Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. .

Douglas Bruster. Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xii + 268 Pp. index. $50. ISBN: 0-8032-1303-4.

"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.

-- Emerson, "Quotation and Originality"

As its Emersonian epigraph intimates, Quoting Shakespeare threads together a timely book. Its occasion is the end to excitement over New Historicism (13), while its topic is "quoting," a principle that links early modern dramatic writing by Shakespeare and contemporaries with modern American critical writing from Emerson to Greenblatt. At first, Bruster's epigraph seems, if not outside the warp and woof, at least un-eventual, while his critique of Greenblatt and the New Historicism--for concerted failure to make good on a fundamentally intertextual project (31)--seems at best belated. Yet this may misunderstand Douglas Bruster's timely project, which is to explore the afterlife of criticism now that its leading theory has passed quietly into the beyond, by monitoring what makes us all tick: "Everyone quotes... and everything we make is quotation" (25).

By "quoting Shakespeare," Bruster thus means two things simultaneously: "a Shakespeare both quoting and quoted" (3). The advantage to this spanning device is that we learn something fresh about both Shakespeare's writing practice and our own: "intertextuality is ... seen here as tethering works to the future as well as the past" (3).

For his part, Shakespeare practices what Levi-Strauss calls bricolage: "a pastiche of various to-hand materials" (22). Bruster attempts to enhance our current understanding of early modern England and its texts by proving that... bricolage can give us valuable insight into the cultural, historical, and political positions of writers and their works" (3). Positions is a key word, for Bruster argues that "we can learn more about texts and the history they incorporate if we look beyond the provocative material that New Historicism commonly employs, for the positions of texts and authors.., often appear most clearly in otherwise ordinary borrowings" (4-5). Thus, Bruster's methodology constitutes a "mode of reading" that "pays attention to the materials that authors used in composing their works" and on what they changed and how (13).

The chapter structure is adventurous. The opening chapter outlines brico/age as "a particular way of reading," while the remaining five supply "practical demonstrations" (13) of "worldly intertextualiry" (6). Chapter one, "Quoting Shakespeare," valuably historicizes a theory of intertextuality via the positioning of quotation. Observing that today "approaches are being reshuffled rather than rethought" (13), Bruster aims to supply leadership. In this, he joins post-revisionist critics who challenge New Historicist principles of social construction with attempts to restore agency to authors" (26): "When examined in relation to their habits of making,... Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Middleton look surprisingly different from one another" (14). "[W]hen it came to quotation," for instance, "Shakespeare practiced a strangely aggressive anonymity" (20). Yet this practice directs how we are to read Shakespeare politically: "Categories like subversion/containment and radical/conservative falsify the heterogeneit y of these plays" (45). Bruster thus asks us to register the full "abundance" of a text's "political positions" (44).

Chapter two, "Quoting Marlowe's Shepherd," shows how in Shakespeare's plays "the controlling authority of 'The Passionate Shepherd' invitor becomes something like a paradigm for political agency" (87). Chapter three, "The Agency of Quotation in Shakespearean Comedy," then surveys such Marlovian "controlling figures" as Portia, Vincentio, Prospero, and Theseus and Oberon: unlike the Plautine slave, "[t]hese figures often come from the aristocracy and bring about the drama's denouement by discovering and controlling information" about "familial or romantic relations" obtained through "disguise and deception" (88). Chapter four, "Quoting the Playhouse in The Tempest," argues "that The Tempest... looks to the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses... for its most salient sources," and "that Caliban derived from Shakespeare's experiences with Will Kemp" (118). Chapter five, "Quotation and Madwomen's Language," turns movingly to the Jailer's Daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen, because her mad bricolage captures "the working r ealities of an early modern playwright" (145). Chapter six, "A Renaissance of Quotation," takes us to Miranda's "New World" itself: during the 1920s and 30s, "FDR's America... would come to quote works from the early modern era, effectively inventing an English Renaissance as necessary prologue to an American one" (11). Bruster's project thus differs from recent ones on the afterlife of Shakespeare because it does nor abandon Shakespeare to the moderns but places him in the originary line of quotation leading to the present. In an afterword, Bruster restates his argument: "[T]hose interested in the relations among books, writers, and the world stand to benefit from seeing books not in isolation but in the context of these books' material sources" (210).

Paradoxically, Bruster seems to think his audience New Historicist (14); he tells us what we need to do (e.g., 38); and he accuses a rather large group of critics of "read[ing] irresponsibly" (50). In chapter two on "The Passionate Shepherd," I miss reference to Diana Henderson's Passion Made Public, while Ovid does not "have his Polyphemus speak directly to the object of his desire" (70). Even though Bruster nicely emphasizes that "lyric and drama become interwoven (86), when he turns back to Shakespeare he sees the controlling Shepherd functioning only in the plays, when the idea also operates in the poems (Venus, Tarquin, the young man from A Lover's Complaint). Readers may wish for the structural center the book seems to require--a set of chapters on "Shakespeare" with close intertextual evidence--but Bruster denies our contentment (171), and perhaps for good reason, since herein lies the real power of his study: it is lucid, persuasive, useful, and important as it stands. Rather than exhausting its v iral topic, Quoting Shakespeare provides timely leadership for it.