Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 17 pls.+ xi + 367 pp. $27.50.

In formulating his thesis that certain English classics by authors born between 1551 and 1564 "wrote England" as a set of institutions embodying an antithesis in the nation state, Richard Helgerson manages simultaneously the disciplines of five or six lesser persons. While frankly New Historicist, his book rightly claims to have escaped from the imprisoning New Historicist fascination with the dynamics of centralized power.

Helgerson begins, often dexterously, by confronting his texts, or "forms," with other, often non-English material so as to generate seven antithetical pairs. His climactic step, however, is to relate each of these apparently dissimilar pairs to the hypothetically paradoxical idea of the nation state by adjusting each's polarity so as to fit the dichotomies state/nation, sovereign/subject, monarch/ people: i.e., he wants to ground the first member of each of the seven pairs in central, monarchical power or status, in opposition to the peripheral power or status of nobles, merchants, lawyers, or commoners, associated with the second member of each pair. It is with this final tweaking of the pairs into political formulations that trouble starts. I enumerate the first and second member of each pair, and examine the pairing, below:

(1) Quantitative verse (principally Spenser's), imitated from the ancients, vs. native rhymed verse. Here the evidence simply fails to support the attempted match of admittedly non-national, non-traditional, artificially introduced quantitative verse to an absolutist, statist ideology. Spenser wanting "the kingdom of our language" only wants English poets, like Greek poets, to adjust pronunciation of words to meter; Harvey's rejoinder about leaving our demotic words in peace is only figurative, and Harvey, as strongly as Spenser, favored quantitative verse. Part of Helgerson's effort to put Spenser into an absolutist context here ("Leicester House") involves the level of personnel (Leicester, Sidney, later Essex) whom Helgerson sees behind the opposite tendency to glorify allegorized chivalric aristocrats rather than monarchical power in The Faerie Queene (see below). On the other hand, Daniel's Defense of Rime is more receptive than fearful towards royal authority. And while arguing for popular custom Daniel undercuts, on his opponent's ground, the argument for imposing an alien, quantitative prosody: not just the English but most other national literatures, he says, have chosen rhyme over unrhymed quantitative verse. The classicizing metrical experiments of the Renaissance may have as mixed political bearings as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classicizing efforts using unrhymed hexameter and (in Goethe's case, like Spenser's) iambic trimeters.

(2) In the epic Gerusalemme Liberata, Godfrey's absolutist redirection of all his lieutenants' energies from their amatory and other projects to the single goal of taking Jerusalem, vs., in the romance The Faerie Queene, Gloriana's only notional authority over the uncoordinated actions of her knights. Here Heigerson's argument runs much better. Although it seems to me likely that Spenser intended an absolutist sequel to The Faerie Queene -- a deliverance of Rome not Jerusalem -- the existing six books are what we have.

(3) Sovereignly dictated civil law, modeled on Justinian's Code, vs. native common law in Coke's Institutes. The best chapter in the book. The obvious opposition of monarchical fiat to traditionary law is detailed illuminatingly.

(4) The sixteenth-century chronicle's relation of events from a monarchist viewpoint, structured by reigns, vs. the growing tendency of the new county maps and of Drayton's Poly-Olbion to reduce and finally eradicate royal insignia in favor of local insignia of subjects' power, and of the land itself. This urgently needs contextualization. The five extant fourteenth-century maps of England display no arms. And Helgerson fails to engage with modern cartographers' claims that early maps were generally instruments of centralized power. Furthermore, long before the appearance of subjects' insignia in English maps, thronging symbolic forms-episcopal and parish architectural symbolism, publicly displayed noble arms (printed on broadsheets on the Continent), evidence of progress in the hierarchy like the quartering of Chaucer's wife's arms on the ducal arms of Suffolk on the monumental tomb of his granddaughter--were read at least as attentively as was the withholding of royal arms on county maps. Oppositely, the organization of narrative history into royal reigns outlives chronicles in the histories of England down to G. M. Trevelyan's time. We cannot understand the rewriting of England in terms of a shift from chronicles to chorography, because this shift is only part of a much larger picture.

(5) The epic, royalist, chivalric ethic of Camoens' Lusiads, condemning commercial profit although tracing a mercantile voyage, vs. the romance-like, many-layered narrative of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, elevating mercantile ethics and inserting the gentry into trade. Again, ignoring alternative discursive forms here weakens this otherwise helpful discussion. In an antimetabole beloved by adherents of theory, Heigerson says that as England wrote ("authored/authorized" [12]) Hakluyt, so Hakluyt wrote ("authored/authorized" England, meaning that he shaped English mercantilist self-consciousness. No doubt, but even without Hakluyt this self-consciousness would have got shaped by alternative discursive means. The United Provinces had no Hakluyt but well knew their role as the then greatest trading nation. Other forms of discourse, or even sense-tokens, are often as potent as the formal texts which monopolize critical attention.

(6) Shakespeare's gentrification of himself and his artisanal stage company by royalist exclusion of commoners from meaningful standing in his history plays vs. the popular inclusiveness of Henslowe's kind of history play. But was Shakespeare only a social-climbing royalist? Very simply, against Helgerson's self-fashioning Henry V, with his cheerless rejection of Falstaff, we need to set the reduction to mere forked humanity of the vividly existential, vulnerable heroes of the great tragedies.

(7) The abstract subjection of Christianity to hierarchical control in Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity vs. the democratically nonconformist martyrdoms, in Foxe's Acts and Monuments, of scripturally knowledgeable, anti-authoritarian commoners. This is impressive, although marred by over-insistent, politically correct glorification of forthright, biblically expert proletarian martyrs.

We are left to conclude, I think, that works of Spenser, Hakluyt, Coke, and Foxe resist absolutistism in often interesting ways. Helgerson points here to a social phenomenon neglected by those New Historicists who see only the monarch's court writing the English Renaissance. What eludes him, however, are demonstrations of large-scale, paradigmatic connections between texts and the power struggles of the absolutist state with subject classes, and convincing evidence of the unqualified power of texts in relation to society, both fashioning and being fashioned.