Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists.

The theoretical crux of Valerie Wayne's important collection is implicit in its title: what does "materialist feminist criticism" of Shakespeare mean, and how does this concept serve to organize the contents of the volume? Both Wayne's introduction and Catherine Belsey's afterword (best read in tandem prior to the individual essays) address this question. Wayne begins, usefully, by mapping out the political agenda of her project in relation to that which it repudiatesq feminist essentialism, especially as expressed in purely psychoanalytical criticism; and the concentration on elite male subjects in some new historicist and cultural materialist criticism. Wayne's "historically-grounded feminism" would correct these deficiencies and simultaneously supply a critique of "capitalistic and patriarchal structures" (5, 10).

Wayne's dilemma, which she confronts head-on, is how to formulate a critical methodology that, on the one hand, endorses a neo-marxist politics and, on the other, accommodates "the instability and multiplicity of historical subjects" (23-24) to be interpreted in accordance with this politics. The crux of this dilemma is the "diffusion of marxism into materialism" (10) or the postmodern reformulation of marxist economism (with Althusser as the watershed) that argues the materiality of ideology and ideological formations. If experience - and language itself - are material, then how does materialist feminist criticism commit to a particular political agenda without simultaneously restricting the possibilities of its historical inquiry?

Belsey's approach to this question would modify - or enlarge - Wayne's concept of the political. Belsey emphasizes the epistemological and political alliance of feminism with postmodern skepticism: both recognize that "all texts exceed their own unitary projects"; both contest the rationalist "pretence of mediated access to a presence, an intelligibility"; and both understand that the materiality of culture "is all about relations of difference" (263-65). For Belsey, the politics of feminism "works in the gaps difference produces, in the interstices between specific operations of power and submission" (263, my italics). Because patriarchy "is not an essence," there can be no meta-narrative of its operations, and feminist modes of resistance to patriarchal practices - including the feminist practice of criticism - will necessarily be protean and pluralistic. Thus, in recording "a series of specific stories" (263) about power, materialist feminist criticism endorses difference as the basis of its politics, and avoids labeling its critical stance in any way that might fix meaning or deflect the process of change.

Although the positions of Wayne and Belsey may be said to be complementary, their emphases are very different. Belsey is wary of reifying materialist feminist criticism by offering it as a corrective to other critical modes; Wayne's theoretical principles are shaped by her activist commitment to contemporary critical disputes. The essays that comprise the volume reflect this tension and represent a variety of accommodations to the materialist feminist umbrella.

Probably the most polemical piece in the collection is Ann Thompson's "Are There Any Women in King Lear?" Concerned with what she sees as objectionable features in the work of Dollimore, Tenhenhouse and Greenblatt, and with certain feminist "over-readings" of Shakespeare, Thompson's critique extends the iconoclastic emphasis in Wayne's introduction. Peter Stallybrass, on the other hand, declines to enter the materialist feminist debate directly so that he may examine (with characteristic subtlety and thoroughness) Gramsci's proposition that "there is no intrinsic connection between inversions of class, inversions of gender and inversions of ethnic hierarchies" ("The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State," 217). Occupying a kind of middle ground, Valerie Traub ("Desire and the Differences it Makes") combines trenchant theoretical analysis of the materiality of Renaissance erotic practice with meta-commentary on the "untheorised assumptions" (83) of a wide range of contemporary critics.

Two fine essays dealing at least partially with Renaissance spectatorship (Sara Eaton's "Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy" and Jean E. Howard's "Scripts and/versus Playhouses: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Public Stage") nicely demonstrate the breadth of materialist feminist interpretive possibilities. Eaton uses contemporary film theory to interrogate fetishistic modes of perception in the gaze of the Renaissance male spectator and of the contemporary male critic; Howard situates the multiple subject positions of the female spectator within the practices and conventions of the Renaissance theatrical industry. Although dissimilar in approach and focus, both writers locate materiality in representation and in ideology, and both make sophisticated use of the work of others in developing their own distinctive theories.

Graham Bradshaw's Misrepresentations sets out to critique some of the same materialist critics that are scrutinized in Wayne's collection, but Bradshaw's single-minded approach and heavy-handed style (too frequently he substitutes ridicule for analysis) seriously compromise his project. Bradshaw would demonstrate that the monolithic "anti-humanism" of Dollimore, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Tennenhouse, and others represents an ideological and methodological inversion of Tillyard. Because these critics are committed to Foucault's dark view of ideological power, homogeneously conceived, and to the assumption that our own world is alienated from that of the Renaissance, they interpret portions of Shakespeare's text supradramatically in order to reify their own ideological compulsions. For Bradshaw, the materialist denial of authorial intentionality functions as a dodge to justify such selectivity.

Bradshaw's insistent reductiveness suggests an imperfect understanding of postmodern hermeneutics, and a need to level the playing field so that he can set himself up as a peer of Greenblatt (his favorite materialist). Inevitably, he gives the game away in delineating his own critical position, which in the end is a variety of formalism. Arguing that the entirety of a play's own intentionality, its "generative matrix of meanings" (15), is discoverable by attention to the practices and conventions of poetic drama and to the textual symptoms of the playwright's "directing intelligence" (31), Bradshaw proceeds to uncover the gestalt of Henry V and of Othello by exhaustive readings of these plays against Shakespeare's sources.

Despite his presumably sincere conviction that it is "the materialists" who are monological, Bradshaw continually reveals why it is that he feels comfortable on the Tillyardian terrain. Like Belsey's rationalist, Bradshaw believes in intelligibility - that texts do not exceed their unitary projects. Although he would have us think differently, it is Bradshaw himself who is corsetted by "candidly stated but critically incapacitating premises" (95).

SUSAN ZIMMERMAN Queens College, City University of New York