Center or margin: revisions of the English renaissance in honor of Leeds Barroll.

IN THE INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER to his Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years (1991), Leeds Barroll lamented the tendency of biographies of Shakespeare to reify "presuppositions about historical causation," thereby resulting in "the freezing of the number of available viewpoints that might otherwise be brought to bear" (7). Barroll's call for the rereading of documents and for the rethinking of patterns of causation comes in the wake of Foucault's account of the "tactical polyvalence of discourses" (1) and of the range of theoretical positions that emphasized discontinuities, instabilities, and the exclusionary forces that underpin the operations of language. In the process, Barroll revisited, and augmented, the stock of those very documents that traditional (and even some revisionary) criticism has reduced to a "uniform" reading. It is precisely this openness, combined with an undiminished appetite for the reinvestigation and the reevaluation of what has hitherto passed for "fact" and critical "truth." that Lena Cowen Orlin's edited collection celebrates. It builds on what Barroll himself inveigled against when he spoke of the sketching of "historical figures making intelligent plans to implement intelligent decisions, experiencing consequences fully anticipated and hoped for" (ibid., 12). Indeed, his initiation and indefatigable editing of major journals such as Shakespeare Studies, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, his founding of the Shakespeare Association of America, his presence at its annual conferences, combined with the regular appearance of his own further publications, all indicate an exemplary and continually adventurous intellectual energy. Meanwhile, the impressively well-organized Shakespeare Association of America continues to provide a major international focus for Shakespeare Studies, and has sustained its mission to encourage and provide a nurturing environment for young scholars, while Shakespeare Studies continues to adventure beyond the existing boundaries of the discipline. Orlin's collection is an appropriate way to honor the achievement of a major Shakespeare scholar, but it is also a testimony to those various avenues of critical and historical investigation that Barroll has been, in large measure, responsible for stimulating and encouraging.

This collection is organized under four headings, representing consecutively, the title of a paper, a graduate seminar theme, a chapter title of one of Barroll's seminal books, and a book title: "England at the Margins," "Researching the Renaissance," "The Human Figure on the Stage," and "Artificial Persons." In some cases, as in the opening essay by Peter Stallybrass under the heading "England at the Margins" it was one of Barroll's own Shakespeare Association of America seminars (Montreal, 2000) that provided both the occasion and the stimulus. But in others, the essays appear to have been specially commissioned for the volume, and have been grouped under one of these four headings: each group a testimony to the prescience of Barroll's own published work, and to the enduring challenge it continues to provide.

Peter Stallybrass's "Marginal England: The View from Aleppo" aims to perform a strategy familiar to readers of Barroll's writing: an adjustment of perspective, of the kind that some recent examples of postcolonial criticism have taken much further to the point of disturbing the hegemonic foundations of post-Enlightenment historiography. Stallybrass does not quite go that far, since, following a dialectic that he himself has been partly responsible for making familiar, of the relationship between marginality and symbolic centrality, his concern is with some of the ways in which "the Mediterranean figured centrally in the English imaginary" (29). The textual spur for his inquiry is the hero's final speech in Othello in which a suicide is figured as the resolution of a conflict "in Aleppo once" between "a Malignant and a Turband Turke" and "Venetian." This convergence of "malignancy" and geographical location is, however, not consistent, since, in the later play, Macbeth, Aleppo is represented as "a merchant city where one might hope to evade the malignancy whose normal place of residence is Scotland" (27). In the one instance the geographical location of malignancy is the Orient, and in the other it is the Occident. Or to put it more precisely, a "margin" of the kingdom of James I, whose destructively libidinal force is imagined as the direction from which a "traduction" of the State might be launched. Stallybrass's quest in this essay is to separate out the "real" Aleppo from its representations, and to investigate the politics that can occasionally make of such locations either antitheses, or, more problematically, proximate geographical spaces. Of course, much depends upon the position of the speaker, since this is not simply a question of reassembling documents that tell different stories about, for example, the relationship between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, but also of evaluating English perceptions and imaginings of these geographical locations. Here material cultures clash with the materiality of languages, and the pursuit of the "real" (in a quasi-Marxist sense of the term) is contaminated by an irreducible textuality that is both fundamentally appropriative and dependent on context.

This adventurous gaze through the wrong end of the cultural and geographical telescope, and the attempt to enhance the image via the psychoanalytical device of Freud's "uncanny," traverses lightly over a complex interlocking web of what Foucault would call "statements" (2) that engage drama, historiography, geography, and literary criticism. The "real" Aleppo, or the "real" Venice, are not quite so easily locatable as Stallybrass would have us believe. In Othello, for example, both geographical locations (and we might add Cyprus to this list) are already allegorized to the point where they become unstable signifiers, reflecting not a geographical location but a culturally and politically inflected narrative. Indeed, the demonic energy that is allocated to a specific geographical space in the play--or to be more precise, three geographical spaces: Venice, Cyprus, and Aleppo--points not so much in the direction of the "unheimlich," but toward forces that exist under the surface(s) of early Jacobean English culture that become visible as part of a theologically informed economy. Such a formulation would take care of Othello and Macbeth, and point us more firmly in the direction of these plays' perplexing recourse to the disturbing congruence of animal and demonic imagery.

Stallybrass's essay began its life as a conference paper and as such is an informed but polemical incitement to further thought. Nevertheless, the argument does invite us to wonder whether phrases such as "global economy," in claims such as the Ottoman Empire "was the westernmost outpost of the intra-Asian trade that dominated the global economy in 1600" (31), are not too extravagant. Also, we need to ponder the formulation of the claim that the Ottomans, Persia, and India "materialised [my emphasis] Europeans. That is, they provided much of the matter (fibres, textiles, dyes) that shaped European bodies" (33). In the plays to which Stallybrass refers "the view from Aleppo" is obscured by a series of "statements" that materialize the perspectives of English culture: "statements" that occlude the very determinations, discursive and otherwise, that drive them, and from which no amount of over-determined historical curiosity can separate them.

It is a pity that the ghost of Freud is given too free a rein in the cellarage of Stallybrass's argument. His isolation of the term "assassination" in Macbeth (1.7.2) correctly locates its first English usage in Richard Knolles's The History of The Turks (1603). But his premature conclusion that this naming "was surely to imagine it as, above all, alien and familiar" (32), "heimlich" and "unheimlich," glides over its earlier Latin and Old French usage that linked it etymologically to the alleged use of "hashish" prior to the act of killing in early Moslem culture. The image of the drugged killer is domesticated in Macbeth in the drunkenness that becomes a literal and a metaphorical impediment to political success. Here the act of "translation" appropriates what is marginal for a moral economy in which rational surfaces are always liable to disturbance from below. In Othello the process is reversed simply because the hero is black, indicating a "natural" propensity for a problematic Venetian civilization to correct aberration by presenting a challenge to what surfaces signify. The politics of this process, and the "art" that sustains it, should make modern readers and spectators nervous.

It is a politics of which Philippa Berry is acutely aware in her fine essay, "'Incising Venice: The Violence of Cultural Incorporation in The Merchant of Venice." The editorial juxtaposition of these two essays confirms the proximity of The Merchant of Venice and Othello to each other in a number of crucial respects. The emphasis in Berry's essay is on "Venice" itself as a space offering "insights into the fragmented and fragmenting character of the Renaissance or early modern culture" (40). She takes up the debate about "surfaces" and suggests that there is a tension in Renaissance culture generally between "the simultaneously alien yet compellingly seductive appeal of diverse forms of ornamentation" (41). It is in The Merchant of Venice that what she calls a "persistently troubled awareness" can be traced through the recovery of earlier "texts" from the play, and thence positioned as part of a larger Renaissance culture haunted "by a multiplicity of half-acknowledged fathers: in other words, by a diversity of putative cultural 'origins'" (40). Once again the "uncanny" surfaces briefly, as part of "a powerful surplus of alterity" (44), although here in its Nietzschean guise as "repetition," while the invocation of St. Paul on the "cutting off" and "grafting" of the Jews threatens to draw the argument in a predictable direction. However, and surprisingly, Berry invokes that most anti-Freudian of philosophers, Gilles Deleuze, to draw our attention to what is a lacuna in Stallybrass's argument: the degree to which "incorporeal entities ... materialise at the surface of bodies without being themselves corporeal or substantial materials." Citing Deleuze, she notes that "corporeal bodies are objects, incorporeal entities are effects" that as such, have no origin; the "incorporeal effect has a ghostly or "phantasmatic' property" (45). Her quarry is the trope of writing itself as an incision made upon a surface, "a highly visual form of cultural marking or wounding, performed upon a skin-like surface by an alien hand," and its manifestation in the play through a series of verbs associated with inscription. The "insculpted" coin that Morocco produces is enlisted in this argument, while the death's head that he chooses can be read as both "an emblem of time," and as "a reminder that within this new work of cultural incision, a strangely hybrid double-eyed (a Janus-like) model of cultural temporality is implicit" (46). However, the invocation of Deleuze raises an important question concerning the historicizing bent of the critic, and militates against too straightforward a theory of causality; indeed, as Deleuze says of "the event": "The infinitely divisible event is always both at once. It is eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening (to cut too deeply and not enough)." He continues: "The event, being itself impassive, allows the active and the passive to be interchanged more easily, since it is neither the one nor the other, but rather their common result (to cut--to be cut)" (The Logic of Sense, 10). The reading of topologies as historical narratives runs a certain risk. Berry negotiates this deftly with her claim that any re-inscription of "textual remains" may never leave "archaic or abjected cultural origins completely behind" (46), or that "once cut off from their originating context, and 'inserted' or 'inscrolled' in an alien cultural surface, can acquire new interest--an exaggerated significance whose 'incising' effect is 'incorporeal' in that it verges on the uncanny, phantasmic, or spectral--precisely because of the loss of an original cultural context or frame." The reversion to a neo-Freudian vocabulary here sits uneasily with Deleuze, but the convergence in Berry's argument of Morocco, Shylock, and Othello (and she would also add Antony and Cleopatra) suggests a closer topographical connection between these three figures and the four plays than criticism has hitherto detected.

The Merchant of Venice is full of what appear to be antithetical, if not paradoxical, formulations, and Berry's dense argument manages to tease out many of them. At a purely phenomenological level, the final act of the play does, indeed, weave together "several different figures of the incorporeal effects that are allied to acts of cultural incision" (51). But what she accomplishes is a model of the play's concerns that refuses an orderly temporal narrative of its various "events." The cultural displacements of particular textual fragments place the play's fabric at the very juncture of what Deleuze identifies as "the boundary between things and propositions" where "everything happens" (ibid., 11). Consequently, the incisions in the play that Berry makes, amounting, it must be said, to major surgery, leave pedestrian debates about "materiality" far behind.

Where Berry leaves off, Patricia Parker begins. As if taking her cue telepathically from Berry's mention of Antony and Cleopatra, Parker explores the "marginal" in a play that contrives to render all boundaries problematical. The figure that she chooses is "Enobarbus"--nomen est omen--whose name resonates throughout the play and is the focus of comments about "barbering," "beards," "cutting," as parts of the more general effect that Egypt has on Rome. Parker does not depart from the familiar opposition of a "masculine" Rome versus a "feminine" Egypt, but she is concerned to tease out, and in some textual detail, the play's complex and persistent association of beards with things Roman. Moreover, she associates the material beard in the theater, as an index of a "prosthetic" masculinity (3) that is part of the play's own discourse of the conditions of its theatrical production of gender identity (80). Her primary concern, however, is, through a close reading of Enobarbus's "most memorable of Shakespearean speeches" (54), to establish a connection between the "infidel" East and the categories of "renegade," "witch," and "infidel" (65) that all come together in the figure and the reported actions of Cleopatra. As in Berry's account of classical analogues in The Merchant of Venice, so here; Parker notes that in Antony and Cleopatra such analogues carry with them "contemporary overtones" (67). Her method is to begin from specific textual references, and then work outward to embrace the provenance of various source texts for the play, and to speculate upon etymologies that become more central to her argument as it progresses. In a play where the view from Egypt is an integral element in the generation of a series of binary oppositions, the customary gloss on Pompey's phrase "salt Cleopatra" (2.1.21) extends the frame of reference beyond familiar editorial associations "of female sexuality or a 'gypsy's lust.'" "Salt" also suggests, Parker argues, "the figure of the saltator, salter, or transvestite dancer familiar from Plautus and other Roman writers and from the condemnation of such spectacles in contemporary anti-theatrical literature" (79). But it is Enobarbus, a marginal figure in the dramatic lives of the play's two protagonists, who is symbolically central to the business of drawing the worlds of Rome and Egypt together. He represents Roman virility and "the prosthetic stage beard that complicated the very categories of natural and constructed" (80). He violates the Roman masculine principle of military loyalty; he is the "red-bearded renegade" of Knolles's The History of The Turke (1603), and the "network of barbering" that he invokes "may have recalled not only Judas or the stage beard of the Jew but the most memorable Red-beard from what The Jew of Malta calls the other 'Circumcised nation'--the Barbarossa who reversed not only Actium but the very direction of Enobarbus's defection, and was a renegade who, like Antony, chose never to return" (82). These three adventurous essays set the tone of the volume as a whole, in that they traverse an intellectual terrain whose broad outlines Barroll has done much to define.

The second section, "Researching the Renaissance," was the title of a graduate seminar led by Barroll at the Folger over eight years from 1991 to 1999, and the three essays grouped under this heading focus, among other things, on questions of gender and theatrical representation. In the case of Phyllis Rackin ("Our Canon, Ourselves") and Harry Berger, Jr. ("Artificial Couples: The Apprehensive Household in Dutch Pendants and Othello"), the emphasis is very much on Shakespearean texts, though in a comparative setting, whereas in the case of Lena Cowen Orlin ("Spaces of Treason in Tudor England"), the focus is upon the semiotics of space in the wider domestic culture of the period. Both Rackin and Berger begin with an acknowledgment of the Shakespearean text's "unconscious"; Rackin asserts, "For modern scholars, Shakespeare's plays have often constituted a notable site of women's repression" (91), while for Berger, the question of theatricalization is linked to "performance anxiety," both within particular plays, and on the part of scholarly commentators (114). Hitherto Rackin has concerned herself with various Shakespearean narratives of masculine "oppression" (4) but the terminological switch to "women's repression" implies a rather different political (and psychological) dynamic that gestures away from "Shakespeare's representations of women" (92), and toward the process of internalizing patriarchal values. Rackin sees the Comedies as the site of "the modern preference for stories in which women are put in their (subordinate) place," and she nominates The Taming of The Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor as two plays that illustrate this tendency "with remarkable clarity" (93). The first of these two plays has long given feminists some difficulty: either the play is, from a modern point of view, a brutal demonstration of women's oppression, or it is a masculine pipe dream that willfully inverts a more complex Elizabethan "reality." Which version of feminism one chooses determines which side of the argument receives most emphasis. Rackin acknowledges that the women's roles are not realistic, but "a wistful fantasy" (98), but she is also skeptical of modern readings that either apologize for Petrucchio's behavior, or credit him with a greater sensitivity than the character possesses (101). It is disappointing that the discussion should settle at the point where the play's status as "the paradigmatic Shakespearean representation of women's place in marriage" is acknowledged (102). Disappointing, because the argument does not fully respond to the fact that in The Taming of The Shrew (as in later comedies) the action is double-edged. Kate's shrewish behavior is a response to her situation, just as Petrucchio's strategy is a response to her shrewishness, and it is this complex dynamic that requires further dismantling. What compounds the problem is the unequal distribution of gender roles that is the source of a modern discomfort that no acknowledgment of the erotic frisson of sexual encounter can dispel. Rackin's neat demolition of Quiller-Couch's offensively elegant projection of masculine desire onto the fabric of the play is well-taken, but she deploys it as part of her own strategy to find, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a more fitting paradigmatic example.

What Rackin finds attractive in The Merry Wives is its domestic realism (102-3), and the positive empowering roles allotted to its female characters. Masculine "verbal facility" is neither dominant nor "privileged" (107), and the isolation of Falstaff figures the inadequacy of masculinity in the play. This is a welcome rehabilitation of a play that Shakespeare scholars have consistently undervalued, although the extent to which it can counterbalance what Rackin identifies as "counterfactual fantasies rather than reflections of the life that the majority of Shakespeare's original audience knew outside the theatre" (110), is questionable, even if we knew much more about the life that they knew. That the audience was complicit "in the production of theatrical pleasure" (109) is a reasonable assumption to make, but the actual dynamics of that process is another matter altogether. Falstaff's outrageous presumption, allied with Ford's pathological jealousy in a causal sequence stimulates the kind of laughter that signals both anxiety and liberation. But the behavior of Mistresses Ford and Page invites much closer scrutiny, since they act in various ways in support of the institution of marriage while at the same time interrogating its licit and illicit practices. As the victim of a ludicrously possessive patriarchy, Mistress Ford negotiates a successful route through a minefield that destroyed one of Shakespeare's later heroines, Desdemona, and her manner of doing so--in particular the dehumanizing of Falstaff to a pile of dirty laundry, and then to a cross-dressed "witch"--deploys the very conceptual materials out of which her own femininity is constructed. In another register, Mistress Page attempts to engineer the marriage of her daughter to an unsuitable partner, thus rendering precarious the business of parental choice tout court. To suggest that it is Anne Page who is from the outset "the only figure who resembles the heroines of the romantic comedies" and that she is "characterised from the first as a representation" (110) is to undervalue the play's own aesthetic dynamic, as it reaches beyond the quotidian world of marital tension, with its risks, its opportunities for betrayal, and its power games, toward a resolution in which these tensions are projected onto the figure of Falstaff, at the same time that the aristocratic impulses of Fenton are transformed as part of a more egalitarian heterosexual confidence in the new generation. In the end this may be no less of a "wistful fantasy" than that of The Taming of The Shrew, but the extent to which this reflects the preoccupations of an Elizabethan audience, or those of modern commentators--after all Rackin's title is: "Our canon, Ourselves"--is never quite resolved.

The question of the efficacy and protocols of the historical study of texts--and it is one to which Barroll himself has devoted considerable attention--is taken up in Harry Berger, Jr.'s essay, "Artificial Couples: The Apprehensive Household in Dutch Pendants and Othello." Unlike Rackin, who deals more directly with the transmission of the Shakespeare canon, Berger uses the concept of "performativity" and its capacity to register social change as a cultural barometer of such "techtonic changes of institutional structure as the emergence of new forms of state and family organisation" (114). Read against Rackin's essay, Berger provides a token explanation of what female "repression" might have looked like in medieval Italian society (115), but from which English and Dutch models of the family may well have diverged (115-16). Following in the footsteps of Catherine Belsey's The Subject of Tragedy (1985), and Shakespeare and The Loss of Eden (1999), he locates desire in the conjugal relation of the nuclear family, which functions to "domesticate a destabilising passion, confining it within the safety of a loving family" (116). But for a variety of reasons, some of which have a demonstrable historical validity, others of which are more speculative, this kind of household in which the male householder is the locus of state authority becomes "a place of danger" (ibid.), and later "a place of theatre" (120). Berger's argument modifies that of Belsey, and it benefits from a comparative dimension, as he moves from medieval Italy to the Dutch Republic, and from domestic manuals such as Jacob Cats's Houwelyck (1625), to the roles and psychic lives of women as projections of male fantasy: "men imagine what women desire, and then displace these fantasies onto women as their fantasies and desires" (119). At stake here are the very ways in which commentators construct historical images and narrative accounts, and Berger's own methodology amplifies Barroll's "important revisionist account of historical methodology" (120) that challenges the New Historicist model of the relations between theater and the State that underestimates the radical mobility of power. In an essay of considerable intricacy, Berger follows through Louis Montrose's observation that the assertion of "theatricality as a universal condition of social life" (cited, 123) made available to all the techniques of the theatricalization of State power. Moreover, the promotion in schools of "the study of grammar, rhetoric and translation" facilitates the mastery of "the ethical skills of mimesis." The consequence is a rethinking of "character" as an effect rather than a source, "the product of art rather than nature," thus rendering an act of successful personation or "the production of a convincing 'character'" as "the fictive effect of a performance and closely identified with acts of imitation" (ibid.). Berger tracks Montrose's account of "the complex micro-political negotiations necessary to keep things going behind the ceremonial facades of the Two-Body constitution." But in a disarmingly self-conscious fashion, he goes on to imagine that the tension between "imperial or royalist ideology and statist reality" is actually worked out in "that wonderfully elastic and disorderly and successful system of checks and unbalances, that repressed bad dream of constitutional monarchy, the Dutch Republic" (125). The result is a reading of Dutch marriage portraits (pendants) as offering "an essentially comedic view of spousal competition," particularly "the wife's performance," and a comparison with the representation of Emilia and Iago in Othello that foregrounds "the husband's anxiety" (126). The competition for space in one genre that registers "the pull between the two sitters' positional reciprocity and their performative competition" (137) is transformed in Shakespeare's play, and in the relationship between Iago and Emilia especially, into a jostling for power that "presuppose[s] the institutional stabilisation of wifely power" (138). Here Berger's argument revolves around the status of Iago's and Emilia's soliloquies, especially that uttered on the perplexing occasion of the latter's discovery of Desdemona's handkerchief (3.3.294-302). For Berger, it is an example of "the technique of ethical evasion" (145). But more surprising perhaps is the claim that Emilia's refusal "to enlighten Desdemona and Othello is a source of her power over Iago inasmuch as it ratifies and preserves his power over them," and that she belatedly exercises that power at the end of the play (146). This an ingenious attempt to negotiate the apparent inconsistency between an omniscient Emilia, capable of analyzing her own subject-position as the mimetic performer of masculine "ills" (4.3.101-2), and a dramatic character of an inferior social class, who appears to be curiously unconcerned, until it is too late, with the consequences of her own wifely loyalty. Berger provocatively concludes that Iago is both empowered and disempowered by his own internalization of "everyone else's evil desires," and that his final silence in the play represents a gesture associated with the very femininity over which he has failed to exert control. "Mum" may be "the model housewife's word" (149), but the ambassadorial Lodovico has other plans for "this hellish villain" (5.2.366), involving another kind of spectacle, and requiring yet another performance.

This deft and finely illustrated account of Dutch portrait painting, and of the intensely Jacobean domestic machinations of Iago, leads directly into Lena Cowen Orlin's essay "Spaces of Treason in Tudor England," in which she augments what she calls "a familiar narrative," that of the "so-called 'Ridolphi Plot' ", with another that she locates "in the margins" of the available documentation and that constitutes "a spatial history of treason" (158). Her particular quarry is the "long gallery" of the Tudor country house, an architectural space, "an accidental effect" of which "was its surprising facility for sheltering private conversations" (168). The question here is the extent to which the long gallery was symptomatic of a growing cultural demand for "privacy," as indeed was the garden; whether they were the consequence of an awareness of "the inhibiting effects of collectivity" (ibid.); and how the resulting tension between "public" and "private" space informed the life of the drama as well as the politics of the state. Orlin observes that plays of the period are full of "witnessings, overhearings, and eaves-droppings" (169), and that "while scenes of intercepted knowledge are both fodder for comedy and necessary engines of drama, they are also revelatory of larger social meanings and suspicions" (170). This is a slightly modified, if not tendentious version of Henri Lefebvre's thesis in his groundbreaking book, The Production of Space (1974, 1991), in which he notes the shift from feudal to capitalist space as evidenced in an emerging urban geography. Lefebvre's use of metaphor is germane to Orlin's argument: "Urban space was fated to become the theatre of a compromise between the declining feudal system, the commercial bourgeoisie, oligarchies, and communities of craftsmen. It further became abstraction in action--active abstraction--vis-a-vis the space of nature, generality as opposed to singularities, and the universal principle in statu nascendi, integrating specificities even as it uncovered them" (Lefebvre [1991], 269). Orlin's contention that the long gallery, and its proximity to the garden, was an architectural innovation facilitating what she calls "social privacy" (169) is empirically attractive insofar as the evidence she presents points clearly in the direction of a reconceptualization of social space. Her point is that in a culture in which it was still difficult to delineate the "public" from a "private" sphere, privacy itself, or the desire for it, and the evident containment of possible interlocutors, could provoke suspicion. The condemnation of the Duke of Norfolk after the discovery of the Ridolphi Plot rested on an allegation of "a suspicious intent to be private" (188-89). Of course, we look at this allegation through the wrong end of the telescope, since one of our contemporary concerns is to protect our own privacy against the paranoid actions of a State determined to make public the most intimate of personal details. Orlin's witty conclusion that in the case of Norfolk "they had found a mind's construction in his space" (189), effects a telling metathesis in its recollection of Duncan's memorable formulation that "there's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face" (Macbeth, 1.4.11-12). The drawing together of "space" and "language" in such a way that space, like language, can be made to signify--"My subject is the signifying capacity of space" (188)--invites further consideration of the dialectical possibilities that emanate from their juxtaposition and the ways in which they intersect in the material and theatricalized world of early modern English politics.

The third section of the book moves away from some of the larger cultural questions concerned with the symbolically central aspects of marginality, and into the theater itself, taking its title from a chapter in Barroll's Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition and Change in "Antony and Cleopatra" (1984). Jean Howard's "Staging Masculinities, National History, and the Making of London Theatrical Culture" reprises a topic and an approach that she and Phyllis Rackin broached in their jointly authored Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997). This book offers a four-chapter treatment of Shakespeare's First Tetralogy, and begins with the recognition that "the difficult transmission of patrilineal authority from one generation to the next is the subject of the history plays, but they marginalise the roles of the wives and mothers, centring instead on the heroic legacies of the fathers, the failures and triumphs of the sons" and that "the privileged scene of heroic history, the battlefield is a problematic place for women." (5) In her essay Howard articulates the same thesis, although with the kind of assurance that an acceptance of this thesis has conferred over a period of some ten years. She begins with the statement that the Henry VI plays stage "spectacular failures of the male dominated social order," and that in these apprenticeship pieces, Shakespeare experimented with soliloquy, with "emblematic scenes," and with interwoven plots. Of course, the recent resurgent flurry of attribution studies, allied with the modest claim that Shakespeare's intentions may have been "literary," may well force a readjustment of this veiled biographical perspective. But the claim that the dramatist was both "learning to delineate styles of stageable masculinity" and "not the collapse of an abstract, patriarchal social order--but individual men who hack, weep, or strut their way through the falling timbers of that large edifice" (199) can stand or fall, depending upon how the narrative of the dramatist's artistic "development" is perceived. This either/or logic, formerly an empowering strategy, but now an obstruction to any critical consideration of the binary thinking in which certain kinds of feminist criticism have become mired, is in danger of obscuring the densely intertextual nature of these plays, in particular, the ways in which they incorporate existing theatrical material into a complex historical (and generically over-determined) narrative. Dramatic characterization is not, it should be emphasized, entirely synonymous with the staging of "individual men," a point that Howard all but concedes in her speculation that Edward Alleyn may have played the role of Talbot if I Henry VI was staged at the Rose by Henslowe. Her retelling of the Manningham story of Shakespeare's quip at the expense of the philandering Burbage, who had played Richard in Richard III, undermines the argument that what this tetralogy foregrounds is a practical theatrical learning process, or that what the audience saw was slices of social realism. Perhaps, as in her speculation that Will Kempe may have taken the role of Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI, audiences may have warmed more to an erotics of performance, although we should take care not to graft our own assumptions about "celebrity" onto Shakespeare's actors. The Elizabethan theater was not Broadway, or at least, Broadway as we know it. Similarly, the hypothetical suggestion that Cade might have returned at the end of the play to perform a jig, and that this might have been "(an uncanny anticipation ... of Falstaff's 'resurrection' in 1 Henry IV, a part also arguably performed by Kemp)" (208), risks projecting onto Shakespeare's oeuvre the critic's own resourceful ingenuity. It would be difficult to dissent from the main feminist plank of Howard's argument, even though this is, perhaps, the most predictable part of her essay. Whether the theater--as both "popular" and marginal (200)--as evidenced in the Manningham or the Robert Greene anecdotes, reflected "popular images of the evolving theatre world" as both "a place of glamorous opportunity or a site of monstrous and socially destabilising ambition" (212) is a moot point, especially since these are not the only alternatives available. If the evidence of Julius Caesar or Henry V as possible candidates for the title of the play that opened the new Globe theater in 1599 is anything to go by, then the players (and the dramatist) were working very hard, and perhaps, unglamourously, to justify the identity of their collective, but still precarious, enterprise.

Raphael Falco's essay on "Charisma and Institution Building in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy" offers an account of how the Second Tetralogy handles "charismatic" and "institutional" authority (215). "Charismatic authority" is a phrase borrowed (and revised) from Max Weber that Falco uses as a means of analyzing "group relations" in these four plays (215). His project is to investigate the relations between the charismatic appeal of the ruler and the extent to which it either generates the political instabilities over which it then proceeds to exert a personal power, or hastens the onset of "the so-called impersonal state" (219). His invocation of Quentin Skinner, Stephen Greenblatt, and David Scott Kastan is designed to clarify the difference between a sociohistorical usage of the concept of "charisma," and a looser, literary usage. Falco cites approvingly Greenblatt's thesis that in Henry V it is the king's provocation of doubt that enhances his power: "For the enhancement of royal power is not only a matter of the deferral of doubt: the very doubts that Shakespeare raises serve not to rob the king of his charisma but to heighten it, precisely as they heighten the theatrical interest of the play" (cited, 219). Falco attaches to this thesis Kastan's refinement of this position, following Lacan, that "it is madness to believe that kingship resides magically in the person of the king rather than in the political relations that bind, even create, king and subject" and that it is Hal's "enabling knowledge" of this political fact that authorizes "his impressive improvisations" (219). He does, however, pull back from the implications of this New Historicist strategy since he sees all of Shakespeare's kings in this tetralogy as "suffer[ing] from the conflict between an impersonal institution of rule and the personal charismatic qualities that seem at times to sustain their royal legitimacy," and he goes on to say that "we can track the establishment of institutionalised authority through the formation and breakdown of their charismatic group relationships" (220). Falco is surely right to entertain "a robust scepticism about seeing in Shakespeare's kings some sort of prototype of the conflict between the charismatic and the impersonal state" (220-21), but he goes further than that. What might it mean to say, as Falco does, that "the charismatic conditions of the plays may not be reflective of political realities" in this context? Moreover, can we slide off the horns of this dilemma by reading into what are now regarded as "primarily literary representations ... a kind of triangulation with the source material and Weberian theory"? It is Falco's contention that Weber addressed "ideal types" and that these were derived, not from actual political practice, but from "literary contexts" where, as in the case of Tragedy, "ideal types of charismatic authority" appear (221). Of course, the trouble is that in these plays the "ideal" and the "real" types appear, and if we were to go beyond the Second Tetralogy to Macbeth or King Lear we might find this complexity replicated and sophisticated further. "Charismatic authority" is a very useful category, but whether it provides a real key to these plays is another matter altogether. Indeed, it appears that Falco himself is unsure, since he needs to augment it with "one of the most provocative post-Weberian theories of charisma," Thomas Spence Smith's account of "entropy driven systems" (225). This returns the argument to something approaching a refinement of Greenblatt's position, in which the "mild chaos" that is the mode of being of "charismatic groups" is thought to provide "a criterion for control" that allows a leader to "extend or encourage a dissipative structure rather than gravitate towards stability, inasmuch as entropy guarantees a sharp dependency among followers" (ibid.). It is a moot point whether this kind of formalist structure is historically portable, especially since in the Second Tetralogy political crisis is generated by a failure of charismatic authority, by its appropriation, and by the attendant risks to the ideological fabric that is designed to sustain it. Here, of course, we would need to intercalate Weberian theory with the political theology of Ernst Kantorowicz, and beyond that with the debates about sovereignty of Carl Schmidt and Giorgio Agamben.

It is Falco's contention that Hal "resolves a great many unstable situations which he inherits from his father" because "he recognises the interdependence--or, again, intersubjectivity--that exists between himself and his followers" (231). He cites the Archbishop of Canterbury's account of Hal's transformation as evidence of "a distinctly charismatic authority of divine promise" that "like the charismata in 1 Corinthians 12, is made part of his soma at the moment that his mortal body becomes the immortal body politic" (232). (6) The contrast between Richard's appeal to his own "humanity" and that of Hal is well-taken (232-33), although little is made of anxiety surrounding Hal's success in Henry V or of the play's problem with the issue of representation itself. At a purely descriptive level we might agree that the "eroticization of Henry's persona charisma ... heralds the transformation of his charismatic presence into the combined institutions of marriage, genealogical legitimation, and the rulership of England and France" (234), but this does not quite capture the larger ironies that we might, in retrospect, read into the play. What Falco earlier claimed of Hal, that he "provides the ideal model of charismatic administration" (225), reads only the play's manifest meaning, a meaning that a series of encounters, not least that with Williams and Bates, challenges. The Machiavellian plan, that Hal had confided to the audience in Henry IV, Pt. 1 (1.2.192-210), is transformed in Henry Vinto a private admission of heavy responsibility; the "idol ceremony" (4.1.237) that requires the acknowledgment of charismatic authority through "adoration" (4.1.242) turns into a question: is it nothing more than "place, degree and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men, / Wherein thou art less happy, being feared, / Than they in fearing?" (4.1.243-46). It is precisely this kind of periodic questioning thrown up by the play's own nervousness about the business of theatrical representation that undermines its aesthetic teleology. "History" and wishful thinking are shown to be uncomfortable bedfellows; charismatic authority and "institution-building" are not shown in alliance; and the comic ending promises to be radically undercut by a descent into a political chaos to which the audience has already been privy: "Which oft our stage hath shown" (epilogue, 1.13).

With Bruce Smith's essay, enigmatically entitled "Mona Lisa Takes a Mountain Hike, Hamlet Goes For an Ocean Dip," we move from the earnest and unwavering pursuit of a "thesis" to an altogether more playful style of exposition, and to a significant shift of methodology. In his book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), Smith briefly mentions the work of the maverick French thinker Michel Serres, and in particular Serres's claim that there is "no life without heat, no matter, neither; no warmth without air, no logos without noise" (cited, 9). Building on this, Smith now proposes in his essay a "historical phenomenology" (250) that he believes he can apply to Hamlet and to speculation about audience responses in Shakespeare's Globe, a building that "directed and propagated sound in distinctive ways" (242). Beginning from T. S. Eliot's description of Hamlet as the "Mona Lisa of Literature," Smith launches a comparison between the positioning against a background of the central figures in portrait and play respectively. Speech and "presence," two concepts that are central to Hamlet and Hamlet, are raised in connection with the attempt to qualify Derrida's account of logocentrism by submitting it to a series of "historical contingencies" (241). To decenter Hamlet from Hamlet would be, argues Smith, to fail to acknowledge the articulation of the tension between language and context or between foreground and background. He contends that "to refuse Hamlet's rhetorical ploys, to decentre him among the sounds in which he exists, is the aural equivalent of telling Mona Lisa to go take a hike" (ibid.) in the sense that it would collapse the enigmatic portrait into its "background." The claim that the Globe theater "directed and propagated sound in distinctive ways" (242) is blandly phenomenological, although it gestures toward the affective delivery of language that in a theater is a much rougher process than the delineation of meaning in a static portrait whose mystery lies, in part, in its having been separated from the conditions of its own production. In a limited phenomenological sense Hamlet does struggle to "come to presence" but to claim simply that his physical surroundings are "full of dispersed sounds that only on occasion find a centre in a single speaker" (243) withdraws into an apolitical version of Kristeva's "semiotic chora." In the context of the play, "presence" and the political and ethical infrastructure that sustains it are a problem. The play is "about" both the formal and the historical grounding of language, and its circulation in the world renders the production of meaning a more hazardous task than a simple appeal to logocentrism would have us believe. Serres's championing of "prepositions" or "a relational way of knowing" (250) breaks radically with the "proposition" of orthodox analytical philosophy, or the "statement" of Foucauldian materialism. However, the extent to which "such a way of knowing recognises the embodiedness of historical subjects," and "attends to the materiality of the evidence they have left behind," and, at the same time, "acknowledges the embodiedness of the investigator in the face of that evidence" (cited, 250), is in Serres's writings a complex invitation to dissolve disciplinary boundaries, rather than to provide a blueprint for a reading of the dramatic action of Hamlet. Indeed, we may wonder to what extent Hamlet undoes the Cartesian subject/object couple, especially since the play poses it as a problem for which no clear solution is yet (historically) forthcoming. Moreover, the positioning of the hero "among," and that leads ultimately to an apparent oxymoron: "the materiality of air that calls into question the distinction between subject and object" (251) and his final relegation to "sea" and "air," is not easily sustainable as a reading. For example, Hamlet's "The rest is silence" (5.2.363) is immediately pulled back into an historical context, first by Horatio, and then by Fortinbras, and examples from other plays should place us on our guard against assuming that such apparent invitations to dissolution or isolation, or such "silences," can be read apart from the politics that situate them. To place Hamlet in the formal world of "sound" is to miss the important point that the Messenger makes at 4.5.102-5 immediately before Laertes's entry, about the historical and practical grounding of sound and the fear of a return to primal chaos: "The rabble call him lord, / And, as the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known-- / The ratifiers and props of every word." To read Hamlet through the perspective glass of Prospero's apology for the insubstantiality of theatrical performance is to risk hijacking the play for a phenomenology that is only tenuously historical, and at the same time only superficially presentist. A "relational" approach to the play must take into account its capacity to generate "passion" in an audience. But returning the hero "to the sea of noise from which he emerged" (252) abandons the task of attempting to explain the various ways in which, in this play particularly, language shapes "noise," and where "noise" is already part of a narrative, in favor of rhetorical flourish.

The final three essays are grouped under the title of Barroll's first book, "Artificial Persons." Smith's attempt to map out what in another theoretical register might have been called the "real" that ultimately resists representation, provides a neat bridge to Catherine Belsey's essay "Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan With Augustine and Montaigne." Each of the three essays, in their different ways, departs from Shakespeare, in order to encompass Milton (Suzanne Woods's "Abdiel Centres Freedom"), and the early modern preoccupation with the objects produced by technology (Barbara Maria Stafford's "Artificial Intensity: The Optical Technologies of Personal Reality Enhancement"). Belsey seeks a rapprochement between psychoanalytical theory and the historicizing texts of earlier epochs, and her piece is in some ways a response to Stephen Greenblatt's essay on "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture." (7) Greenblatt acknowledged the existence of "complex forms of self-consciousness and highly discursive personhood in the West long before the sixteenth century" (8) but he went on to argue that the best hope for a properly historicized form of psychoanalytic criticism lay in "the school of Hegelian psychoanalysis associated with the work of Jacques Lacan, where identity is always revealed to be the identity of another, always registered (as in those parish registers) in language." (9) The Hobbesian phrase "artificial person" had been for Barroll focused primarily in theatrical performance, but for Greenblatt it was extended to encompass an entirely theatricalized Renaissance culture. Belsey's concern is with Renaissance culture generally, although she is uncertain of the claim that Lacan's complex topographical account of the operations of the symbolic order via language are "historical" in the "culturalist" way that Greenblatt thinks (258). Her solution is to uphold the formal aspects of Lacanian theory in order to demonstrate its effectiveness in dealing with the reading of "texts." This neatly sidesteps the problem of deciding whether psychoanalysis advocates a universal, or a historically relative, human condition, and concentrates on "an approach to the necessary condition of meaning" (ibid.). For Belsey the contribution of Psychoanalysis is "methodological rather than explanatory, a way above all of paying attention to the workings of the texts" (259). Not merely that, but the renewed emphasis upon "close reading"--a much closer reading than that advocated in New Criticism--would enjoin the cultural critic to employ the same procedures as the psychoanalyst "who listens for the slippages, lapses, and incoherences in speech of the analysand." The result of this "mode of interpretation" would be, Belsey insists, "more history, not less, and more nuanced history" that would not be hampered, either by a vague appeal to presentist concerns, or by the temptation to slide back into "the old reassuring cognitive totalities of the Elizabethan world picture and the early modern mind" (ibid.).

Belsey isolates the Freudian concern with human sexuality, and traces this back from St. Augustine, through Montaigne, to Freud and thence to Lacan. She argues that, like Augustinian theology, "psychoanalysis allots a central place to the conflict between law and desire," so that what in St. Augustine is an unruliness of the penis becomes in Psychoanalysis "the phallus as lawless, irrepressible, for ever in conflict with propriety." Thus her claim is that "Psychoanalytic castration re-enacts the Fall," and that sex is "the place where that loss is most evident" (261). Belsey points to a methodology, but she also offers an explanation and a narrative whose seductive coherence chafes against the nuanced "history" she advocates. Indeed, although in a post-structuralist world committed to the principle of fragmentation, "language is incapable of transmitting a full thematic content, a complete, coherent world picture, or a cognitive totality of any kind" (270), we cannot, as Belsey readily admits, do without some theoretical means of grasping "the contours of signification itself" (275). The difficulty she faces is in moving from the ideological contamination of a Freudianism steeped in biology, and from an explicitly sexual register, to an explanation that recovers from it the operations of "language," "culture," and law. Hers is a different kind of culturalist reading from that of Greenblatt, and one committed (in principle) to a materialist insistence upon the inextricable interdependence of "matter" and "spirit." Augustine, Montaigne, and Lacan are, in Belsey's carefully nuanced reading, "aligned against the division between matter and spirit that informs the dominant tradition of Western Philosophy" (271). Except that in her account a thematic narrative threatens to overwhelm what Jean-Joseph Goux calls "a logic of the symbolisation process, that is, a logic of the successive forms taken by the exchange of vital activities in all spheres of social organisation, a logic pertaining to phylogeny as well as to ontogeny. This logic enables us to conceive the dialectics of history." (10)

What is glimpsed at tangentially in Belsey's rewriting of the brief of Psychoanalytical criticism--Goux's "regulated process of equivalents and substitutions which cuts across the separate registers of the general social body" (11)--is to some extent reprised in Suzanne Woods's analysis of the modern "state" as it is represented in Books 5 and 6 of Milton's Paradise Lost, in particular through the figure of the isolated loyalist Abdiel. Woods follows one of Barroll's own distinctive arguments to claim that the very patriarchal power that in structural terms informs the symbolic order is weakened in the early-seventeenth century whereby "the Crown (synonymous with 'the State')" found itself "in ideological opposition to those whom the Crown rules." Barroll's "polymorphic body politic," in which different interest groups such as the aristocracy, the gentry, and merchants, along with the Crown, "made up the early modern state by relating to one another within a general formation characterised by the constant mobility of power centering" (cited, 279), figures for Woods as the terrain upon which there developed a sense of individual autonomy that signified "personal and political freedom" (279).

It is Abdiel's resistance to Satan's rebellion that for Woods encapsulates the debate between what for Milton is "liberty" and "heedlesse license" (281). Despite Milton's own dislike of monarchy, his own representation of himself as "a singular voice of conscience against the easily swayed mobs," and his depiction of the "courageous isolation" of Abdiel, indicates sympathy for a figure and a gesture that makes the angel "Milton's kind of rebel prophet" (283). Her reading of the theology implicit in this resistance is of a rather different kind from that proposed by Belsey. Milton, Woods argues, invites the reader to exercise "personal freedom" in interpreting this encounter as "a consistent reminder, if we choose to believe it, that it is possible to know good by knowing good, and that we do not have to fall into evil to know good" (288). Where Belsey would emphasize a constitutive dialectics that resides at the heart of the Fall, (12) Woods posits a concept of "presence" beyond signification that the exercise of "personal freedom" is designed to exemplify in Milton's poem. It is this "centering [of] individual freedom" that allows Milton to change "the cultural dynamics" by inviting the "individual reader and the individual hero to make choices founded on conscience and responsibility" (289). Of course, the question remains of precisely how such "conscience" and "responsibility" are produced in the ideology that informs the unconscious of the text.

Both Belsey and Woods, in their different ways, explore the dynamic and shifting micropolitics of the early-modern period. Barbara Maria Stafford's essay "Artificial Intensity: The Optical Technologies of Personal Reality Enhancements" draws attention to particular aspects of early-modern technology and to the traces that various technological devices leave in visual art. Optic magnifying glasses, "wonder cabinets," "magic lanterns," "perspective boxes," mirrors, and various anamorphic apparatuses capable of transforming human images, all contribute to the early modern definition of the "human" as being aligned with "the instrumentalisation of the biological self" (293). Stafford wants to depart from histories of "progress" which, she thinks, have served to obscure the "supernatural, wonder-inducing, and knowledge-producing evolution" as represented by this "optical instrumentation" (296). Stafford is on a mission to reinstate the "aura" of visual objects separated from their context in a quotidian reality, as in a museum or an exhibition such as the Devices Of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (293), to a serious consideration of these technological accomplishments as offering "the promise both to extend us prosthetically and to deliver transcendence" (296). It is the desire to perceive technological advances as capable of "delivering transcendence" that needs further elucidation here, especially in the light of how particular mechanical inventions mediate the natural world, replicate its features, and augment it, and in so doing, aim to return humanity to a lost perfection. Indeed, the juxtaposition of various objects such as "shells, gems, coins, sculpture, paintings, clocks and automata" may be perceived as "struggles to uncover general categories or cognitive patterns from myriad particulars," which "were signs of the turn towards empirical observation emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (297). Stafford's is a highly personal enthusiasm for the investigation and analysis of the material objects of culture that are designed to extend human potential, and she reads them as traces of those forces that "shape us" (304).

This essay offers a fitting conclusion to an impressive range of essays, that, taken collectively, pay a full and deserved tribute to Leeds Barroll's own intellectual achievement. Each essay is, in its own way, controversial, seeking to expand our knowledge of the early-modern period rather than simply to affirm a status quo. In precisely the same way that scholars have regularly returned to Barroll's own writings, so this collection, expertly edited by Lena Cowen Orlin, performs that role and invites readers to return, to debate, to challenge received knowledge, and to extend its horizons. These are, as the title suggests, "revisions," invitations to rethink, that are a fitting tribute to a lifetime dedicated to the prosecuting and encouraging of serious scholarship.

Notes

(1.) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 100ft.

(2.) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavstock? Publications, 1982) 31-33.

(3.) Cf. Will Fisher, Materialising Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: 2006), 87.

(4.) See Cambridge University Press, Phyllis Rackin, "Misogyny is Everywhere." A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 42ff.

(5.) Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 44.

(6.) Falco cites approvingly J. H. Walter's edition of Henry V that makes "the appropriate connection to St. Paul's ecstasies" (232). Only in T. W. Craik's Arden 3 edition of the play is there a reference to St. Paul (King Henry V [London: 1995], 123n.29).

(7.) Stephen Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, (New York: Rontledge, 1991), pp.131-45.

(8.) Ibid., 137.

(9.) Ibid., 142.

(10.) Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 24.

(11.) Ibid., 21.

(12.) See especially, Shakespeare and The Loss of Eden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 38ff.