Critical Survey

To some extent, the title of this edition of Critical Survey, ‘Questioning Shakespeare’, could be regarded as a little misleading in the sense that the objective of the edition is not to question events in the plays and poems themselves, but rather to question and challenge the conventional Shakespearean critical tradition. It would therefore, perhaps, be more accurate to entitle it ‘Questioning “Shakespeare”’; the quotation marks signaling that it is the ‘institution’ of Shakespeare, with all the historical and cultural resonances such a term suggests, rather than the individual man which is the primary focus throughout. It is the ideological trajectory of this institution which is the essential issue being put in question, though this of necessity requires a close and detailed analysis of some of the plays and poems.

In recent years the concept of early modern ‘source studies’ has undergone a sea change, with profound but underestimated implications for Tempest scholarship: ‘Where once it was assumed the term[source] could apply only to those texts with demonstrable verbal connection, critics [now insist]…upon the dialogue that an individual text conducts both with its recognisable sources and analogues, and with the wider culture within which it functioned’. Coincident with this widening of critical focus to include the circulation of motifs and ideas throughout the wider culture of early modern Europe has been the emergence of a renewed emphasis on the Mediterranean contexts – both literary and historical – that have shaped the imaginative topography of Shakespeare’s play.After decades of the dominance of Americanist readings, there is now a renewed appreciation for the topographical complexity of Shakespeare’s imaginative landscape.

The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Pericles have been perceived as constituting a distinct group – ‘romances’ – only since 1874, as Barbara Mowat remarks.1 In the First Folio, the first two of these plays were classified as comedies, the third as tragedy. Pericles, not included in the Folio, never received a classification, but was known anomalously as ‘a play called Pericles’ in both quarto and the Third Folio. I shall argue that Cymbeline is to be seen as neither romance nor tragicomedy, but as an ‘early British History’. Close investigation of the play in relation to the historical section of Loves Martyr (published in 1601) will help to place it not in 1609–1610, but early in Shakespeare’s career. It is anti-Tudor in sentiment, and opposed to James as a prospective king. It subtly promulgates the rule of the Dudleys. The meaning of the contested term ‘British’ is key to this interpretation.

Why does the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida exist in two states, each with a distinct title page (S1 and S2, Figure One)? Surely this textual doubling is the most conspicuous illustration of W.W. Greg’s admonition that Troilus is a ‘play of puzzles, in respect of its textual history no less than its interpretation’. Despite more than a century of speculation, contemporary criticism seems no closer to a satisfying solution. Traditionally, answers have focused on hypothetical market-driven preferences of the publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Whalley: S1’s reference to performance at the Globe theatre is false because it was ‘unlikely that this play was ever performed to an audience at the Globe’ and the preface to S2 constitutes ‘an assurance that the play was designed for some private occasion or company’. Or the publishers supposed that having two different states of the title page would incite publicity and ‘stimulate sales’, or one publisher, for some unidentified reason, preferred one title page, and the other, another. Or ‘they decided to avoid a copyright dispute with His Majesty’s Servants by leaving them unnamed either in the title or the epistle’, or ‘they discovered after printing was under way that the play had held the stage only briefly but had attracted a sophisticated following’. No wonder that William Godshalk has recently chastised Troilus critics for substituting unverifiable speculation for sober interpretation of factual evidence, encouraging a disciplined return to a ‘facts first, then interpretation’ inquiry model.

Beliefs acquired from authoritative sources and maintained over time, tend to achieve the status of truths. As a result, though there are many possible ways of interpreting historical data, consensus beliefs are so powerful a determinant of interpretive outcomes that new interpretations of historical evidence will tend to be rare. In addition, any evidence that conflicts radically with a belief that has achieved the status of a truth will logically be dismissed. Such, historically, has been the status of the Shakespeare authorship question. Since we know who wrote the Shakespeare canon, there is no apparent point to research.

In this paper I argue that Muldoon’s recent Horse Latitudes (2006) rereads, in a way that corrects our misreadings, images of horses and horse-related images in his work, and that from this self-reading another Paul Muldoon emerges: the postmodern ironist we think we know will here give way to a poet of abjection and of ‘abject’ political sympathies, a figure it turns out was there all along.

Michael Cunningham’s most recent novel, Specimen Days, was bound to be compared to his previous work, The Hours. Reviewers and readers alike could easily identify the numerous similarities between the two texts: both novels were made up of three narratives set at different historical periods but with very similar if not related characters and themes, and a major literary figure haunting their background – Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Walt Whitman in Specimen Days. Lucas, Catherine, and Simon are the three main characters of Cunningham’s latest novel, caught up in similar relationships across three different stories of death and rebirth, trauma and recovery, sacrifice and transcendence.Ahistorical fiction, a police crime thriller, and a science fiction text, the three stories are all set in New York, tied together with recurring symbols and motifs: a white porcelain bowl, a music box, a white horse, the date 21 June, the angel statue at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain. For a novel that took its creator eight years to complete, Specimen Days seemed to some critics to be short of inspiration. Not only was the novel repeating themes, images, and characters within its own three novellas, but it was also repeating patterns from Cunningham’s previous book.

Lidia Vianu is Professor of English Contemporary Literature at the University of Bucharest. She has twice been Fulbright lecturer in Comparative Literature in the United States: at the State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, and the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a poet, novelist, critic, and translator, who has published five books of literary criticism as well as Censorship in Romania, a book of interviews and translations. She has written one novel and three poetry collections. Her editing work includes six anthologies of British and American literature and criticism, and she has translated works into both Romanian and English. In 2005 she won, jointly with Adam J. Sorkin, the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation.

The Idea of India AKHILA ASHOK

Stone Milk by Anne Stevenson (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), 70 pp. ISBN-10: 1-85224-775-4, £7.95.

A Lope of Time by Ruth O’Callaghan (Shoestring, ), 66 pp. ISBN-10: 1-90488-688-4, £9.00.

Notes on contributors