Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism.

Albert H. Tricomi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. xi + 201 pp. + 7 figs. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8130-1435-2.

Michael F. N. Dixon. The Politicke Courtier: Spenser's The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996. x + 245 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 0-7735-1425-2.

Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism is an extended argument about historicist practice, devoted as much to methodology as to the literary texts it examines. With "cultural historicism" Tricomi suggests a less ambitious but perhaps more sustainable form of new historicism; his study means to reform rather than reject new historicist ways of reading. Following an introductory chapter which describes the limitations of historicist criticism in the 1980s, the book divides its attention between two topics. The first section takes up the theme of surveillance in More's Utopia, in Jonson's and Shakespeare's poetry, and via the figure of the informer in early modern culture. The second section examines the effects of such surveillance as registered upon "the sexual body" in Shakespeare's 'problem plays,'" in what Tricomi calls the Jacobean "problem play," and in The Duchess of Malfi and a less familiar play, Thomas Drue's The Duchess of Suffolk.

In contrast to many essays and books that criticize new historicism, Tricomi's study offers something to take its place. Thus if his critique of new historicist methods is sometimes familiar, it takes on additional authority when he demonstrates ways of reading that address deficiencies in the critical essays of Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, and others. How does Tricomi want to reform new historicism? In place of synchronic readings, he argues for the diachronic and the processual. The emphasis which historicism places on political power and the powerful mastery of texts is one which could benefit, Tricomi suggests, from closer attention to literature's distinctive power to move us (and others before us): "the affectivity of the past is part of our cultural identity; denial of it is a debilitating blindness" (155). Finally, a sensitivity to the potentially arbitrary nature of pars pro toto (or "part for the whole") readings leads Tricomi to read more works, and works from a larger span of time, than is customary with the new historicism. Thus his chapter on Utopia includes references to utopian writings by Campanella, Bacon, and others.

The most impressive sections of this book are those dealing with the late-Elizabethan/early-Jacobean "problem play." What makes Tricomi's remarks especially interesting here is the fact that he refuses to accept this genre as a given. Instead, he explores its roots in the newly-intensified social dialogue concerning sexuality in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, dialogue sparked by such playwrights as Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, and Granville-Barker. Tricomi implies that it was only when societies returned to the questions which had driven bitter plays like Measure for Measure in the first place that they found compelling ways to describe them. Tricomi then expands the idea of problem play to encompass works by Marston and Chapman, and suggests that many other dramatic texts might be defined as "problem plays" too. Readers may not be surprised to hear that English writings became increasingly harsh and misogynistic in the late 1590s, but these remarks are worthwhile in reminding us that Shakespeare's works were not alone in addressing complex social problems.

Among the questions raised by the concept of "cultural historicism" is why one should read literary texts if what one is interested in is culture. Tricomi makes little effort to define "culture," and it is not clear that reading, say, five plays rather than one, or reading plays from over the space of thirty years rather than from a narrower historical window will necessarily give us a better understanding of culture in early modern England. Even if other kinds of cultural production are introduced (as they are, throughout Tricomi's study), it remains doubtful that "readings" of parts are the best way to begin to understand a whole. A related question which this book raises is whether it is possible for a work to be, for all intents and purposes, culturally irrelevant; whether a work like Shakespeare's Sonnets, for example, might - with its personal idiosyncracies and intensive formal play - be better understood through other interpretative languages. If everything is cultural, one might ask, does that not diminish what the word can mean for us?

The word "courtier" in the title of Michael Dixon's study asks for immediate qualification. For Dixon argues not that Spenser is best understood in relation to Elizabethan court circles, but that The Faerie Queene can be profitably read through Kenneth Burke's concept of rhetorical "courtship." Burke elaborated his theory of such courtship in A Rhetoric of Motives, calling on Castiglione in defining courtship as "the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social estrangement" (qtd., 10). To Dixon, as to Burke, such estrangement occurs on existential, erotic, and political levels, and is that which works like Spenser's epic are designed, literally, to overcome. The foundational idea or property in this process of courtship is "justice" - a quantity, Dixon argues, for and with which Spenser transforms The Faerie Queene from "a catalogue of mutually independent virtues" to "an iterative series of interdependent virtues ... indeed, a 'grammar of virtues'" (13).

As the preceding summary intimates, Dixon emphasizes the structural rather than ornamental aspects of rhetoric. Taking narrative as a mode of proof, Dixon reads The Faerie Queene in terms of sequence; the position of events and descriptions in the work compellingly determine their meaning. Thus the later books and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie are read not as the diminished, fragmentary remainder of a more powerful beginning, but as something like the summation of a well-crafted speech on the Ciceronian model: The Faerie Queene as an oration pro jure. Much of this reading is attendant on the conviction that "by the time he began work on Book IV, possibly already in Book III, Spenser's shift from a catalogue to a grammar of virtues was in place, and that "justice," the subject of Book V, informed topoi determining both the direction of shift and a syntax of interdependency among the virtues preceding and succeeding it in the narrative sequence" (13). Likewise, reading The Faerie Queene as escalating process leads Dixon to see Britomart as a more complex and enduring surrogate "quester" for the reader than is Redcrosse, and to link Britomart's demonstrative function in Book V with similar functions in Books III and IV.

The last half of Dixon's study stresses the role of Artegall and Calidore in foregrounding the public nature of virtues that only appear to be privately inflected; this section of the book also outlines continuities between Mount Acidale and Arlo Hill, where Spenser is present "in the posture of Mutabilitie's judge" (194). Dixon's privileging of justice here dovetails nicely with the research of Elizabeth Fowler, who, in "The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser" (Representations 51 [1995], 47-76), similarly emphasizes the later books and Cantos. Where Dixon is concerned with the rhetorical process by which justice becomes central to The Faerie Queene - in a word, with justice's form - Fowler is interested in the content of such justice. Her essay gives us a useful sense of what was (and is) at stake, in relation to justice, for Spenser's readers, and for those affected by English colonialism.

The Politicke Courtier advances an intriguing argument for reading The Faerie Queene rhetorically, and for using rhetorical theory to re-evaluate the second half of Spenser's epic - especially as it focuses on justice. Readers unaccustomed to rhetorical terminology may initially be put off by the sometimes dense deployment of terms like "inventio," "dispositio," and "enthymeme" - especially when several of such terms are yoked together in a single phrase or sentence. And readers used to seeing The Faerie Queene as a loose collection of stories whose divergent themes and incidents resist the shaping desires of either the prefatory letter or the epilogical Cantos may themselves resist Dixon's belief that Spenser both intended to structure his epic in this way and succeeded in that intention. The end may crown all, but whether a works conclusion can so effectively transform prior elements - especially when such a work is likely to be read, and has been read, in parts - is open to debate. By opening such a debate, however, Dixon's book does Spenser studies a service.

DOUGLAS BRUSTER University of Texas at San Antonio