Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements PDF
Preview Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements
Renaissance Literature 111 and Its Formal Engagements Renaissance Literature BI and Its Formal Engagements Edit-ed by Mark David Rasmussen palgrave Permissions "Veni Coronaberis," from New and Collected Poems 1952-1992. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey HilI. Reprinted by permission of Houghron Mifflin Co. All rights reserved. The Kitchenmaid [De keukenmeidj by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. "Veni Coronaberis," from Geo./fey Hill: Collected Poems. Copyright © 1978, 1985 by Geoffrey HilI. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. * RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND ITS FORMAL ENGAGEMENTS © Copyright Mark David Rasmussen, 2002 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002978-0-312-29359-8 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever withour written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti cal articles or reviews. First published 2002 by PALGRAVETM 175 FifthAvenue, NewYork, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingsroke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughour the world. PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-0-312-29360-4 ISBN 978-1-137-07177-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Renaissance literature and its formal engagements / edited by Mark David Rasmussen. p. cm.lncludes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-29360-4 (alk. paper) I. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-Hisrory and criticism. 2. Renaissance-England. 3. Literary form. I. Rasmussen, Mark David, 19530 PR418.L57 R48 2002 820.9'003-dc21 2001035954 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: January 2002 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Contents Introduction: New Formalisms? Mark David Rasmussen 1. TOWARD A HISTORICAL FORMALISM Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Pro mise of a Historical Formalism 17 Stephen Cohen Shakespeare and the Composite Text 43 Douglas Bruster The Politics of Aesthetics: Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem 67 Heather Dubrow Marston's Gorge and the Question of Formalism 89 Joseph Loewenstein H. RENEWlNG THE LITERARY Learning from the New Criticism: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets 115 PaulAlpers Undelivered Meanings: The Aesthetics of Shakespearean Wordplay 139 Mark Womack The Poetics of Speech Tags 159 William Flesch Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course 185 Elizabeth Harris Sagaser Mterword: How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't 00 Without It 207 Richard Strier Contributors 217 Index 219 Introduction BI New Formalisms? Mark David Rasmussen T he aim of this collection is to encourage a shift in the study of Eng lish Renaissance literature, a shift toward a fuller and more seIf conseious engagement with questions of form. Why is such a change needed now? Briefly, because the fieId has moved too far away ftom these questions lateIy, in favor of modes of analysis that for all of their methodological sophistication tend to interpret Renaissance works as bundles of historical or cultural content, without much attention to the ways that their meanings are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form. To be sure, something along these lines has been happening in virtually every area of literary study today, as part of the movement toward cultural studies. 1 But it is a particularly ironic deveIopment in the fieId of Renaissance litera ture, since over the years that fieId has been so fertile in providing objects of formalist scrutiny. Indeed, the history of British and American formalisms during the century just past might almost be written as aseries of responses to English Renaissance texts. One need only recall T. S. Eliot's championing of the metaphysical poets, or the centrality of the poetry of Donne and Shakespeare to the critieism of Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, to rec ognize the programmatic importance of this body of literature for the brand of Anglo-American formalism that came to be known as the New Critieism.2 The great batcles between that version of formalism and what is now often called the "old" historicism were fought over English Renaissance poems, in the debate between Brooks and Douglas Bush over Marvell's "Horatian Ode," or in the controversy so engagingly recounted by Richard Strier be tween Empson and Rosemond Tuve over George Herbert's poem "The Sac rifice."3 One might eite A. Kent Hieatt's discoveries about numerological patterning in Spenser's Epithalamion, or Stephen Booth's minute attention to the linguistic intricaeies of Shakespeare's Sonnets, as two other examples, very BI 2 Mark David Rmmussen different in kind, of the extraordinary responsiveness of previous generations of critics to the formal properties of the English Renaissance literary text.4 Renaissance studies changed overnight with the publication in 1980 of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance SelfFashioning.5 Certainly most work pub lished in the field since the early eighties has been shaped by its engagement with Greenblatt's new historicism, whose prominence within Renaissance studies today is unmatched by any critical method in any other area of British, American, or comparative literary study. As several analysts of the new historicism have noted, its successes as a critical method may largely be attributed to its ability to negotiate the twin pitfalls of a formalist criticism perceived to be essentially ahistorical, on the one hand, and a politicized mode of ideology critique perceived to be reductive of textual meanings, on the other.6 More specific to the thoroughly overdetermined triumph of the method within Renaissance studies is the often-noted tendency of contem porary academics to find their own post-modern alienation mirrored in the anxieties of works produced at the inception of modernity, as those anxieties find voice in new historicist accounts.7 For our purposes, though, the really crucial point is that made by Stephen Cohen in his essay for this volume, in which he demonstrates that new historicist critical analyses were originally far more oriented than they are today toward questions relating to literary form and its function within culture. Whether, in Heather Dubrow's witty formulation, we see in the title of an early new historicist anthology, "The Forms ofPower and the Power ofForms in the Renaissance," an embrace of power by forms, or a relegation of forms to the margins, form remains an unmistakably prominent part of the mix.8 Indeed, much of the early influ ence of Greenblatt's book was surely due to its providing aseries of breath taking readings of such canonical works as More's Utopia, Wyatt's lyric poetry, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Othello-readings not for malist in their scope, but directed toward the total explication of the literary text that had also been the goal of the New Critical interpretations with which they were in dialogue.9 Simply put, Greenblatt's readings often seemed to do a better job of explaining what was going on within these works than previous, mainly New Critical, accounts had managed to do, and so supplanted the authority of those accounts; but both Greenblatt's subse quent work and that of his followers has set aside such explication as its goal, in favor of the mining of literature for evidence of cultural practices. This later version of the new historicism takes Renaissance culture rather than lit erature as its central concern, dipping only intermittently into the literary text as one manifestation of that culture among many.lO While the allure of Greenblatt's early readings was largely responsible for the prestige of new his toricist method within the academy, and particularly within Renaissance studies, it is this second version of the new historicism that now dominates BI Introduction 3 published work within the fie!d. Much of this work has been valuable, but in recent years many have come to fee! that the new historicist paradigm, at least in its present orientation toward cultural studies, appears to be ex hausted, its initial excitement now long since cooled. That is the situation that this volume addresses. The authors of the essays collected here disagree about many things, but all of them, I think, share a sense that what is needed within the fie!d today is a renewed commitment to engaging questions of form. Such asense is increasingly making itse!f feit throughout the literary academy, in all areas of study.11 Indeed, as Ellen Rooney has argued in arecent essay, the current "flight from form" serves to impoverish not just literary studies, but cultural studies as weIl, slighting the disciplinary specificity of each. 12 As Rooney also maintains, any genuine at tempt to reinvigorate formalist analysis must work through the theoretical developments of recent years, rather than bypassing them out of a nostalgia for formalisms past; if it is to have a legitimate claim on our attention, a re newal of formalist inquiry must address both the history and the needs of our present moment.13 Such a freshly theorized formalism might be ex pected to take two main directions, either inflected toward the historical/cultural or toward the literary/aesthetic, as the grouping of the es says in this volume is intended to suggest. So, all four essays in the volume's opening section, "Toward a Historical Formalism," share a commitment to a critical practice that at least one con tributor, Douglas Bruster, be!ieves is already finding its place within the fie!d, though not yet as a theoretically se!f-conscious movement. If that is so, the need for some initial reflection upon the aims and methods of such a histori cized formalism is more than met by the four essays in this section, and es pecially by Stephen Cohen's opening contribution. As Cohen puts it, his essay aims to replace the new historicisms "opposition al narrative" of its own relation to formalist criticism with a "more complex network ofinfluences ac knowledged and unacknowledged, roads taken, passed by, or abandoned." So, while most standard accounts of the new historicism stress its indebted ness to the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and to Michel Foucault's anatomies of discourse and power, Cohen chooses instead to emphasize the affinities of much early new historicist work with that of such Marxist diag nosticians of form and culture as Louis Althusser, Terty Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and (especiaIly) Raymond Williams.14 Yet the influence of these thinkers has proved far more enduring within the field of cultural studies than within the new historicism, producing the especially piquant irony of our present intellectual moment, when, as Cohen observes, cultural critics perform formalist readings of nonliterary texts and practices, while literary scholars will themselves not to think about form. Cohen's essay provides, among other things, the most careful tracing yet to appear in print of the 4 • Mark David Rasmussen complex splinterings and affiliations between cultural studies and the new historicism. Ir also in passing effectively refutes an argument frequently made against formal readings ofRenaissance literature: that since the very notion of tbe literary is a modern invention, to apply it to early modern texts is anachronistic. But English Renaissance authors, Cohen reminds us, did have a word for what we call (or used to call) literature. They called it "poesy." In the opening section of his essay, Douglas Bruster succinctly defines the "new formalism" espoused, explicitly or implicitly, by all four essays in tbis sec tion as "a critical genre dedicated to examining the social, cultural, and histor ical aspects of literary form, and the function of form for tbose who produce and consume literary texts." Both in his essay for tbis collection and in his most recent book, Quoting Shakespeare,. Bruster finds himself intrigued by the role that source study, and particularly the analysis of verbal borrowing, might play witbin such a revitalized formalism.15 Source study as a critical practice tends to be viewed dismissively today, though as Bruster points out tbe new histori cism might itselfbe regarded as version of such study, witb tbe literary work ex cavated as a source for tbe text of culture. More to tbe point, tbe analysis of verbal borrowing takes on new interest in the light of recent post-structuralist arguments about tbe multiply-determined authorship of Renaissance plays.16 To interpret verbal borrowing as one element of these "composite texts," as Bruster terms them, is to gain access to rich cultural information embedded in literary data, a point amply demonstrated by tbe concluding section ofBruster's essay, which examines an apparent verbal borrowing from Nashe's The Unfor tunate Traveller found in Shakespeare's Henry V AB Bruster notes, such a bor rowing would not be likely to tempt the interest of a new historicist critic, nor would it engage a more traditional scholar drawn to recovering dialogues among high canonical works. Yet as Bruster's reading shows, a contemporary scholar operating in a seemingly old-fashioned critical mode, but armed witb sometbing like a postmodernist sense of textuality, may distill a wealth of social and cultural detail from tbe words. As Bruster notes, the scholar most closely associated with the call for a "new formalism" in Renaissance studies is Heather Dubrow, who first used the phrase in print in the conclusion to her bookA Happier Eden, published in 1990.17 Dubrow's essay for this collection is a revised and expanded ver sion of an article she published in Modern Language Quarterly, as part of a special issue, "Reading for Form."18 The piece begins by examining some of the causes, both intellectual and institutional, for the recent hostility toward questions of form. Like Cohen and Bruster, Dubrow views this animosity as partly fueled by a reductive account of the various histories of formalist the ory and practice, from Kant to the present. Her essay goes on to demonstrate the power of a historicized formalism through aseries of dazzling readings of tropes in English Renaissance country house poems, showing how these
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