Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Michael Neill. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. xiii + 527 pages + 31 illustrations.

This book gathers fifteen of Michael Neill's essays on English Renaissance drama. Because they were written over a period of twenty years, it is difficult to find in them a center. But Neill's pieces do have a number of shared concerns and commonalities of approach: as he mentions in his introduction, his interest in historicism was shaped by L. C. Knights, E. M. W. Tillyard, and M. C. Bradbrook (4). And although he has clearly benefited from and engaged with new historicist criticism, his work can be seen as a synthesis of old and new historicisms, with admonitory messages (usually by implication) for those who practice some of the more recent critical methodologies. One might take as the book's central credo the following: "It has generally been a weakness of contemporary historicist criticism ... that it has devoted more space to the identification and description of discursive contexts than to the detailed analysis of texts themselves. The consequences, I argue, are not simply aesthetic, for a fully informed historicism cannot afford to overlook...

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