Historicism and 'presentism' in early modern studies

Cambridge Quarterly

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 37-60

  Wells, Robin Headlam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949588136     PISSN: 0008199X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/xxix.1.37     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford 1996) pp. 4-5.
2. Robin Headlam Wells, 'The Fortunes of Tillyard: Twentieth-Century Critical Debate on Shakespeare's History Plays', English Studies, 66 (1985) pp. 391-403.
3. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London 1944) pp. 64, 261.
4. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London 1928);
5. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York 1937);
6. Franklin le van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven and London 1940).
7. The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York 1940) p. 20.
8. English, 5 (1944-5) p. 160.
9. The Counter-Renaissance (New York 1950) p. 7.
10. In Graham Storey (ed.), Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (1961);
11. 'Ambivalence' was delivered at the Shakespeare Summer School, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951 and first published in John Garrett (ed.), Talking of Shakespeare (London 1954).
12. Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford 1959) p. 34. Gardner's lecture, delivered at the University of London in 1953, was called 'The Historical Approach'.
13. The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare's Art (Chapel Hill, NC 1962) pp. 171, 173.
14. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1967; repr. Chicago and London 1984);
15. W. R. Elton, 'Shakespeare and the Thought of his Age' (1971), in Stanley Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge 1986) pp. 17-34;
16. Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton, NJ 1973);
17. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford 1977);
18. Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1979).
19. 'Shakespeare and the Thought of his Age', p. 32.
20. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, p. 12.
21. 'The Fortunes of Tillyard', p. 402.
22. The phrase quoted is from Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984; repr. Brighton 1986) p. 229.
23. Radical Tragedy, pp. 89-90.
24. Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, NY and London 1993) p. 5.
25. 'Afterword', in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 2 (London and New York 1996) p. 240.
26. Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven and London 1997) p. 47.
27. Ellis's quotation is from Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York and London 1992) p. 52.
28. Literature Lost, pp. 4-5.
29. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London 1980) p. 4.
30. H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York and London 1989) p. xi.
31. Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass. 1995) p. 5.
32. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester 1995) p. 17.
33. On the history of historicism see Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and New York 1996);
34. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH 1997).
35. Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hemel Hempstead 1992) p. 32.
36. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (eds.), New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, NJ 1993) p. 1.
37. Shakespeare's Universal Wolf, pp. 7-8.
38. The Business of Criticism, p. 32.
39. 'The Historical Sense', ibid., p. 135.
40. Quoted in Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (1937; rev. edn. New York 1962) p. 269.
41. Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia Spriggs (London 1941) p. 19.
42. 'The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies', English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986) p. 43.
43. Ivo Kamps (ed.), Materialist Shakespeare: A History (London and New York 1995) p. 3.
44. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares, New Accents (London and New York 1998) p. 6.
45. Two pioneering works in this field are Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature, and the Nature of Womenkind, 1540-1620 (Brighton 1984)
46. and Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY and London 1990).
47. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Houndmills 1998) p. 6.
48. Though some materialists, conscious, presumably, of the implausibility of a theory of self that denies all intellectual freedom, are willing to cede limited powers of agency (e.g. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York 1992) pp. 10-14;
49. Louis Montrose, 'Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History', English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986) pp. 5-120), radical anti-essentialism is still widely accepted as a reliable theory of subjectivity.
50. As Edmund Smyth writes, 'That the self can no longer be considered a unified and stable entity has become axiomatic in the light of poststructuralism' (Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London 1991) p. 10).
51. Linda Charnes agrees: the notion of essential selfhood is 'epistemologically insupportable' (Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass. 1993) p. 10).
52. The Subject of Tragedy (London and New York 1985) p. 33.
53. Confessions, trans. William Watts (1631), Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (London 1922 and 1925) i. 449-51.
54. The Heroic Frenzies, trans. Paul Eugene Memmo Jr. (Chapel Hill, NC 1964) p. 137.
55. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, passim.
56. For discussion of Catherine Belsey's misreading of Donne's 'Hymn to God my God, in my sickness' with its insistence on the essential depravity of the natural man see Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music (Cambridge 1994) p. 141.
57. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago 1995).
58. 'Cultural Materialism and the Ethics of Reading: or the Radicalizing of Jacobean Tragedy', Modern Language Review, 90 (1995) p. 833.
59. The Essayes or Counsels Civill or Morall (London 1906) p. 117.
60. Oliver James, 'Why being ancient doesn't make you mature', Observer Review, 10 Aug. 1997, p. 4.
61. Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, trans. Nicholas Grimald, ed. Gerald O'Gorman (Washington, DC 1990) p. 92.
62. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London 1928) p. 110.
63. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome (1601), trans. Samson Lennard (London 1606) p. 223.
64. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London 1965) p. 109.
65. The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford 1975) p. 11.
66. The Duchess's cry echoes Medea's 'Medea superest' (Seneca's Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (London 1927) i. 240).
67. On the sense of self in Seneca see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven and London 1985). Braden writes: 'the rage that is the all-consuming subject of Senecan tragedy seems to me the voice of a style of autarkic selfhood distinctly characteristic of classical civilization' (p. 2).
68. See also the chapter entitled 'Shakespeare's Stoicism', in Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London and New York 1990) pp. 165-89.
69. E. W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York and London 1964).
70. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London and New York 1984) p. 52.
71. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford 1992) p. 95.
72. 'Gunpowder, Treason, and Scots', Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985) pp. 141-68.
73. See also W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge 1997) pp. 75-123.
74. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, passim.
75. In the De Jure Regni Buchanan writes, 'The government of kings is in accord with nature, that of tyrants contrary to it; a king rules willing subjects, the tyrant unwilling' (quoted in Roger A. Mason, 'Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity', in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (eds.), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh 1982) p. 21). Mason argues that, to interpret Buchanan's resistance theory in modern constitutional terms is to do violence to his thought. For Buchanan it is not the mass of the people, but the 'nobility, either in a council, an assembly, a public convention or a parliament, to whom the tyrant must account for his crimes' (p. 25).
76. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, NY and London 1991) pp. 25-31.
77. Paul Yachnin, 'The Powerless Theatre', English Literary Renaissance, 21 (1991) pp. 49-74.
78. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court 1603-1613 (New Haven, Conn, and London 1995) pp. xix-xx.
79. Kamps, Materialist Shakespeare, p. 2.
80. Rasselas, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Gwin J. Kolb, 16 vols. (New Haven and London 1958-1990) xvi. 112.
81. Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth A. Smith, 'Theorizing the Writing of History', Journal of Social History, 22 (1988) p. 154.
82. Cf. Heather James: 'In the play's dramatic construction Shakespeare reiterates Troilus' notorious query, "What's aught but as 'tis valued?"' (Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge 1997) p. 90).
83. For a defence of Shakespeare's supposed anti-rationalism from a psychoanalytic point of view see Emil Roy, 'War and Manliness in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida', Comparative Drama, 7 (1974) pp. 107-20. Roy writes: 'More than in any other play, Shakespeare offers the subtleties of intellection as a self-defeating way of handling moral instabilities' (p. 119).
84. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford 1986).
85. Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge 1985) pp. 84-5.
86. Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (Basingstoke and London 1997) p. 367.
87. The Frontiers of Drama (1945; 2nd edn. London 1964) p. 67.
88. 'Enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system, write Adorno and Horkheimer; 'In the anticipatory identification of the wholly conceived and mathematized world with truth, enlightenment intends to secure itself agains the return of the mythic' (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming (London 1973) pp. 24-5).
89. See John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London 1995) pp. 38-75.
90. 'Guilty as charged officer', review of The Colour of Justice, Guardian (G2), 14 Jan. 1999, p. 9.
91. 'Why I wrote it', Observer Review, 17 Jan. 1999, p. 7.
92. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md. 1985) p. 82.
93. Observer, 29 Nov. 1998, p. 28.
94. Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North, 6 vols. (London 1895-6) i. 12, 10.
95. The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Leslie J. Walker, 2 vols. (London 1950) i. 217, 295, 355, 356.
96. Erasmus, Man of Letters: the Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ 1993) p. 5.
97. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London and New York 1962) i. 25.
98. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford 1983) p. 11.
99. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford 1994) p. 441.
100. A Passage to India (1924; repr. Melbourne, London, and Baltimore, Md. 1936) p. 147.
101. Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (Cambridge 1991) p. 431.