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History in Literature: The Renaissance Theatre

and Crisis, 1632–1642. By Martin Butler.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Pp. xii + 340. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology,
and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries. By Jonathan Dollimore.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp.
viii + 312. James I and the Politics of Literature:
Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their
Contemporaries. By Jonathan Goldberg.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Pp. xx + 292. Literature and the Discovery of
Method in the English Renaissance. By Patrick
Grant. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Pp. x + 188. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From
More to Shakespeare. By Stephen Greenblatt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Pp. x
+ 322. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton
and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts.
By Margot Heinemann. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980. Pp. x + 300.
Shakespeare's History. By Graham Holderness.
Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985. Pp. xii + 243.
Society and History in English Renaissance
Verse.fromBy
Downloaded Lauro Martines.
http://journals.cambridge.org/JBR, Oxford:
IP address: 128.122.253.228Basil
on 29 May 2015

Blackwell, 1985. Pp. viii + 191. Censorship and

Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and
REVIEWS 107

281-82). Yet Burke did this as a response to perceived attacks on a

"liberal commercial society," which he wished very much to preserve
(pp. 209, 280-82). For this reason, Pocock urges, we need to approach
problems in the intellectual history of the late Enlightenment ever
mindful of how the linguistic field of that period was changing.
Of the three arguments discussed in this review, the first and third
are the most important. For taken together they compel us to recon-
sider the way that religious and economic modes of thought and value
interacted in eighteenth-century thought, especially among Protes-
tants, who, as Pocock notes, were still in the process of dealing with
the "inner dynamics" of their own religious beliefs (p. 250). Indeed,
Virtue, Commerce, and History shows why Christianity remains a
problem for Enlightenment scholarship. Moreover, it shows why the
"Weber thesis" may still be of value to scholars who, in Pococks
words, operate "on the assumption that what people claim to be doing
and how they justify it is just as revealing as what they finally d o " (p.
218). At the same time, however, Virtue, Commerce, and History pro-
duces evidence that shows, again in Pocock's words, just where
"Marxist language can be employed with validity" to the study of
eighteenth-century thought (p. 44). Though Pocock certainly did not
intend the book to be read this way, the worklike character of the text
that Pocock has given us suggests that the languages discussed in it
"cluster" more or less in the way I outlined in this review. It is that
aspect of Virtue, Commerce, and History, which Pocock would call its
"performative" aspect, that has been applauded here.

LARRY DICKEY
Columbia University

History in Literature: The Renaissance

Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642. By MARTIN BUTLER. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 340.

Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shake-

speare and His Contemporaries. By JONATHAN DOLLIMORE. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. viii + 312.

James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and

Their Contemporaries. By JONATHAN GOLDBERG. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983. Pp. xx + 292.
108 REVIEWS

Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance. By

PATRICK GRANT. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Pp.
x+188.
Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. By STEPHEN
GREENBLATT. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Pp.
x + 322.
Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama
under the Early Stuarts. By MARGOT HEINEMANN. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1980. Pp. x + 300.

Shakespeare's History. By GRAHAM HOLDERNESS. Dublin: Gill & Mac-

millan, 1985. Pp. xii + 243.

Society and History in English Renaissance Verse. By LAURO MARTINES.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Pp. viii + 191.
Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading
in Early Modern England. By ANNABEL PATTERSON. Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Pp. x + 283.

Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular

Literature. By LAURA CAROLINE STEVENSON. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 252.

From its outset, the Renaissance was a historiographic movement.

It taught not only a reverence for antiquity but also a sense of history.
To make proper use of ancient learning, humanism required it to be
known concretely and in the original, which meant not only exploring
the particularities of the past, especially of style and language, but also
recognizing its differences from the present. This awareness of histor-
ical distance was the foundation of Renaissance learning; it lay beneath
the very concept of rebirth on which the writers and artists of the
period grounded their work.' The current interest among literary schol-
ars in the historicity of Renaissance literature represents a return of
this sensibility. But just as earlier humanists modified and adapted the
ideas of the ancients as they sought to restore them, so present-day
critics and students have transformed the historiographic perspective
of the Renaissance as they have brought it back to life.
The impulse behind the recent emphasis on history in Renaissance
literary studies is not hard to discover. It arises in response to the sway
so long held among literary critics by formalism, structuralism, and
1
See Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language,
Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), pp. 19-50.
REVIEWS 109

what is called poststructuralism. These approaches focus on literary

works as autonomous objects of interpretation, in which the text is
construed to have a life of its own, apart from the conditions of its
production. Author, audience, and milieu mean little. In recent years,
this line has been taken up most prominently by the proponents of
deconstruction, for whom texts are always open, indefinite, and inde-
terminate and therefore in constant play with other texts and with the
ideological presuppositions and discursive practices of their critics and
audiences. As a result, they are subject to constant change in presenta-
tion, reproduction, and interpretation, as they fit first into one and then
another discourse. On this view, literary criticism concerns itself with
exposing the ideological import of various readings of particular texts,
insisting that none—not even those of the authors or their intended
audiences—is inherently privileged as the true interpretation. Criti-
cism, then, becomes a form of ideological politics, in which attention
shifts from the text to the social ideas the critic deplores or advocates.
The thrust of such recent literary scholarship has been to counter
the most extremely ahistorical versions of this view by stressing that
literature is a cultural creation tied to specific historical contexts, social
and intellectual. But in doing so, the critics have borrowed heavily
from those they criticize, and much of the recent outpouring of books
and articles represents an effort to historicize the insights of structural-
ist and poststructuralist criticism. The result is a historiography that
bears little relation to the work of Renaissance historical writers,
whose methods centered on documents and whose attention focused
on change. Even to contemporary historians, who are much concerned
with structures, paradigms, and mentalities, the effect may be some-
what eerie since present-day literary critics tend to overburden their
writing with commentary on what has been called Grand Theory, a
practice that gives their books and articles a highly abstract and some-
what disembodied quality. 2

I
The historical study of literature has always presented a special
problem of method. It is the problem of context. To which realms of
human life and thought should literature be related? In the past, the
history of literature itself provided the context. Historical inquiry
sought out a literary work's roots by tracing the various influences that
shaped its form and content. This kind of literary history was a branch
of the history of ideas, which connected particular works to the various
schools of thought that supplied their backgrounds. We see few exam-

2
Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cam-
bridge, 1985).
110 REVIEWS

pies of such scholarship these days, although Patrick Grant's new

book, Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renais-
sance, falls into this category. Sometimes this type of historical study
is subject to what Marc Bloch described as the "idol of origins," which
explains "the very recent in terms of the remotest past." 3 But this
pitfall, successfully sidestepped by Grant, is easier to avoid than the
other major shortcoming of old-fashioned literary history, namely, its
tendency to become "tunnel history." According to J. H. Hexter, who
invented the term, this kind of history treats its subjects in self-
contained compartments, never considering the possible relations
among them. Obviously, such learning has come to us precisely be-
cause historians in the past have been so single-minded in their studies.
But to view politics, law, economics, religion, or literature only in this
fashion is to preordain the explanations we can offer. If political events
can have only political causes, we can account for literary works only
in literary terms. There is no room for literature in politics or politics in
literature. The result is a highly artificial taxonomy of human endeavor,
not a living history of thought and action.4
If we are to escape from the limiting confines of the tunnel, how-
ever, we must confront a number of methodological puzzles. In his
new book, Society and History in English Renaissance Verse, Lauro
Martines has faced some of the most difficult ones with admirable
equanimity. Martines comes to his subject from a career largely con-
cerned with the social and intellectual history of the Renaissance Ita-
lian city-states. Nevertheless, he knows English Renaissance poetry
well, and he has thoroughly familiarized himself with the recent litera-
ture devoted to its criticism. His aim is to establish a historical ap-
proach to literary analysis that can "hurdle the gap between poem and
social world" (p. vii) and thus "to use the light of social and historical
analysis to find the traces of society in poetry, and to use social literary
analysis to bring the light of poetry to the mysteries of the historical
world" (p. 4). He does so by setting forth and then expounding on and
making operational a series of theoretical points concerned with seeing
literature "as action in the world" (p. 9) of a distinctive and especially
revelatory type. But his model, as intelligently worked out as it is,
manifests the inherent difficulties of the enterprise. As much as Mar-
tines tries to see literature as having "the same ontological status as
other social events in the world" (p. 20), his language will not permit
him to do so. The world—"the real world outside," he says in one
place (p. 20)—stands distinct from literature by definition. The former
refers to "historical and social setting . . . for example: reading audi-
ences, patronage, politics, milieu, religious matters, and social
groups"; and the latter refers to particular works and their parts: "dic-

3
Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, 1961), p. 29.
4
J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early
Modern Europe, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1979), pp. 258-59.
REVIEWS 111

tion, figurative language, tone, generic conventions, and rhetorical or

semiotic features" (p. vii). As a result, there is an immediate problem
of reference—of how "reliably" literature reveals its milieu, as Mar-
tines says (p. 11). But if literary works are themselves forms of social
expression and action, can we ever say that they unreliably reveal their
milieu? Certainly, they can each reveal it in greater or less detail or in
different ways requiring special techniques of analysis and interpreta-
tion. But they cannot reveal it more or less accurately, any more than
field glasses or the slow-motion camera reveal a great blue heron to our
view more accurately than does the naked eye.
Even in imaginatively transforming the world, literature necessar-
ily remains part of it through language. For we use language to com-
pose the world, to draw ourselves into relations with other minds and
other things. This means that knowledge of our social milieu comes to
us in an already interpreted form. In consequence, we do not have a
fixed social reality against which to evaluate the contribution literature
makes to our historical understanding, as Martines himself says (p. 3).
We cannot, then, connect our world to our literature or our literature to
our world but must think that literature gives us access to social milieus
that ordinarily are not examined by the techniques of conventional
social history. It lets us enter the world of epistemological and
metaphysical presuppositions, moral and aesthetical values, and inter-
connected norms and meanings that condition social action. Martines
makes this point but does not seem able to let it fully inform his under-
standing. With his emphasis on the connections between literature and
history, he seems trapped in a post-Renaissance epistemology that
tests truth according to facts deemed independent of our methods of
discovering them. This is not the place to subject his stance to lengthy
philosophical scrutiny.5 Rather, it seems enough to say that Martines
has not yet completely assimilated his own very sensible methodologi-
cal lessons. His sort of social literary analysis demands a clean break
from the most deeply held convictions of old-fashioned empiricist his-
toriography, or it must founder on the rocky shores of reference and
representation. For to reveal the mysteries of the historical world
through poetry we have to abandon the notion that we can pursue truth
from the privileged position of verifiable knowledge and accept that we
need to interpret meanings from necessarily skewed and incomplete
points of view.

II
Martines eschews using the word "ideology," but his approach
turns on a distinctly ideological conception of human knowledge. In
5
I have offered some thoughts on the underlying issues in David Harris Sacks, "The
Hedgehog and the Fox Revisited," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1985): 267-
80.
112 REVIEWS

one form or another, the notion of ideology also provides the founda-
tion for much of what is current in the historical study of literature. As
a term of art, "ideology" has been with us a long time, but it entered
into recent Renaissance literary studies very much in the wake of
Stephen Greenblatt's enormously creative contributions to the field.
Virtually all the major themes of what has come to be called the "new
historicism" were taken up in his Renaissance Self-fashioning—social
codes, cultural systems and discourse, structures of class and of
power, and the dissolution of the "sharp distinction between literature
and social life" (p. 3).6 This book, ostensibly about the manner in
which English writers gave voice to the power of individuals to shape
their own lives, turned out to be concerned even more with the ways
individual identities and "cultural institutions—family, religion,
state—were inseparably intertwined." There were "no moments of
pure, unfettered subjectivity." Instead, he says, the human subject
itself appeared "remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the rela-
tions of power in a particular society. . . . If there remained traces of
free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was
strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force" (p.
256). The emphasis is on the last phrase—"in force."
The idea of a controlling ideological system colors the thinking of
most of the authors treated here. In Praise and Paradox, Laura
Stevenson, another scholar interested in literature whose training is in
the discipline of history, develops a notion of ideology as a form of
"false consciousness," though she never uses this term and probably
never would. "Social fact," she says, "changes more quickly than
vocabulary and ideology, and so men frequently find themselves de-
scribing observations of the present in the rhetoric of the past" (p. 6).
Hence the Elizabethans could treat the new importance of men of trade
and industry only in language appropriate to knights and gentlemen.
"Before men abandon old paradigms," she argues, "and develop new
ones that accurately describe what they observe, they strain the rhetor-
ical concepts to the snapping point in an attempt to deny the possible
ramifications of what they see." This produces a paradox or, as we
might say, an oxymoron, symbolized by such popular literary types as
"the gentle craftsman" (pp. 6-7). Unfortunately, there is much that is
muddled here. The paradoxical character of the gentle craftsmen and
his fellows is apparent only retrospectively because we conceive of
gentility and craftsmanship as each belonging to separate social and
moral realms. But it is presumptuous to impose our vision of the social
order as the model against which to judge the accuracy or inaccuracy
of past paradigms. We should ask, rather, what Elizabethans might
6
The term "new historicism" is Greenblatt's (Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to
"Special Issue: The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,"
Genre 15, nos. 1-2 [1982]: 5).
REVIEWS 113

have meant by linking aristocratic concepts like gentility to economic

activities like trade and manufacture.
Implicit, and unexamined, in Stevenson's approach is a distinction
among the residual, dominant, and emergent aspects of culture. These
are terms that derive from the "cultural materialism" of Raymond
Williams and that find prominence in much Marxist literary criticism,
such as the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Graham Holderness.7
They stress the complex and sometimes contradictory quality of cul-
ture and what Holderness, in Shakespeare's History, identifies as its
progressive nature, its tendency to point in the direction of change
even as it seeks to dominate and control it. Stevenson no doubt would
be appalled by the company in which I have just placed her. She
presents herself as adamantly anti-Marxist, but her approach suffers
from the same whiggish and deterministic character as theirs. Where
they see the dominant Elizabethan ideology of order caught up in the
history of capitalism, at once resisting and contributing to its inevitable
triumph, she sees it as "completely at odds" with its spirit, the source
of a "laughable unreality" in social description, and therefore doomed
to disappear (p. 210).
This is hardly the place to review the contribution of literature to
the rise of capitalism, but something needs to be said about social class
since the idea of class plays such an important role in the concept of
ideology. Stevenson's book again offers us a useful way to enter into
the problem, for she carries the idea with her even as she seeks to deny
its relevance. The "paradox" of her title follows from her insistence on
the social blindness of the Elizabethans. The prevailing language of
their era, she argues, prevented them even from considering what ef-
fect the emergence of a new "social group," possessed of "capi-
talistic" values, "might have on accepted social ideology." The ideol-
ogy belongs to one form of social structure and the new group to
another (p. 210). But Elizabethans did not identify themselves in terms
of class if by this we mean a group marked by its economic interests or
its relations to the means of production. In consequence, their social
ideologies are not economic in character. Rather, they drew political
and moral distinctions, dividing the population according to those who
bore rule and those who did not and valuing individuals and groups
according to their contributions to the commonwealth. Hence the
popular literature of which Stevenson speaks offers no paradox, pre-
cisely because it depicts not a system of social stratification but a polity
of ranks and orders in which it is possible even for the lowborn to
display virtues that make for a good society. This is not to say that
these works contain no criticism of prevailing social views. But it is
well to keep in mind a larger point, namely, that the literature of com-

7
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 121-27.
114 REVIEWS

monwealth concerned itself primarily with the ways each group pro-
moted the welfare of the whole by due regard to its proper social
function.
A similar point might be made to Marxist critics. For although
scholars like Holderness and Dollimore recognize the political charac-
ter of ideology, its role in "understanding society and making choices"
(Holderness, p. 147), they do so from a class-oriented conception of
the social order. Holderness, for example, not only argues that Shake-
speare recognized significant cultural differences between England's
medieval past and his own day, a point I found interesting and persua-
sive, but also insists that he recorded the existence of a distinctively
feudal stage of English history. In consequence, Holderness calls these
plays, anachronistically, "chronicles of feudalism" (pp. 40-144). But
far from showing Shakespeare as a student of social formations, as the
argument requires, Holderness convinces us that the playwright was
an explorer of polities, concerned with systems of governance and
patterns of rule, not with structures of class and their attendant super-
structures of power. The risk in Holderness's work, and in Dollimore's
as well, is that, in collapsing politics into society, the autonomous
importance of the former will be missed. For the great debate in Re-
naissance England was about who should govern, not about who
should own. Politics received priority, not property.

Ill
It would be unfair, however, to suggest that literary scholars have
been neglecting the perspective of politics in their work. Not only do
the students of "cultural materialism" focus heavily on it, if only as an
epiphenomenon of more fundamental social processes, but so do the
practitioners of the "new historicism." Greenblatt, in the essay in
which he introduced the term "new historicism," gave this approach
its agenda by viewing literary works "as fields of force, places of
dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox
and subversive impulses." 8 The study of literature, then, reveals a
dialogue between what Greenblatt identifies as "subversion," or chal-
lenges to the principles on which authority is founded, and what he
calls "containment," the process by which subversion is held in check
and sometimes even appropriated to the consolidation of existing re-
gimes.9 These are preeminently political processes. They place the

8
Greenblatt, introduction, p. 6.
9
Ibid., p. 4; Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance and Its Subver-
sion," Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61, reprinted in revised form in Political Shakespeare: New
Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1985), pp. 18-47; see also Jonathan Dollimore, "Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural
Materialism and the New Historicism," in ibid., pp. 10-15.
REVIEWS 115

state at the center of attention and stress the ideological and cultural
supports on which its perpetuation depends. Not surprisingly, this type
of cultural analysis has led scholars to those forms of art in which, in
Dollimore's words, "state and culture most visibly merge." 10
We can see the focus on subversion in Dollimore's Radical
Tragedy, which offers extremely interesting readings of plays by John
Chapman, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John
Marston, William Shakespeare, Cyril Tourneur, and John Webster, all
in aid of "decentering man" and undermining what Dollimore
identifies as "essentialist humanism," the belief in a universal human
nature. His strategy is to see these writers as contributing to an alterna-
tive view of man, one that "shifts attention from individuals to their
context and above all to a dominating power structure which con-
structs them as either agents or victims of power, or both" (p. 231). I
have already said something about the proleptic character of Dolli-
more's Marxism, its tendency to see the course of history encapsulated
in the residual, dominant, and emergent ideologies present at a given
moment. Here I would add only that it is difficult to see each of the
writers he treats as subversive in the same fashion or to the same ends.
In Radical Tragedy, we read of literary works that display considerable
uncertainty about, and even disagreement with, prevailing social and
political assumptions, but they can be construed as part of a movement
only at the highest level of abstraction, in a battle between materialism
and idealism. But to argue in this fashion is once again to remove
criticism from the realm of history, for, despite Dollimore's claims to
the contrary, these are terms in a transhistorical debate among theo-
rists and philosophers, not time-bound expressions of events and de-
velopments.
The theory of subversion and containment implies that a dominant
ideology leaves conceptual space for only a few discursive pos-
sibilities; it limits at the same time as it authorizes. Jonathan Gold-
berg's James I and the Politics of Literature explores this idea from the
perspective of containment. He sets out to examine "the relationship
between authority and its representations in the Jacobean period" on
the basis of an "underlying thesis . . . that language and politics—
broadly construed—are mutually constitutive." "Language" here
subsumes "writing, discourse, literature and presentation," while
"politics" refers "to those social processes in which relationships of
power are conveyed" (p. xi). Not surprisingly, then, we find consider-
able attention given to the masque, the state portrait, and the king's
own writings, along with what we would identify as more conventional
forms of literature. Indeed, it is a hallmark of this kind of scholarship
that it devotes itself not only to the study of public performances, such

1
Dollimore, "Introduction," p. 3.
116 REVIEWS

as the masque and the drama, but also to the nonliterary arts, such as
painting and sculpture, and to nonliterary texts, such as polemics and
treatises. The goal is to establish the "ideological conjunction," the
"ruling images," of the day. In this instance, the ruling images, Gold-
berg argues, were themselves "images of rule" (p. 240), derived from
the king's well-developed theory of monarchy and from his character-
istic way of presenting himself to the public. But the resulting ideology
itself controlled the king by subjecting him to the subversive and con-
tradictory complexities of representation at the same time as he im-
posed his vision on the state.
There is something curiously circular here. Again language and
politics collapse together. "Writing represents authority," Goldberg
says; "however, representation is not simply the transcription of
power into other terms. The real requires realization; representation,
understood in its full complexity—both as restatement and as recast-
ing, replacing representation—realizes power. This is as true for poets
as for kings, and as true in explicitly political writing as in other forms
of discourse" (p. xi). Ever since J. L. Austin analyzed for us how to do
things with words, it has been easy to think of individual statements as
"performative utterances" and to conceive of discourse in general as a
type of behavior.11 But Goldberg's approach reverses the process,
making actions into forms of discourse. A good deal can be learned in
this way, especially in regard to the highly ritualized performances
characteristic of Renaissance elites. Kings and courtiers in this era
commonly fashioned themselves according to roles scripted for them
by prevailing norms and practices. Their lives, therefore, can
profitably be interpreted according to "a poetics of culture," to use
Stephen Greenblatt's intriguing phrase. But in doing so, one risks let-
ting talk become a substitute for other forms of action. From here it is
easy to misconstrue the nature of power, thinking of it primarily as
discursive practice and downplaying, or even trivializing, its depen-
dence on coercive violence. "Public dismemberment," Goldberg says,
such as the losing of one's hand for publishing offensive material or the
losing of one's head for treason, "was one way in which the power of
the monarch was displayed, inscribing itself on the body of the con-
demned. Those brought to trial and punishment became emblems of
power, and their broken bodies testified to the overwhelming truth
represented by the [monarch]" (p. 2). The words "displaying," "emb-
lems," "inscribing," and "testified" miss the mark, in ways once
criticized by George Orwell.12 Public executions may have given a

" J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Cambridge,

Mass., 1962).
12
See, e.g., George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (London, 1949), and "Politics and
the English Language," in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, vol. 4 of The Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New
York, 1968), pp. 127-40.
REVIEWS 117

fearful warning to those who witnessed them or learned of them. In

that fashion they served as a coercive message to all who might
threaten established authority. But from the perspective of the man
who had lost his hand, dismemberment was a crippling reality that
must have meant suffering and incapacitation to the end of his days.
From the point of view of the dismembered traitor, coercion was no
longer necessary. The threat he posed was cut off with his head. It is
tempting, therefore, to respond to Goldberg by reminding him of a
famous nominalist text:

Sticks and stones can break my bones,

But names can never harm me.

IV
Precisely because the power of discourse depends ultimately on
the exercise of force, it is well that students of literary history, like
Marlines, Goldberg, Dollimore, and Margot Heinemann, have devoted
attention to censorship. For here we have an expression of power,
affecting both thought and action, that goes beyond a mere form of
words. In her wide-ranging and stimulating Censorship and Interpreta-
tion, Annabel Patterson has sought to explore the literary and histor-
ical significance of this aspect of Renaissance politics in England. Her
larger aim is to challenge poststructuralist theories and critical prac-
tices, which she sees as "a new form of censorship," one that depre-
cates "the role of the intellectual in the national and international
consciousness" and that discards "the time-honored tradition of litera-
ture as a privileged medium by which matters of grave public concern
could be debated" (p. 23). She begins by arguing for the existence of
what she calls a "repressive culture," conditioned by the overt censor-
ship practiced by the state. The threat of suppression and punishment
led writers to mask the full force of their messages and therefore re-
quired readers to comprehend these works in light of their hidden
meanings, which in turn were tolerated by the censors. Hence "the
prevailing codes of communication" were the result of an "implicit
social contract between authors and authorities . . . intelligible to all
parties at the time, . . . a fully deliberate and conscious arrangement."
The indeterminacy of Renaissance texts, then, arises from authorial
intention and could be "knowingly exploited by authors and readers
alike" in an agreed on "hermeneutics of censorship" (pp. 17-18).
There are a number of puzzles inherent in this approach. First,
censorship in the Renaissance, as Patterson shows, normally focused
on particular issues touching the honor, authority, or policy of the
crown. The strategies used to avoid punishment, then, also tended to
center on these same particular issues, commenting on them in ways
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that made the criticism tolerable to the authorities. Literary analysis

that stresses censorship, then, necessarily focuses on topical refer-
ences, on the ways in which specific pieces of a given text touch
specific events contemporaneous with its publication. Such an ap-
proach, however, can diminish both text and history by wrenching the
passage and the event from context and by focusing on matters some-
times of only passing interest or importance. It can also lead to consid-
erable difficulties of interpretation since the appropriate context is not
always certain. Different members of an audience can supply different
contexts, some of which may be different again from those the author
intended.
Second, the idea of a "repressive culture" is fraught with
difficulties. It is far from clear, for example, whether the repression
results from the practice of censorship or is a more generalized charac-
teristic of the age. The English elite of the Elizabethan and early Stuart
era lived in a court society, dominated by issues of status and honor.
To communicate within its ambit required deference to superiors, elo-
quence in discourse, and prudence in policy lest one offend those
whom one wished to persuade. Survival in this kind of environment
demanded a courtesy, a new personal self-discipline that we might call
repressive in the modern, psychological sense. But it would be wrong
to think of this restraint of the self as the consequence of repression in
the political sense. We all know of the chilling effect that can be pro-
duced by aggressive state scrutiny of expression. But if a courtier made
his case through analogy or through obscure historical reference, he
need not thereby have been seeking protection against punishment;
instead he may have been using the most effective means to win the
agreement of his superiors. In Patterson's account, the "hermeneutics
of censorship" requires that texts be double-sided, open to safe public
readings and critical private ones. But to whom are the second readings
addressed if not to the very persons who might do the censoring?
Patterson herself unearths many instances in which the author found
ways to make his "message acceptable to those whose actions it would
influence" (p. 79). But calling such texts "censored" would seem to
stretch the meaning of the word beyond utility.
But the great problem with Patterson's approach is that censorship
is not a stable historical category. Its character changes not only ac-
cording to how much value is placed on intellectual freedom but also in
keeping with the available means of communication and its suppres-
sion. The advent of printing enhanced the power of publication, mak-
ing the possibility of free expression all the more important to thinkers
and writers and all the more dangerous to public authorities. But by
concentrating publication in the hands of skilled printers, the invention
of movable type at first made censorship subject to efficient centraliza-
tion, well within the administrative capacities of the Renaissance state.
Later, as printing became commonplace, this advantage was lost, and
REVIEWS 119

the possibilities of effective regulation by Renaissance princes and

their officials were dramatically diminished. Moreover, the agents of
censorship in England were by no means a professional civil service,
with an abstract loyalty to the state. Rather, they were primarily land-
owning aristocrats and local justices, many of whom were highly criti-
cal of the state's use of its powers, especially in times of political crisis.
The period covered by Patterson's book treats this era in the history of
communication without attending to this changing context. For her,
rhetorical strategies evolve, but censorship remains a constant.

The issue of historical change has been in the background through-

out this review. We must now address it directly. Among historians,
primacy is given to chronology—to time. For all our ideological differ-
ences, and they are numerous, this is the one thing that links us to-
gether. We may have deep differences about the relation between the
past and the present, but we know there is a difference. Like Lorenzo
Valla and his fellows, we worry about anachronism, and in this way we
remain the heirs of the Renaissance. But a concern with anachronism is
implicitly a concern with change, with irreversible time or, as theoreti-
cal physicists say, with "the arrow of time." Recognizing, understand-
ing, and explaining change is at bottom what characterizes history as a
discipline. From a historian's perspective, this sense of history too
often is what has been missing from the many notable efforts of literary
scholars to incorporate historical knowledge into their interpretations
of literature. By seeing literature in relation to—or as part of—a cul-
tural regime, they connect it to social processes that in their very
nature impose order and resist change. Discourses, paradigms, symbol
systems, and the like generate repetitive processes through which soci-
ety continuously reproduces itself, contradictions and all. A focus on
such concepts stresses the transcendence of power along with its his-
torical reality but does not usually produce stories, and "historians,"
as Lawrence Stone has reminded us, "have always told stories." 13
In closing this review, let us look briefly at two works that exem-
plify in their different ways the idea of history as a story of change.
Each concerns itself with the relation between a particular ideological
configuration and a specific literary form, in this case between Puritan-
ism and theater; and both insist persuasively that Puritanism was not
inherently antitheater. For Margot Heinemann, in Puritanism and
Theatre, Puritanism is a broad but single movement of opposition to
"absolute royal power." Based on "the alliance of the 'industrious
sort of people' . . . with a large section of the 'natural rulers'" (p. 23),
13
Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,"
Past and Present, no. 85 (November 1979), p. 3.
120 REVIEWS

its resistance to "the divine-right monarchy and its aristocratic and

city-oligarch supporters" (p. 9) centered in the House of Commons.
Hence she calls the group the "Parliamentary Puritans" and connects
Thomas Middleton to it largely through the patronage he received from
its leaders, such as William, third earl of Pembroke, and several power-
ful Londoners. Operating in their interest and for their benefit, Middle-
ton wrote plays that satirized the existing social order and criticized
crown policy, especially in his openly anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic A
Game of Chess.
The strength of this book is its capacity to connect literary works,
with all their universalizing commitments, to a concrete historical nar-
rative. The concepts of patronage and audience, as Martines correctly
points out, pin literary ideas to specific, time-bound elements of social
organization and political occurrence (pp. 5, 53-61). Structure makes
itself felt not only as mentalite but in and through events. However, the
events of which Heinemann tells us form themselves into an all-too-
predictable narrative in which everything is conditioned or determined
by an underlying pattern of social evolution and class conflict. Early
modern England, we are told, "was in process of change from a society
based on rank and status to one based more directly on wealth and
property" (p. 3). Politics and ideology followed this development, with
the court representing the old order and the parliamentary Puritan
opposition representing the new. In this account, each instance of
disagreement or conflict—whether political or theatrical—forms part
of a continuous sequence and necessarily contributes to the collapse of
the existing regime. The upheavals of the 1640s loom over everything
and are anticipated at every turn.
Construed in this fashion, Puritanism seems more parliamentary
than Protestant and Parliament more revolutionary than constitutional.
But if Puritanism is not treated primarily as a movement of religious
reform, every sign of social criticism and political discontent can be
related too readily to every other, and every social tie among those
holding such views can become a link in a chain of alliance. Unfortu-
nately, Heinemann falls into this trap and in places allows tenuous
genealogical argument to substitute for precise social and political anal-
ysis. Puritanism ceases to be an enspiriting attitude toward life, which
permitted considerable disagreements about specific policies and strat-
egies, and appears as a party, "an opposition" (p. 23). There was
plenty to oppose in the actions of the early Stuart state and church, of
course, but whether opposition in the period amounted to an organized
movement, specifically identified with a particular class or coterie, is
open to serious doubt. The existence of a political party demands not
only general ideological agreement among its members but a commit-
ment to specific programs and not only an affiliation of like-minded
individuals but a stable institutional framework within which to pursue
power. Without these preconditions, politics tends to be something of a
REVIEWS 121

hit-and-run process based on shifting alliances, though it need not

necessarily be an unprincipled game of Namierite factions. Early sev-
enteenth-century England, however, arguably lacked both the neces-
sary preconditions for party politics. Without arguing to the contrary,
one cannot assume, as Heinemann so readily does, that all evidence of
opposition arose from a single impulse and contributed to a single
cause.
In Martin Butler's Theatre and Crisis we confront a different, and
a more satisfactory, view of historical process. Where Heinemann
presents a closed narrative, in which the outcome of her story is pre-
destined by the existing structure of classes and the ongoing pattern of
change in Stuart England, Butler offers a more complex and open-
ended interpretation. He recognizes that in the period "the interests of
ruler and people . . . were not always compatible," but he does not
thereby think that events "fit readily into an inevitable, step-by-step
progression" to the breakdown and transformation of the existing re-
gime (pp. 22, 282). "To infer that the nation was polarizing into two
neatly opposed sides throughout the 1630s, and that any royal regime
would inevitably have been swept towards a disastrous and unavoid-
able collapse," he says, "is to attribute a purposiveness to events that
is unwarranted and suspiciously teleological" (p. 10). Hence, unlike
Heinemann, he allows personality and contingency to play an impor-
tant role in shaping events. He even argues that the course of politics in
the 1630s and 1640s might have been otherwise had Charles I "been a
different sort of king" (p. 87). If the processes of change could have
taken England in any one of a number of different and incompatible
directions, however, this freedom was not unlimited. It operated
within the existing structure of institutions and ideas, which made
some outcomes more likely than others. In this, drama played a role
"by calling the old certainties into question and educating attitudes to
them over a period of years" (p. 24). "Drama," Butler argues, "was
not merely the product of society but was itself part of the historical
process, an agent of change as much as the mirror of change, a partici-
pant engaged with its society's compromises and not merely an ob-
server o/them" (p. 281).
Butler captures this complex and indeterminate mixture of culture
and politics in the concept of "crisis." Rather than seeing England as
"two nations . . . one popish, cultivated and Italianate, the other puri-
tan, iconoclastic and insular," he views its "values in a continual state
of flux or dialectic, each perpetually modifying and modified by the
other as they issued into the experience of their time" and became
attached to "the confusions and complexity of the experience within
which they were embodied and realized." As social, political, and
intellectual types, he says, Cavalier and Puritan, "court" and "coun-
try," "exerted their claims simultaneously on all members of society,
and they, subjected to many conflicting pressures, differed among
122 REVIEWS

themselves as variously, and contradicted themselves as often as we

do now, so that the crisis not only divided men among themselves but
caused a species of division in the minds of all" (p. 5). Butler's aim is
distinctly antiwhig. He seeks to capture the reality of England's early
modern crisis, not as it led progressively from the Age of Elizabeth to
the Age of the Restoration, but from the viewpoint of those who experi-
enced it. He does so admirably, distinguishing carefully the styles and
themes of court drama, of the noncourtly indoor theaters, and of the
open-air ones, each with its different, though overlapping, audiences.
The result is a book that historians will find as exciting as literary
scholars will, one that tells a story rooted in the thought and events of
the period. Here we have a sense of history as a living process of
change, fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, as much the conse-
quence of choice, debate, and conflict as of underlying structures and
impersonal forces. It is a history of possibility, not teleology.

VI
According to the philosopher Saul Kripke, the problem with all
philosophical theories is that they are "wrong." Once an idea has risen
to the level of theory, specifying the necessary and sufficient condi-
tions that will work for it, it inevitably must simplify the sense we have
of reality and, by doing so, leave out too much. In place of developing
theory on theory, then, Kripke seeks to "present just a better picture
than the picture presented by the received views." ' 4 As historians, we
cannot go so far since we need theory to organize our thoughts and
direct our questions. But we should not forget Kripke's warning. There
is no substitute for a "better picture," one that attends to the complex-
ities of the world it addresses. For, as F. W. Maitland said long ago in
commenting on historical error, "the guess-working spirit is so willing;
the verifying flesh is often weary." 1 5
After decades of philosophical and methodological criticism, we
can no longer use the word "verifying" quite so freely as did Maitland,
but his point still holds. In historical study it is never enough to imagine
how it must have been. We also need to seek evidence from the past for
our views. What we know is the present, which includes within it the
remains—literary and otherwise—of the past. It is for us to interpret
this evidence, asking questions of it that are of interest and of use to us.
Hence our understanding of the past will vary as our commitments and
our culture change. But if we are to be fair to those we study, and
honest with ourselves and those who read us, we must make the at-
tempt to put our biases in perspective. It is the essence of humanist
14
Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 64, 94.
15
F. W. Maitland, "Canon MacColl's New Convocation," in Selected Historical
Essays of F. W. Maitland, ed. H. M. Cam (Boston, 1962), p. 256.
REVIEWS 123

scholarship that the acts and ideas of all h u m a n beings d e s e r v e the

same kind of evaluation we would give our o w n — t h a t each should be
allowed to c o m m u n i c a t e his meanings and intentions and that each
should be given his d u e . Anything less t e m p t s us to willful distortion
and misinterpretation, transforms our w o r k from history into ethical,
social, or political c o m m e n t a r y , and robs it of its authority to speak
about either the past or the present.

D A V I D HARRIS SACKS
Reed College

Theory and Antitheory in Nineteenth-Century

British Social History

Boys Together. By JOHN CHANDOS. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-

sity Press, 1984. Pp. 412. $29.95 (cloth).

Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrializa-

tion. By BETTY FLADELAND. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 232. $22.50 (cloth).

Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies. By DAVID GAR-

LAND. Aldershot: Gower Publishing Co., 1985. Pp. x + 297. $41.95
(cloth).
The Victorian Clergy. By ALAN HAIG. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Pp.
376. $33.00 (cloth).
Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales. By W. R. LAMBERT. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1983; distributed by Humanities Press,
Atlantic Highlands, N.J. Pp. xiv + 294. $33.50 (cloth).

Judging by the editorials and essay reviews that have appeared in

scholarly journals over the past decade, social historians have fallen
out of love with sociology. This certainly seems to be the case among
students of nineteenth-century Britain. In the inaugural number of His-
tory Workshop, Gareth Stedman Jones and Raphael Samuel argued
that the lure of sociological theory has often misled historians hungry
for a restoration of meaning and structure to the past. What most irked
Stedman Jones and Samuel was the extent to which historians had
meekly accepted the task offillingup the "empty conceptual boxes" of