Critical Survey

For some time now, attempts to reconstruct and re-mark the history of how interiority and the subjectivity to which that belongs emerged in Western culture have been making critical headlines. According to the proponents of this explicitly anti-humanist and anti-essentialist master narrative, that moment can be precisely located at the time of Shakespeare. Using Hamlet as his example, Francis Barker argues that bourgeois subjectivity comes into being only in the late seventeenth century; challenging idealist conceptions of literary culture and history, Jonathan Dollimore promises to deliver Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the misrepresentations of essentialist humanism. Similarly, Catherine Belsey claims that to search for characters’ ‘imaginary interiority’ is to map modernist notions of a unified, coherent humanist subject onto early modern texts. According to Margareta de Grazia, those texts do represent motives for interiority, or, as Raymond Williams has it, conditions of possibility for occupying such a personal space; but, as Peter Stallybrass maintains, the early modern subject encountered in Shakespeare’s texts is not an ‘individual’.ho Although that subject may indeed possess a ‘self’ (in the sense of being distinct from others), he does not have an ‘identity’ – a term that is also absent from Shakespeare’s texts and that does not appear, in the sense of denoting individuality, until 1638. In short, we have met the early modern subject, and he is not us.

The new British historiography of the seventeenth century has identified a crisis of multiple monarchy in the 1640s that precipitated what was hitherto known as the ‘English Revolution’ or ‘English Civil War’ and is now termed the ‘British Problem’. This historiographical shift has not yet been matched by a similar move in literary studies, yet it could be argued that documents of culture can offer much in the way of highlighting the tensions within the emerging British polity. In particular, the English history play provides a useful starting-point in an attempt to map out the literary representation of British identity formation in the early modern period. It also subverts the short-term historical interpretations of the British Problem that confine it to the middle of the seventeenth century. My own feeling is that the origins of the problem go back further, and this is reflected in my readings of earlier material. What began as a way of explaining the crisis of sovereignty of the 1640s can be applied to the Renaissance as a whole. J. G. A. Pocock, one of the first historians to call for a British perspective, has recently argued for an ‘Age of the Three Kingdoms’ that would comprise the entire early modern period. This could be used to argue for long-term causes of the English Civil War – a term that Pocock wishes to retain – while opening up those causes geographically and temporally. I want to suggest that the new British historiography, combined with the recent turn towards the matter of Britain in Shakespeare studies, can be employed to good effect in a reading of John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634), the story of the pretender who threatened to usurp, with the help of France, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall, the throne of Henry VII, King of England and Wales.

Internalising the gaze of the Other, in this case that of Lady Anne, Richard’s acquisition of a looking glass is accompanied by an idealisation of body image that is redolent of the ‘jubilation’ experienced by the subject of Lacan’s mirror stage. Briefly, in the mirror stage the ego is formed in terms of identification with one’s specular image, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture upon seeing himself in the mirror will ‘jubilantly assume’ the upright position (Lacan 1977, 2). The apparently ‘orthopaedic’ effect of captation by the mirror image would appear particularly apposite for a character that is frequently disposed to descanting upon on his own deformity. This transition from an uncoordinated body image, the corps morcele, to the Gestalt of bodily wholeness, however, is irreducible to a myth of origins. As Jane Gallop has argued, the mirror stage involves a temporal dialectic at once anticipatory and retroactive which is of paradigmatic significance for Lacan’s understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and the signifying chain

In 1580, Anthony Munday wrote a pamphlet (from which the above quotation is taken) entitled ‘A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Playes and Theatres’, a banal polemical text of a kind very common to early modern London. This work was a very self-conscious contribution to the literary attack on the London stage; indeed, it was the first of such works to single out the stage for exclusive criticism, rather than include it as one among many decadences, as is the case in Philip Stubbes’ notorious Anatomie of Abuses (1583).

The textual, like the literary, criticism of Shakespeare is concerned with the inter-relation of spirit and form: searching for traces of the originating hand, the distinctly Shakespearean feature that is encased in the accretions of the physical book. The presence of such idealisations is less a contradiction of the claim to objectivity than it is a necessary precondition of the method of enquiry of nineteenth and early twentieth-century textual theory. Literary criticism likewise, sought for a similar spiritual element, a pure principle of meaning locked into the words on the page. As Stephen Greenblatt remarks at the beginning of Shakespearean Negotiations: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organised, professionalised, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum...Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces made themselves heard in the voices of the living’.

Barbara Bowen’s perceptive reading revels in the relationship between Troilus’ final speeches and Pandarus’ final appearance, but many critics, bibliographers, and editors have argued that the ending printed in both Q (1609) and F (1623) may be only one of the ways the play ended. There is a long history of speculation that Troilus and Cressida was revised, and that the ending may have been altered, perhaps for different audiences. The theories of editors and bibliographers can be read alongside the play’s theatre history, revealing how the heroism and scurrility that Bowen describes have been emphasised and diminished in different literary, theatrical, and social climates. I am particularly interested in exploring the play’s multiple and disruptive movements of closure, and the ways in which changing notions of an ‘authentic Shakespeare’ have been evoked in the critical responses to originary and modern texts and performances.

After the First World War, critical interest in Hamlet was particularly intense. The War had precipitated a crisis of rationality, and now, along with a wide range of conventional positions and assumptions, the rationality of Shakespeare’s play came into question. On one side of a protracted debate, John Dover Wilson marched at the head of those critics who argued and defended the rationality of Hamlet. For Wilson, approaches which threatened the traditional understanding of the play also threatened good sense. In particular, he set himself against those views which, by undermining the coherence and authority of Shakespeare and his play, served to undermine their rationality. Yet it was W.W. Greg – the most ‘rational’ of critics, and in other respects Wilson’s powerful ally – who supplied the most pressing challenge to articulate the full defence not only of the rational Hamlet, but also of the rational Elizabethan stage.

The Gift

Snowdrops Clouds It might as well be Saturday

Riding the Trans-Australian

Scyld’s Funeral (from Beowulf) 597

Stephen Greenblatt (General Editor), The Norton Shakespeare (New York & London: Norton, 1997) Paperback: ISBN 0-393-97086-8 £17.95 (no details of U.S. paper edition available); Cloth: ISBN 0-393-97087-6 £25.00/$65.00

Lay by your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500–1700. Edited by Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy and Melanie Osborne (London: Arnold, 1997). Paperback: ISBN 0-340-61450-1 £14.99; Cloth: ISBN 0-340- 691484 £45.00

Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700. Edited by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1996) 307 pp. Paperback ISBN 0-521-46777-2 £12.95; Cloth: ISBN 0-521- 46219-3 £35.00

Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin (London: Routledge 1997). Paperback: ISBN 0-415-04749-8 £14.99; Cloth: ISBN 0-415- 04748-X £45.00

Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender Representation Identity. Paola Tinagli (Manchester University Press, 1997). Paperback: ISBN 0-7190-4054-X £15.99; Cloth: ISBN 0-7190- 4053-1 £45

Shakespeare’s Folios. 4 volumes boxed (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997). ISBN 0-4151-5878-8 £650.00

Notes on contributors