Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory. (Reviews).

Andy Mousley. Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. viii + 244 pp. $65 (ci), $19.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-312-23173-3 (ci), 0-312-23174-1 (pbk).

This volume functions as a primer of modern literary theory, using bits of Renaissance dramas to demonstrate the implications of reading from various angles; it also builds its own argument about humanism. The argument, unexpected in a primer, is less strong on its own terms than is the generalist survey of major critical schools that it affords.

The argument, in brief, is that anti-humanist theory "performs a kind of estrangement" (217) upon readers which is sometimes but not always useful and productive. Such alienation makes "detached critics of us" (218), but may also short-circuit the affective pleasures of reading literature. Explicit in the Introduction, mostly-implied elsewhere is an apologia of reading as a humanist. The Introduction establishes the bare tenets of humanism, rightly claiming that in other such surveys "humanism is often treated quickly and/or dismissively" (5). Here humanism is given pride of place, ironically so. Conceiving of his readers as undergraduates or perhaps secondary-schoolers, it seems, Mousley begins his tour with simple claims about the motivations of reading Renaissance plays through humanist lenses. For example, we may read to experience "a journey of exploration" (4). The heart of the Introduction, however, is a list of reasons not to read as a humanist might, followed by lucid if also schematic attempts to gl ance at some of the many claims for and against the cadre of theories Mousley calls "anti-humanist."

Several ironies emerge from this ambitious Introduction. One is that the discussion of humanism, against which the book will proceed to develop its presentation of the major schools of modern theory, is simply too short and general. In spite of Mousley's intentions, humanism here seems simple-minded in retrospect, once readers delve into the more challenging chapters that follow. A second irony is that Mousley identifies humanism as a mode of pre-modern criticism, but does not pause to develop its nascent historical roots in sixteenth-century humanist reading and teaching practices.

The structure is straightforward. Successive chapters discuss semiotics, structuralism, post structuralism, psychoanalysis, historicism, feminism, and Marxism. Each theory is unpacked in plain English, meant to be digestible by non-specialists, a challenge Mousley handles well. To illustrate the features and consequences of reading from within each of these schools, he draws on a narrowly-canonical notion of what constitutes "Renaissance drama": Shakespeare is predictably the most frequent exemplar. Plays by Marlowe, Webster, Dekker, and Kyd also feature. Within chapters there is a logic to these choices, but one or two less-relentlessly canonical picks would have been a welcome surprise.

Writing a primer necessarily requires Mousley to move across a big canvas of philosophy and intellectual history, at times swooping down to pluck a salient scene from one of his exemplary dramas. The primer genre demands swift concision, coupled with a relaxed tone, which Mousley achieves throughout. His writing on Hamlet demonstrates the needed sprezzarura. In eight pages we are reminded of the "grammar of tragedy" (59) discussed earlier; acquainted with some consequences of reading Hamlet in structuralist terms as being "precisely about the breakdown of stable meaning" (60); asked to consider how Hamlet pushes structuralism to its limits; and given a glimpse of Sidney's Defence of Poetry, with ideas about Lear to boot.

The book presents its schools of criticism fairly if not capaciously. Sometimes it touches on the limits or weaknesses of a theory; more such skepticism might have helped non-specialists to develop a clearer sense of when -- and when not -- to invoke one or another theoretical stance.

Mousley's own ambivalence toward certain theories is kept at bay until his final sentence. There he hints of wishing to read as a critically-sophisticated neo-humanist. "Language, within neo-humanist stands [sic] of contemporary criticism," he writes, is "an affectively charged experience, and at several removes from the bloodless register of the more technocratic and scientific wings of modern literary theory" (2 18). Yet Mousley has worked diligently to engage us in relevant contemporary theories, bloodless or otherwise.

Such an effort is difficult and worthy. St. Martin's raises the ante by making claims on the book's jacket which, to put it gently, are startlingly big, given what the book is and does. These marketing ploys should not detract from Mousley's solid if not grand effort to help non-specialists engage literary theory and early modern drama.