Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements

227 Pages·2002·22.11 MB·English

by  Mark David Rasmussen (eds.)

Renaissance Literature
111
and Its Formal Engagements
Renaissance Literature
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and Its Formal Engagements
Edit-ed by
Mark David Rasmussen
palgrave
Permissions
"Veni Coronaberis," from New and Collected Poems 1952-1992. Copyright
© 1994 by Geoffrey HilI. Reprinted by permission of Houghron Mifflin
Co. All rights reserved.
The Kitchenmaid [De keukenmeidj by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy of the
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
"Veni Coronaberis," from Geo./fey Hill: Collected Poems. Copyright © 1978,
1985 by Geoffrey HilI. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.
*
RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND ITS FORMAL ENGAGEMENTS
© Copyright Mark David Rasmussen, 2002
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002978-0-312-29359-8
All rights reserved. No part of
this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever withour
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti
cal articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by
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Companies and representatives throughour the world.
PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC
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Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 978-0-312-29360-4 ISBN 978-1-137-07177-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Renaissance literature and its formal engagements / edited by Mark David
Rasmussen.
p. cm.lncludes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-29360-4 (alk. paper)
I. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-Hisrory and criticism.
2. Renaissance-England. 3. Literary form. I. Rasmussen, Mark
David, 19530
PR418.L57 R48 2002
820.9'003-dc21 2001035954
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: January 2002
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Contents
Introduction: New Formalisms?
Mark David Rasmussen
1.
TOWARD A HISTORICAL FORMALISM
Between Form and Culture: New Historicism
and the Pro mise of a Historical Formalism 17
Stephen Cohen
Shakespeare and the Composite Text 43
Douglas Bruster
The Politics of Aesthetics:
Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem 67
Heather Dubrow
Marston's Gorge and the Question of Formalism 89
Joseph Loewenstein
H.
RENEWlNG THE LITERARY
Learning from the New Criticism:
The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets 115
PaulAlpers
Undelivered Meanings: The Aesthetics of Shakespearean Wordplay 139
Mark Womack
The Poetics of Speech Tags 159
William Flesch
Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter
in a Renaissance Poetry Course 185
Elizabeth Harris Sagaser
Mterword: How Formalism Became
a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't 00 Without It 207
Richard Strier
Contributors 217
Index 219
Introduction
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New Formalisms?
Mark David Rasmussen
T
he aim of this collection is to encourage a shift in the study of Eng
lish Renaissance literature, a shift toward a fuller and more seIf
conseious engagement with questions of form.
Why is such a change needed now? Briefly, because the fieId has moved
too far away ftom these questions lateIy, in favor of modes of analysis that for
all of their methodological sophistication tend to interpret Renaissance works
as bundles of historical or cultural content, without much attention to the
ways that their meanings are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form.
To be sure, something along these lines has been happening in virtually every
area of literary study today, as part of the movement toward cultural studies. 1
But it is a particularly ironic deveIopment in the fieId of Renaissance litera
ture, since over the years that fieId has been so fertile in providing objects of
formalist scrutiny. Indeed, the history of British and American formalisms
during the century just past might almost be written as aseries of responses
to English Renaissance texts. One need only recall T. S. Eliot's championing
of the metaphysical poets, or the centrality of the poetry of Donne and
Shakespeare to the critieism of Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, to rec
ognize the programmatic importance of this body of literature for the brand
of Anglo-American formalism that came to be known as the New Critieism.2
The great batcles between that version of formalism and what is now often
called the "old" historicism were fought over English Renaissance poems, in
the debate between Brooks and Douglas Bush over Marvell's "Horatian
Ode," or in the controversy so engagingly recounted by Richard Strier be
tween Empson and Rosemond Tuve over George Herbert's poem "The Sac
rifice."3 One might eite A. Kent Hieatt's discoveries about numerological
patterning in Spenser's Epithalamion, or Stephen Booth's minute attention to
the linguistic intricaeies of Shakespeare's Sonnets, as two other examples, very
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2 Mark David Rmmussen
different in kind, of the extraordinary responsiveness of previous generations
of critics to the formal properties of the English Renaissance literary text.4
Renaissance studies changed overnight with the publication in 1980 of
Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance SelfFashioning.5 Certainly most work pub
lished in the field since the early eighties has been shaped by its engagement
with Greenblatt's new historicism, whose prominence within Renaissance
studies today is unmatched by any critical method in any other area of
British, American, or comparative literary study. As several analysts of the
new historicism have noted, its successes as a critical method may largely be
attributed to its ability to negotiate the twin pitfalls of a formalist criticism
perceived to be essentially ahistorical, on the one hand, and a politicized
mode of ideology critique perceived to be reductive of textual meanings, on
the other.6 More specific to the thoroughly overdetermined triumph of the
method within Renaissance studies is the often-noted tendency of contem
porary academics to find their own post-modern alienation mirrored in the
anxieties of works produced at the inception of modernity, as those anxieties
find voice in new historicist accounts.7 For our purposes, though, the really
crucial point is that made by Stephen Cohen in his essay for this volume, in
which he demonstrates that new historicist critical analyses were originally
far more oriented than they are today toward questions relating to literary
form and its function within culture. Whether, in Heather Dubrow's witty
formulation, we see in the title of an early new historicist anthology, "The
Forms ofPower and the Power ofForms in the Renaissance," an embrace of
power by forms, or a relegation of forms to the margins, form remains an
unmistakably prominent part of the mix.8 Indeed, much of the early influ
ence of Greenblatt's book was surely due to its providing aseries of breath
taking readings of such canonical works as More's Utopia, Wyatt's lyric
poetry, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Othello-readings not for
malist in their scope, but directed toward the total explication of the literary
text that had also been the goal of the New Critical interpretations with
which they were in dialogue.9 Simply put, Greenblatt's readings often
seemed to do a better job of explaining what was going on within these
works than previous, mainly New Critical, accounts had managed to do, and
so supplanted the authority of those accounts; but both Greenblatt's subse
quent work and that of his followers has set aside such explication as its goal,
in favor of the mining of literature for evidence of cultural practices. This
later version of the new historicism takes Renaissance culture rather than lit
erature as its central concern, dipping only intermittently into the literary
text as one manifestation of that culture among many.lO While the allure of
Greenblatt's early readings was largely responsible for the prestige of new his
toricist method within the academy, and particularly within Renaissance
studies, it is this second version of the new historicism that now dominates
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Introduction 3
published work within the fie!d. Much of this work has been valuable, but
in recent years many have come to fee! that the new historicist paradigm, at
least in its present orientation toward cultural studies, appears to be ex
hausted, its initial excitement now long since cooled.
That is the situation that this volume addresses. The authors of the essays
collected here disagree about many things, but all of them, I think, share a
sense that what is needed within the fie!d today is a renewed commitment
to engaging questions of form. Such asense is increasingly making itse!f feit
throughout the literary academy, in all areas of study.11 Indeed, as Ellen
Rooney has argued in arecent essay, the current "flight from form" serves to
impoverish not just literary studies, but cultural studies as weIl, slighting the
disciplinary specificity of each. 12 As Rooney also maintains, any genuine at
tempt to reinvigorate formalist analysis must work through the theoretical
developments of recent years, rather than bypassing them out of a nostalgia
for formalisms past; if it is to have a legitimate claim on our attention, a re
newal of formalist inquiry must address both the history and the needs of
our present moment.13 Such a freshly theorized formalism might be ex
pected to take two main directions, either inflected toward the
historical/cultural or toward the literary/aesthetic, as the grouping of the es
says in this volume is intended to suggest.
So, all four essays in the volume's opening section, "Toward a Historical
Formalism," share a commitment to a critical practice that at least one con
tributor, Douglas Bruster, be!ieves is already finding its place within the fie!d,
though not yet as a theoretically se!f-conscious movement. If that is so, the
need for some initial reflection upon the aims and methods of such a histori
cized formalism is more than met by the four essays in this section, and es
pecially by Stephen Cohen's opening contribution. As Cohen puts it, his
essay aims to replace the new historicisms "opposition al narrative" of its own
relation to formalist criticism with a "more complex network ofinfluences ac
knowledged and unacknowledged, roads taken, passed by, or abandoned."
So, while most standard accounts of the new historicism stress its indebted
ness to the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and to Michel Foucault's
anatomies of discourse and power, Cohen chooses instead to emphasize the
affinities of much early new historicist work with that of such Marxist diag
nosticians of form and culture as Louis Althusser, Terty Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and (especiaIly) Raymond Williams.14 Yet the influence of these
thinkers has proved far more enduring within the field of cultural studies
than within the new historicism, producing the especially piquant irony of
our present intellectual moment, when, as Cohen observes, cultural critics
perform formalist readings of nonliterary texts and practices, while literary
scholars will themselves not to think about form. Cohen's essay provides,
among other things, the most careful tracing yet to appear in print of the
4 • Mark David Rasmussen
complex splinterings and affiliations between cultural studies and the new
historicism. Ir also in passing effectively refutes an argument frequently made
against formal readings ofRenaissance literature: that since the very notion of
tbe literary is a modern invention, to apply it to early modern texts is
anachronistic. But English Renaissance authors, Cohen reminds us, did have
a word for what we call (or used to call) literature. They called it "poesy."
In the opening section of his essay, Douglas Bruster succinctly defines the
"new formalism" espoused, explicitly or implicitly, by all four essays in tbis sec
tion as "a critical genre dedicated to examining the social, cultural, and histor
ical aspects of literary form, and the function of form for tbose who produce
and consume literary texts." Both in his essay for tbis collection and in his most
recent book, Quoting Shakespeare,. Bruster finds himself intrigued by the role
that source study, and particularly the analysis of verbal borrowing, might play
witbin such a revitalized formalism.15 Source study as a critical practice tends
to be viewed dismissively today, though as Bruster points out tbe new histori
cism might itselfbe regarded as version of such study, witb tbe literary work ex
cavated as a source for tbe text of culture. More to tbe point, tbe analysis of
verbal borrowing takes on new interest in the light of recent post-structuralist
arguments about tbe multiply-determined authorship of Renaissance plays.16
To interpret verbal borrowing as one element of these "composite texts," as
Bruster terms them, is to gain access to rich cultural information embedded in
literary data, a point amply demonstrated by tbe concluding section ofBruster's
essay, which examines an apparent verbal borrowing from Nashe's The Unfor
tunate Traveller found in Shakespeare's Henry V AB Bruster notes, such a bor
rowing would not be likely to tempt the interest of a new historicist critic, nor
would it engage a more traditional scholar drawn to recovering dialogues
among high canonical works. Yet as Bruster's reading shows, a contemporary
scholar operating in a seemingly old-fashioned critical mode, but armed witb
sometbing like a postmodernist sense of textuality, may distill a wealth of social
and cultural detail from tbe words.
As Bruster notes, the scholar most closely associated with the call for a
"new formalism" in Renaissance studies is Heather Dubrow, who first used
the phrase in print in the conclusion to her bookA Happier Eden, published
in 1990.17 Dubrow's essay for this collection is a revised and expanded ver
sion of an article she published in Modern Language Quarterly, as part of a
special issue, "Reading for Form."18 The piece begins by examining some of
the causes, both intellectual and institutional, for the recent hostility toward
questions of form. Like Cohen and Bruster, Dubrow views this animosity as
partly fueled by a reductive account of the various histories of formalist the
ory and practice, from Kant to the present. Her essay goes on to demonstrate
the power of a historicized formalism through aseries of dazzling readings
of tropes in English Renaissance country house poems, showing how these