Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.(Bibliography)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Rice University

This year's publications continue important conversations about shared issues of concern to all of us in the field. Although I can discern no seismic break with criticism from last year, work that hitherto might have inclined in more narrowly theoretical directions has taken a decisively philosophical turn. There was, however, very little casting about for a new trend with a new label. The best books were the ones that had most thoroughly absorbed and integrated theory and new historicism. The handful of hardy and relentless souls still banging the drum for the "new" causes sounded hopelessly belated. A few authors came out fighting from the jungle, fulminating about the errors of ideological scholarship, apparently unaware that the war has been over for quite some time now. However, despite predictable differences in quality among the books received, some of the less polished monographs and collections below were successful nonetheless in putting forth a new idea or in attempting an experimental mode of inquiry.

In what follows, I have reviewed only books with a stated academic purpose, as opposed to books squarely aimed at the general reader. The categories in which I have placed the various volumes are necessarily somewhat arbitrary since some books could easily have fitted under more than one heading. I have privileged monographs over collections, anthologies, editions, and annuals on the grounds that despite the degree to which the latter now form part of the vanguard of the field, monographs still represent the most focused and sustained consideration of their literary and intellectual objects and demand commensurably higher powers of synthesis and consistency of argument.

MONOGRAPHS

Authorship and Print -- One of the most important current conversations is about the status of Shakespearean authorship and about whether Shakespeare should be regarded as a poet rather than, following other trends both in theater history and cultural materialism, as a prodigiously talented theater hack. In the forefront of this discussion is one of the best books this year. Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. His thesis is that texts are as much literary artifacts as performance-based scripts. Erne achieves nothing less than the complete undoing of our current understanding of Shakespeare as an author. Far from being indifferent to his own literary reputation, Erne maintains, Shakespeare wrote not just for the stage, but also for publication--his company was interested in play texts for print as well as for performance. This is why, Erne contends, Shakespeare so often wrote plays that were far too long for performance. One of the important ramifications of this argument is that hypotheses that have hitherto explained the often puzzling textual variants of Shakespeare's plays--the entire bad quarto/corrupt text hypothesis, along with the notion that some plays were taken to the provinces and emended for performance there--are replaced with the idea that the play had, from its inception in Shakespeare's creative imagination, a double life. The play was produced for maximum return and profit, both for the theatrical and for the literary purposes. The current emphasis on stage-centered Shakespeare, Erne contends, ignores the rise of the playbook, unheard of in the early years of the theaters, whose plays we only know of through the survival of their titles. Erne's treatment of hard evidence is particularly persuasive here. He notes that Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors gives an astonishing glimpse of Shakespeare's view of his own authorship when Heywood tells us that Shakespeare was furious at William Jaggard's printing of Passionate Pilgrim, and notes that, indeed, Shakespeare's ire must have had some effect because the next edition of Pilgrim, published in the same year as Apology (1612), removes Shakespeare's name from the title page. That someone like Sir Thomas Bodley was not interested in playbooks, often adduced as evidence that they were ephemera, is shown to be the exception rather than the rule of book collecting. Erne makes a wholly convincing case for Shakespeare, not as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century style author, but nonetheless as an author who was passionately interested in the printed outcome of what he wrote, who wrote in the age of the reader, for readers as well as for live audiences. While Erne concedes that there was no legislation regarding copyright until the eighteenth century, he provides incontrovertible evidence that the idea of copyright and the practice of insisting on literary ownership were well established in Shakespeare's day. Erne does not deny that Shakespeare was always concerned with performance, but argues that performance was always simultaneously literary in the most profound sense. This becomes especially clear when Erne summarizes the state of scholarly opinion so far: "Yet how could Shakespeare--as a participant in an entertainment industry in which competition was fierce--have afforded to be mindful of more than the immediate needs of the business in which he was a player? In reaction to earlier views of Shakespeare that removed him from the material pressures of the stage business in which he was involved, scholars habitually portray him as one among many playwrights writing for the public stage under similar circumstances" (pp. 18-9). What is missing from this perspective, Erne maintains, is

the extent to which Shakespeare, as a shareholder in his company, was what Susan Cerasano has called a "privileged playwright." While we do not know how much Shakespeare was paid for the plays he furnished his company, it is clear that the greatest part of the handsome fortune Shakespeare had started to amass as early as the 1590s came from his share in the profits of his company rather than from his plays. For Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights, the situation must have been altogether different ... Shakespeare, "privileged playwright" that he was, could afford to write for the stage and the page. (pp. 20-1)

Erne thus uncovers cherished fantasies about Shakespeare's authorship, from W. W. Gregg's desire to salvage an authentic text to the Norton attempt to produce a performance text. While recognizing the Norton as a groundbreaking project, he argues nonetheless that "rather than presenting the plays as they would have been performed in Shakespeare's time, such an editorial practice actually recovers conflations of theatrical scripts and reading texts" (p. 26).

Facing a book of over 550 pages with a lengthy, belligerent appendix to a poised and scholarly main argument, one might be forgiven for believing that Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays was itself written by two different people:

In recent years the wide spectrum of literary criticism has included a "politicizing" strand, the term referring not to large-scale political activity within the state but to so-called "identity politics," categories of race and gender where "the identities in question are social constructions based on mythical portrayals of a collective past attached to symbols of ongoing subordination in the larger society" ... Identity politics either practises the discourse of guilt, the injured minorities (blacks, women, gays) attaching blame to writers living and dead for their complicity in persecution, or it seeks in literature of the past justification for its own defining attitudes. Either way, the results are often extremely damaging to literary texts, which become distorted, forced into inappropriate and anachronistic categories. It remains a puzzle why political movements which are perfectly justified in the contemporary world--to stamp out racism, to win equal working conditions for women, to prevent the persecution of homosexuals--should have such a deleterious effect on literary texts and on the practice of literary criticism. (p. 537)

Such narrow-mindedness detracts from what is otherwise a brilliant and irrefutable case for coauthorship defined in strictly empirical terms in teh first part of the book. The substantive argument of the book's core represents a painstaking review and reexamination of all the extant scholarship on the issue of Shakespeare's coauthorship. Shakespeare wrote collaboratively in "at least seven surviving plays" (p. 19): Titus Andronicus (written with George Peele), Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), Two Noble Kinsmen (with Francis Beaumont), Henry VIII (with John Fletcher), Pericles (with John Wilkins), I Henry VI, and Edward III as well as Shakespeare's part in "The Booke of Sir Thomas More." In revisiting these cases for collaborative authorship, Vickers takes up the way important recent editions of most of these plays have dismissed or denied such arguments, and turns to neglected evidence ranging from the early nineteenth century to as late as 1987. This reprise of earlier work enables Vickers to corroborate rather than discredit these earlier findings often buried in obscurity. He argues vehemently against this dismissive approach to past scholarship. Every major playwright wrote collaboratively, and Shakespeare was, in the light of Vickers's evidence, incontrovertibly, no exception. A work of meticulous and painstaking scholarship, chapter 2 evaluates in dense technical detail the various methods--statistical, parallel passages, stylistic, vocabulary, and so on--by which authorship can be ascertained. In the course of his discussion. Vickers builds on his own work, which established the author of A Funeral Elegy as John Ford (p. 74), as well as the pioneering labors of MacDonald P. Jackson, David Lake, and M. Tarlinskaja, among others. So how, then, did the "myth" of single authorship come about? Vickers argues that very few collaborative plays got into print (p. 17). If collaboration produced these relatively minor works, what about, say. Hamlet and the great tragedies? Vickers argues that some plays are incontrovertibly Shakespeare's alone, and he does not regard the fact that Shakespeare used, for example, a plot not his own in Hamlet as "collaboration" in the strict sense that he intends.

Collaboration was so much the norm of theater for Shakespeare and his contemporaries because of the speed at which composition took place--four to six weeks--in order to meet the demand for plays. In one instance a murder whose events unfolded in August of 1624 was on stage by September. Vickers paints a vivid picture of the material conditions of play-scripting, of the demand and pace as well as the method by which texts for performance were produced.

Among a range of intriguing questions posed by Nora Johnson's The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama is why those actor-playwrights who elbowed themselves into fame and notoriety at every available opportunity achieved only anonymity, while Shakespeare, who, according to Johnson, shunned the limelight, did not. The answer to this question, Johnson maintains, is not only an aesthetic one. It is rather that Shakespeare's silence on the matter of his authorship has enabled a history of humanist projection, which has conveniently allowed posterity to shape a wholly anachronistic conception of authorship. Johnson does not for a moment doubt Shakespeare's aesthetic supremacy in relation to Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Anthony Munday, and Heywood, but she does suggest that Shakespeareans of all political stripes and ideological persuasions have ignored compelling historical evidence about what authorship might have meant by unduly isolating him as the sine qua non of canonicity. This perspective on the traditional versus materialist polemic is refreshing, and Johnson adeptly upbraids both camps for their blinkered view of the period, which she suggests can only be corrected by greater attention to a wider range of historical material. Her absorbing final chapter addresses Shakespearean authorship in terms of whether and to what extent Shakespeare had control of his clowns, Will Kemp and Robert Armin. When Kemp performed Feste's song at the end of Twelfth Night, for instance, "Precisely because he is not outside the script, Feste opens up possibilities within authorship as Shakespeare practiced it that speak loudly of the need to negotiate charismatic performance" (p. 157). Authorship, Johnson claims, whatever it may be now, was not then about controlling performance, but rather creating room for its fullest, and even most unpredictable expressions. Using Michel Foucault's dictum that "books and discourses really began to have authors ... to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is to the extent that discourses could be transgressive," she argues that stage clowns with their "embattled comic triumphs" create "a form of authority analogous to that of the author" (p. 159).

Theoretical/Philosophical Approaches -- Another major contribution this year, very much part of the conversation about the relation between poetry and performance, is David Schalkwyk's Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays. Schalkwyk takes a theoretical or, more accurately, a philosophical perspective using Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin as a way of addressing the "performative force" (p. 1) of Shakespeare's language. In doing so, Schalkwyk successfully integrates formalist and historicist approaches. His aim is to "link close linguistic analysis with questions of power and society" (p. 2). He sets the sonnets in dialogue with the plays, stressing that the 1609 quarto is the only body of sonnets in the period written by a dramatist. The poet of the sonnets, he writes, "is clearly a player-poet" (p. 5). Theatrical interactions analogous to the sonnets are necessarily more fully embodied on the stage and consequently press upon readers and audience the full weight of disparities in gender and social status. Thus, dramatic energy works to materialize lyrical dialogue, whereas Petrarchanism works in the opposite direction to dematerialize and disembody its speakers. Of particular significance is Schalkwyk's brilliant argument that the sonnets are indeed autobiographical on the grounds of precisely the absence of proper names. In pursing this line of thought, he recapitulates the critical arguments for and against the sonnets as Shakespeare's autobiography and puts them in the context of Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's "What is an Author?" Schalkwyk favors Foucault over Barthes and takes Foucault's instigation to "reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance" (p. 18). What occupies this space, says Foucault, is a name, and Schalkwyk uses this as a way into the philosophical problems posed by names as explored by John Searle and Saul Kripke, which in turn offer ways of thinking about or thinking against the maddeningly abstract pronouns of the sonnets: "The absence of proper names in the sonnets has both a logical and ideological import. Logically, it suggests--even if it does not prove--their autobiographical nature. Ideologically, it intimates the desire of the player-poet to substitute the burdensome name of the beloved with the 'all' of himself. That 'all' must, however, be suitably cleansed of his own improper name" (p. 152). The book is packed with insights about the relations between lyric and performance, and between language and performance, as well as the current state of criticism. "Interiority" he writes, "is neither an ineffable inward state hidden from public view nor a mere epiphenomenon of the social, but rather a condition made possible by the availability of certain socially sustained language games" (p. 241); and: "The post-Saussurean theory of language that continues to inform the major critical movements that have recently wished to explore the consolidation or subversions of relations of power and desire, including the Foucauldian notion of discourse, has been far too blunt an instrument to probe the range and nuance of language at work in Shakespeare" (p. 239). Even readers not attuned to the philosophical readings of the operations of language will find the readings of the sonnets indispensable, especially since the book deploys intricate ideas with complete lucidity.

Hugh Grady's Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from "Richard II" to "Hamlet" is best read as a sequel to Grady's Shakespeare's Universal Wolf, which showed "how themes of 'good and evil' in four central Shakespearean plays could be reconceptualized ... as representing emerging modernity and its logic of reification" (p. 2). The new book aims to historicize these earlier claims by analyzing the context for Shakespeare's ideas of power in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne. For all that, the turn to history is not immediately apparent in the introduction. Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek, Friedrich Nietzsche, and more, are mentioned in his opening survey of conceptions of power and subjectivity in twentieth-century philosophy, which also encompasses how those ideas of the subject percolated through the writings of British cultural materialists and American new historicists. Grady eschews positivist historicism with its emphasis on source and influence. Instead he examines the relation between Shakespeare's texts and contexts (both sixteenth/seventeenth century and twentieth/twenty-first) as allegorical (in so far as historicism always encodes a story about the present as it reconstructs the past) and analogical (that is, as parallel rather than perfectly congruent lines of thought). He argues that Shakespeare's plays are in effect "interventions within our own theoretical discourses" (p. 3). Although Grady's "presentism" will strike many readers as anachronistic, he takes readers through the logic of his argument explaining that "at least since Hegel, [Shakespeare] has been recognized as a figure who has achieved his ultimate centrality precisely because he was one of the first and most original enunciators of modernity and its peculiar conception of the modern subject" (p. 21). While Grady's impressive powers of theoretical synthesis may still fail to persuade readers not already of his party, the core chapters of the book are consistently rewarding and often brilliant readings of Richard II and the Henriad in relation to early modern philosophy and political theory.

Douglas Bruster's ambitious Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn is arguably more concerned with the state of Renaissance studies at the present time than it is with the Renaissance. Bruster defends this approach, arguing that the present critical moment is a vital dimension of...

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