Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit.

Seth Lerer, (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 18.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv + 252 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59001-9.

This is a valuable book. If its thesis of ubiquitous Pandaric impersonation in the court of Henry VIII is too epic, certainly reductive, and finally impossible to prove, the means by which Lerer seeks to prove his case are consistently alive. In five densely argued chapters, Lerer leads the reader through landscapes of reading that are in themselves recapitulations of early Tudor readings. In this dialectic between his own readings and those of Henrician England (at least in his specially selected texts), Lerer reveals a central concern that gives his own text a strong narrative sequence: the role of literary text in shaping cultural reality. Text becomes the vanishing point, as in Renaissance painting, of all perspectives, cultural, ideological, or otherwise.

It is this basis in actual language that leads, as Derrida has described in his own teaching method, to Lerer's special explications. The last two chapters of this book show the power of Lerer's method in the frequently eloquent readings he gives to both politicized manuscript anthologies (the Devonshire manuscript is especially good) and printed volumes. In the latter he surveys the role of Henrician Chaucer texts as well as the poems of Wyatt, where he crucially refocuses the verse epistle, and to a lesser extent, the poems on Wyatt by Surrey and the manipulative role of Tottel's Miscellany. In these chapters, as in his earlier study of Chaucer and his readers, from which this work descends, Lerer creates an ironic (and even tragic) interplay between textual presence and cultural absence (and vice-versa).

If the last two chapters reveal the richness of this method, the second and third working out of the initial chapter show its difficulties. Grandfathered from Greenblatt, Lerer's critical base shares the same achievements and fault-lines. He has some of the New Historicist problems with historical accuracy: among others, the Scottish king James V was the half-brother of Lady Margaret Douglas herself, not of her (and his) mother, Henry VIII's sister; Sir Anthony Denny could not, even in the most distorted sense, be considered a Pandar in the Tudor court; and the evidence for Sir Francis Bryan should be examined carefully for actual instances - Chaucer's original Pandar would never have written a text like Bryan's final one; the Pope never came to Calais but to Marseilles in 1533; and it will be a surprise for David Starkey to see his work on the formation of courtliness set in conjunction with that of Elton's.

The problem of the method lies in Lerer's exaggeration in defining as exclusively Pandaric the Tudor court's reading of Troilus and Criseyde and then going farther: "It is this 'privy' Pandarus that defines courtly poetics for the Henrician age and, more generally, that shapes the making of the early modern reader." Such reduction tends to self-destruct. The single point of critical entry - Pandarus - cannot bear the epic sweep of stage one, all courtly poetics in this period, or stage two, the making of all early modern readers. "Cultural self-knowing in the rituals of theater and the impulses of spectatorship" as found in the deceits and voyeurism of the Henrician court, for example, simply do not explain the ideological basis for engagement (in the Sartrean sense) in the political, cultural, not to mention theological, dialectics of the period. It does not "shape the making" of the reader of, for example, Wyatt's masterpiece, the Penitential Psalms, or Surrey's invention of blank verse in his subjective restructuring of Europe's communal epic, the Aeneid - both working from a very different ideological dialectic than that in Pandarism. In a period that produced a number of ideological masterpieces from Utopia to Tyndale's New Testament to Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, texts missing from analysis here but surely as important as Hawes or Henry VIII's love letters, the ambivalence in anthologies or minor texts cannot shape "the making of the early modern reader" quite so determinately as Lerer states.

In fact, Lerer's perceptive readings would have found a better frame in the indeterminacy that marks the dialectic of creation, invention, and reading itself in this period. The shock of the new subjectivity that emerges in all these texts could only have found in metaphor and its language of indeterminacy the analogue for what Wyatt calls "these blodye dayes." At his most eloquent Lerer leads us from reductive, derivative readings to the mysteries and indeterminancy of the texts themselves. In a dialectic of word and culture, we learn their power to shape the new realities of the self this age was discovering.

W. A. SESSIONS Georgia State University