New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature.

Edward Arnold, 1992. 180 pp. $14.95.

Charting a course through the recent rereadings and rewritings of Renaissance literary culture is no easy matter. Certainly the complexity of current debates in literary studies is precisely part of the field's energy and interest, but critical dexterity -- dazzling though it may be -- can also exclude non-specialist audiences. This is the starting point of Thomas Healy's New Latitudes: the book is "designed either for those who have only recently embarked on examining Renaissance texts or for those who feel puzzled by some of the recent critical debates which have been focused around texts they may be long familiar with" (4). In so doing it introduces different theoretical approaches (especially "new historicism", deconstruction and feminist criticism), alongside issues pertinent to Renaissance literary studies -- such as language, genre, the formation of canons, editorial policy, institutional practice, and readerships. Healy's strategy is to present theoretical issues by "exploring Renaissance texts": New Latitudes thus serves as both "a short introduction" to theoretical practice and as a series of readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts.

It is a strategy that can work extremely well, particularly in terms of the book's main audience: undergraduates new to the field. In a chapter on "Founding Canons," for instance, Healy deftly discusses aspects of canonization with studies of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the format of Ben Jonson's Workes of 1616, together with short, focused readings of George Herbert, Ann Collins, Jacob Bauthumley and Anna Trapnel. The chapter is more than a restatement of canonization within the academy: Healy gives a concise and thought-provoking introduction to the production of Renaissance literary texts themselves, discussing the implications of folio and quarto editions and the book trade (then and now), while raising issues of genre and imitation through questions of audience -- both Renaissance and modern. In so doing Healy unpacks what have sometimes become truisms assumed in recent Renaissance criticism, and he does so clearly, accessibly and originally.

Healy shows a similar attention to audience and textual production in his chapter on "The Drama's Place," which combines readings of Dr. Faustus and Measure for Measure with an analysis of editorial procedure, alongside a pithy introduction to the London theaters and aspects of high/low dramatic culture of the period. In the course of the chapter, Healy raises important questions about authorial intention, audience reception and the problems of assuming a stable dramatic text--"a discernable document, an artefact" -- when "discussing texts as cultural documents" (115). Similarly, in a chapter addressing deconstruction, Healy calls for greater attention to the difficulties of language, arguing that "many cultural historians have too readily appropriated literary writing as cultural documents, subduing the problems about what language actually represents which have been examined by other forms of theoretical inquiry, notably deconstruction" (25). Likewise, Healy's chapter "The New Historicism" serves as a lucid and critical introduction to the field. Rather than a discussion of discourse-theory, Healy's focus is upon the anthropological and anecdotal impetus of "new historicist" criticism, with readings of Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations (King Lear in particular), Louis Montrose, Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins. While acknowledging that "new historicism" is not a homogeneous movement, Healy raises the problem of historical representation in using strategies of "thick description": when "New Historicist case studies of specific texts and specific contexts start to feel like metaphors for the whole culture" (68), argues Healy, we need to ask "why one |historical' text is chosen rather than another, and whether they may, or may not be, considered representative of those commonly found in cultural circulation" (74).

There are, nonetheless, distinct problems in working in the "introductory" format, perhaps the most obvious being that of simplification. For instance Healy's opening chapter, though raising important issues of categorization, tends towards a schematic reading of "neo-conservative" and "new" models of history, while any potted survey of deconstruction (chapter 2) or feminist criticism (chapter 7) is necessarily an exercise in selectivity -- only compounded by scant footnote references to further issues and reading. What I found more problematic, however, was the lack of textual examples in Healy's reading of Renaissance texts. We have, for instance, to take Healy at his word when he says of Renaissance women writers that "through skilful deployment of male dominated language, women could subtly reveal its limitations and contradictions" (155); likewise, the case study of Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland warranted more citations. From a teaching point of view this raises the problem of encouraging students to demonstrate their own ideas with examples alongside a critical study making brief forays into a wide range of texts with no supporting citations (a strategy to which the final chapter, "Gendered Readings," is especially prone with its recourse to over sixteen authors and texts).

Healy does, however, acknowledge the current "wariness among critics to make large generalized claims" (3), and it is difficult to tell how far the format of the book prohibited a more extensive use of footnotes: the index, for instance, is cursory, and one page only has been allowed for selected reading. This should not detract, however, from the strengths of New Latitudes: at its best, Healy's writing is committed, critical and compelling, attentive to the problems of audience, and original in its presentation of familiar issues to an unfamiliar public.