power, and its articulation of the ways that these passages are redacted in the epic poetry, make this book valuable for all Miltonists. Its account of Samson Agonistes, where Milton "clearly recognizes the possibility of alternative perspectives even as he proceeds with his own" (p. 139), provides a complement to Wittreich's sustained argument about the many voices and perspectives in Samson.

In Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton, Blair Hoxby explores how the economic transformation of the seventeenth century affected the works of Milton. Hoxby is a fine reader who illuminates many apparently inert passages by careful attention to the economic undertones of the vocabulary Milton chooses. He shows repeatedly how Paradise Lost "engages the contemporary discourse of trade empire" (p. 151), and argues that the poem is finally a criticism of the ideology of trade that dominates the court of Charles II. Hoxby's argument about the status of work in Paradise Lost is fascinating, as is his claim that in the last books Milton presents "human history as an unprogressive alternation of luxury and violence" (p. 152). But I would have preferred to see more attention to the work of self-regulation, since this underpins the autonomy that makes individuals into economic agents. Understanding Samson Agonistes as a meditation about the status of work after the Restoration, when one's efforts might be aiding an ungodly regime, Hoxby adds significantly to the contradictory currents that continue to swirl around this closet drama. One leaves the book convinced that developments in what has been called "the dismal science" suffused some of the century's most sublime literary accomplishments.

Milton of course had an immense impact on later literature. Anna K. Nardo explores one of the less famous sites of Milton's influence in George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton. Nardo looks at the way the erudite nineteenth-century novelist engaged both with the frequently fictional stories that were told about Milton, and with the texts that Milton produced. Nardo shows how the gender politics that suffuse stories of and by Milton subtend George Eliot's portraits of the social limitations facing gifted women. It is an illuminating book, and will edify both Miltonists and George Eliot scholars. Although it sometimes seems that Nardo is trying to explain too much through this very real connection, the book testifies to the myriad ways one creative artist can metabolize the works of another.

STUDIES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH

As is appropriate in the year of the 400th anniversary of her death, Queen Elizabeth I is the subject of much critical and editorial attention. In Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty, John Watkins astutely explores the ideological underpinnings of the various stories told about her in the generations immediately following her death. This is a book that will have a wide impact in literary studies; but it will also have to be read by historians of the period. Where most previous accounts of Elizabeth's reputation in Stuart England have emphasized a kind of fuzzy nostalgia for her glorious rule, Watkins explores the precise political deployments of her reign, as positive and negative exempla, available in the seventeenth century. It is particularly fascinating to watch Watkins describe how Elizabeth emerged belatedly in the Restoration as a champion of the via media between tyranny and mob rule, particularly since this political fiction still has such cogency in England's national mythology. I also enjoyed very much the ways that Watkins tracks the various politically motivated scandals about Elizabeth's personal behavior that emerge in the late seventeenth century. Watkins shows us how Elizabeth was never just a one-dimensional heroine, but rather served as a highly flexible trope supporting various contradictory forms of political commitment. As he argues in his suggestive conclusion, greater historical distance only made her more malleable to a wide range of political positions.

England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, picks up just where Watkins's book leaves off, tracing her reputation from the sixteenth century through the film Shakespeare in Love. Extremely readable, this book is a history of "English-speaking culture's perennial, forever-mutating investment in a queen who even today is still engaged in a posthumous progress through the collective psyche of her country" (p. 2). The book is filled with fascinating illustrations ranging from the glorious to the maudlin. One is struck by the cyclical nature of legends of Elizabeth--both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, were fond of the myth of Elizabeth as an appreciative patron of Shakespeare, the same myth invoked by Tom Stoppard at the conclusion of the film Shakespeare in Love. The book wears its profound learning lightly, and provides a fascinating object lesson in the various ways the present attempts to remake the past.

This year also brings us a greatly enhanced opportunity to explore not just Elizabeth's image but also her own brilliant words, with...

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