John M. Mucciolo, Editor. Assisted by Steven J. Doloff and Edward
A. Rauchut. Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions (Essays in
Honour of W.R. Elton). Hampshire and Vermont: Scolar P, 1996. xii + 292 pp. ISBN 1
85928 193 1 Cloth.
Steve Cirrone
Center for Higher Education BardSF@aol.com
Cirrone, Steve. "Review of Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and
Conventions (Essays in Honour of W.R. Elton)." Early Modern Literary Studies
4.1 (May, 1998): 13.1-4 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/04-1/rev_cirr.html>.
Shakespeare’s Universe is a selection of essays gathered together under five
categories to honour the late Shakespeare scholar-critic William R. Elton, the categories
being "Shakespeare, Politics and Religion," "Shakespeare and Gender,"
"Shakespeare and Staging," "Shakespeare and Language" and
"Shakespeare and Criticism." Each category is made up of three to six essays,
most of which make intriguing, though at times tenuous, critiques of various aspects of
Renaissance literary history. According to the editor, the text’s collective critical
spirit stems from a central document of Shakespeare criticism, Johnson’s Preface
(1768), but I fail to see the document itself or its spirit playing any major role here.
What is evident, however, is that most of the essays endeavour to construct their
arguments according to the tenets of new historicism. The preface states that each essay
attempts to challenge the practical application of certain Renaissance "truths"
or universals by examining the microstructures (historical nuances) present in the
individual and culture. The volume’s preface also promises that the essays
collectively set out to fashion the broader implication that "universal appeal cannot
result from mere generality; rather, it must equally feed off the natural which, in turn,
must exist primarily at the level of textual or individual specificity." This
implication has the sound of intelligence yet, unfortunately, what is meant by "the
natural" is left unclear both in the preface and throughout the entire volume.
Additionally, since the text’s scope seems somewhat ambitious for one volume, the
essays collected herein do little but scratch the surface of the subject of each category.
And although the title and categorical organization of the text plainly states that a
strong Shakespeare-based thread connects the essays in the volume, none of the essays
deals exclusively with the historical contextualization of Shakespeare’s work, and
others barely mention Shakespeare at all. Additionally, few of the essays included in this
volume actually make use of the historicist arguments laid bare in Elton’s monumental
work, King Lear and the Gods. Such incongruity results in a text of insightful
scholarly materials collected under an umbrella title, leaving one to wonder what exactly
the standard for submission and acceptance must have been. Perhaps there is an intrinsic
problem in a labour of love such as this: any one text that sets out to praise a scholarly
giant such as Elton is bound to come up thin.
This is not to say that the essays themselves are all without critical merit. Despite
the rather inconsonant complexity of the text, several essays in this volume stand as
works of genuine critical insight in and of themselves. Of particular interest is the
essay by George Walton Williams, "Hamlet and the Dread Commandment," which
rephrases Hamlet’s traditional indecisiveness into a textually based argument for
seeing Hamlet’s agonizing as a representation of the political and social
ramifications of the plight of a son who challenges the direct commandment of his father.
Williams delicately and intelligently constructs his argument by comparing Hamlet’s
decision-making process with those of Laertes and Fortinbras. (All three have been given
injunctions by a father or father-figure.) Also recommended is the essay by T.H.
Howard-Hill, "U and Non-U: Class and Discourse Level in Othello," which
examines in somewhat Marxist fashion the way in which the linguistic differences between
Cassio and Iago suggest that class remains the single most defining relationship between
them and that class-clash must be considered to be part of the motivation for Iago’s
consuming distemper. Howard-Hill’s judicious and historically specific essay sheds
new light on the motivations of an enigmatic Iago that may indeed be a figure attempting
to fight for, from Iago’s perspective, social justice.
Of the other twenty-one essays collected in this volume, "‘A Liberal
Tongue’: Language and Rebellion in Richard II," by David Norbrook, and
"Perspective in Troilus and Cressida," by Francois Laroque, also deserve special
mention, not only for their intellectual power to persuade -- though this too is evident
-- but also for their adequacy in questioning the known universe of Shakespeare by a close
examination of certain historical influences found in the texts themselves. Just as
important, both Norbrook's and Laroque's approaches to their subject matters fit nicely
with most of the promises of the volume as outlined in Mucciolo's introduction. And in the
volume as a whole, many of the essays do try very hard to persuade the reader through the
sheer power of well-written arguments; but I would caution the reader in closing by saying
also that a number of these essays fumble through or overlook plausible historical grounds
for argumentation in favour of using an abundance of critical jargon.
