Reading Between the Lines.

In these challenging and controversial essays, Annabel Patterson engages critically with some key areas of current debate in the humanities, from literary to legal studies. Patterson resists what she regards as false oppositions which we are often asked to make: between the traditional canon and popular culture, between theory and close reading, between "old" and "new" modes of historicism. And she argues that the early modern writers on whom she concentrates already faced problems we can recognize today, in ways that we can still learn from. Patterson offers sharp observations on the political obfuscations of some contemporary commentators, from Allen Bloom to certain deconstructive critics. But she also continually startles us by finding the raw edge of modern debates in a wide range of apparently familiar early modern texts.

A fascinating chapter demonumentalizes Holinshed's Chronicles and reveals the volume's openness to politically critical elements of popular culture. Patterson brings out the political complexities of that neglected but highly important cultural form, the petition, showing how Shakespeare's plays articulate a wider social pressure for the petition to be seen as claiming political rights rather than begging for graces from above. The book's canonical authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, are related to the wider ferment of political debate and opposition. Patterson sharply challenges some current feminist readings of The Rape of Lucrece by bringing out the poem's neglected republican elements; her argument that "'class' divides us more incisively than 'gender'" will certainly arouse controversy. A chapter on Donne fruitfully develops a continuing engagement with ambiguities in that poet's apparently absolutist politics. While skeptical about the extent of Milton's early radicalism, Patterson offers a persuasive account of the continuing radicalism of his later poetry via an engagement with theories of the sublime.

Patterson's title signals a hermeneutical strategy of refusing to take monarchist rhetoric at face value, acknowledging that these writers were working under the pressure of censorship. Generally this is an illuminating approach; but there are occasions when one may feel that it is at odds with her unfashionable and salutary belief in the need to respect what can be determined about authorial intention. Her alertness to indeterminacies is so acute that it becomes hard to imagine how any writer in the early modern period could not by this method be transformed into a liberal humanist. Patterson rightly resists facile charges of anachronism: one of her most important points is that recent forms of historicism have exaggerated the differences between some forms of early modern discourse and our own.

All the same, the emphasis on Spenser's ambivalence towards hard-line policies in Ireland, while a welcome corrective to some oversimplified accounts, can seem to verge on the apologetic. And when Patterson declares that "it is a mistake to believe he was comfortable with this final solution," which he nonetheless endorsed, she does not seem to recognize that this version ("genocide is going to hurt me more than it hurts the Irish") may ultimately seem rather more damaging to Spenser than the conventional account. Nonetheless, here as elsewhere Patterson combines a formidable breadth of reference with sharp-eyed attentiveness to textual detail; the book involves the reader in that process of politically critical debate which is at once its object and its method.

David Norbrook MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD