Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance.

Writers at the awkward and neglected cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have generally lost out when canonical honors were being awarded. C.S. Lewis famously dismissed the greater part of the sixteenth century as a "drab age," and few critics have taken trouble to disagree.

Andrew Hadfield argues, on the contrary, that this is a dynamic period, all the more fascinating for its cultural uncertainties. It is, after all, a time when English was still being consolidated as a single language; when the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism for the national soul was also taking shape as a struggle between Latin and the vernacular; and when the literary and linguistic consequences of the printing revolution had not yet been fully felt or understood.

Given such circumstances, the question of a national literature was bound to arise as a matter of urgency and dispute. Hadfield's main point is that "the problem of national identity required urgent attention in the sixteenth century, principally owing to the Reformation and the consequent stress placed on the need to establish vernacular languages and cultures in each respective European country" (9). It was as a consequence of this perceived need that poetry became a site of mutually exclusive claims and ambitions.

Moreover, as Hadfield reminds those of us who are apt to take our national literatures for granted, "no one in the Tudor period was sure how to write such a literature or confident as to what it was supposed to do" (19). In this context one remembers Skelton's tentative early constructions of an English canon - Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate - from which subsequent hierarchies of literary excellence could be seen to have sprung, and to which Skelton had vainly hoped, and hoped in vain, to add his own name.

Hadfield leads his argument through relative by-ways - though he never treats them as such - as John Bale's defense of the rights of monarchs against the papacy and his British history of writing, usefully contrasting Bale's "monolithic consistency" with Skelton's "flexible pragmatism." He helpfully reintegrates the Mirror for Magistrates into literary history rather than "mere" history and shows how it nationalizes some of its foreign sources like Boccaccio, even before the fashion for Petrarch took off.

He goes on to discuss the complicated effects of literature's closeness to the court. For instance, George Puttenham was unable, in The Art of English Poesie (1589), to distinguish between the proper functions of the poet and the courtier. His solution, entirely logical at the time, was to combine the two and speak of the "courtly maker." Clearly, in a situation where the Queen had become England's main Muse, the art of poetry had been particularly strongly compromised or blessed.

Exemplary chapters on Spenser and Sidney complete the book. What emerges is a fascinating account of a culture under pressure of rapid change while desirous of consolidatory stasis. Hadfield's scepticism, informed throughout by recent cultural theory, is at once fully supported by detailed research and quite forcefully expressed. ("Taking the Renaissance at face value is a dangerous and widespread habit," 131.)

His tart dismissal of academics who will not take the trouble to understand theoretical "jargon" is one of the most convincing I have read: "Critics who think that they are beyond the need of jargon and are free to write 'proper' English are simply in the grip of an older jargon and, consequently, older theories." (21) This combination of meticulous scholarly attentiveness with combative innovation results in a meticulous and challenging thesis.

GREGORY WOODS Nottingham Trent University