Thomas P. Anderson. Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton.(Book review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-06

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Thomas P. Anderson. Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. viii + 225. $94.95.

There are at least three ways to think about what happens when we describe the past in narrative. One view, associated with Hayden White and Roland Barthes, holds that we inevitably understand the past in narrative terms, and that what seems like an independent "event" is in fact comprehensible only in relation to a sequence of events. Without narrative, no past. A second view, articulated by a range of writers from Thomas Carlisle to Michele de Certeau, holds that the past is tragically lost to us, and that the stories we create about it inevitably suffer from gaps and breaks: narrative never quite recaptures the past. A third view, loosely based on a psychoanalytic model, holds that the past is traumatic, and that we attenuate this trauma by telling orderly stories about it. Yet the past resists repression, sometimes erupting dramatically in the narrative intended to manage it; narrative tries, without full success, to forget the past by tidying it up.

Thomas P. Anderson has written a book that offers this third view, with occasional doses of the second. He argues that the early modern historical imagination in England dreaded certain traumatic aspects of the past, including (among other things) regicide, the relation of the dead to the living, and the interpretation of the sacrament. According to Anderson, English drama of the period,...

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