The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern Literature.

David M. Posner, The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 33.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 272 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-66181-1.

The Performance of Nobility offers thoughtful, learned, and persuasive readings of four major writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, three of them French (Montaigne, Corneille, and La Bruyere), one English (Francis Bacon). All four, David M. Posner argues, were deeply preoccupied with problems of theatricality and disguise. In the upper reaches of early modern society, men (the book accords women only marginal attention) needed to wear masks in order to function effectively; several of his texts (he shows) go so far as to raise doubts about the existence of real selves beneath the masks. Posner's authors meditate on these facts and often deplore them, but they also (as some of the book's most effective passages demonstrate) reenact the problem in their own writings. Texts that open with conventional complaints about dishonesty slide treacherously into manipulating their readers with theatrical trickery, leaving us uncomfortably convinced that deception and seduction help society more than they harm it.

The book appears in a series devoted to encouraging "a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history," and Posner offers a suitably historical explanation for his authors' preoccupations and techniques. All four, he argues, wrote as members of court societies, and they were intensely concerned with the nobility's fate within such settings; their interest in theatricality and identity directly reflected the courtier's unending need to act before an unforgiving audience of his/her fellows. Hence a trajectory of deepening pessimism as the early modern period advanced. Absolute monarchs left steadily less room for the nobility's favored roles, and increasingly defined what those roles might be. The four writers thus embody "a progressive revealing of the impossibility of sustaining the discourse of nobility" (208). The nobiliar literary tradition would end with the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth concern with theatrical role-playing would give way to novelistic character development.

To an historian, the book's arguments for setting its literary texts so firmly within the contexts of court and nobiliar crisis form its weakest parts -- and seem to illustrate as well some differences that continue to divide the disciplines, despite a full generation of New Historicist reflection and research. Posner focusses almost exclusively on works of generally-recognized literary greatness, and bluntly concludes that the few minor literary works he examines "hardly require any sophisticated theoretico-interpretive intervention in order to be shown for what they are" (21); non-literary texts receive no attention whatsoever. He thus denies himself some of the most effective tools that literary critics and historians have employed in recent years, and must rely instead on visceral responses to the texts, unguided by comparison with other early modern writers: a passage in Montaigne, for instance, "has a strangely hollow ring to it," an "oddly dogmatic tone," and "gives one the sense" that cliches are bei ng insincerely offered (38). Similarly, Posner stresses the need to know "who is reading [Bacon's] Essayes, and why" (83), but quickly shifts to the rather different claim that they "are intended for a specific audience" (84); he backs up even that claim only with evidence from the text, and never addresses the now-immense literature on early modern reading publics.

Questions like these have substantive implications for Posner's argument that nobiliar crisis shaped his authors' thinking. Corneille (to take an extreme example) was no noble, nor even a courtier-artist like Racine and Velazquez. He was a middle-class, provincial urbanite, who wrote for big commercial theaters and proudly noted his successes in them. His plays teem with aristocratic courtiers, and may have reflected the real anxieties of real aristocrats; but they cannot have done so in any simple way, and they must have reflected others' anxieties as well. The court after all could serve as a helpful image for imagining many circumstances of early modern life, including (as Jean-Christophe Agnew showed some years ago) the anxiety-filled marketplace itself. Presumably this was one reason that these and similar texts retained such literary influence in the bourgeois Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Performance of Nobility fails to pursue its historical arguments very far, but it remains a fine study of literary texts. Posner's interpretations are usually convincing and always interesting; and his efforts to link his authors' arguments to their rhetorical strategies offer a model for thinking about early modern writing.