Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (review)

For the last several decades, the predominant mode for understanding violence and wounding on the early modern English stage has been Foucauldian and New Historicist. The exceptions have been by and large driven by psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Anderson's book falls squarely in the latter camp, as the word trauma in the title might suggest. Some dead exert no pressure on the living, it seems, and Anderson does not feel compelled to mount either an extended critique of New Historicism or a bristling defence of his own methodology. Nonetheless, his wide-ranging study clearly demonstrates that psychoanalytical and deconstructive approaches to the literature and culture of earlier, premodern periods can be more than superficially historical and can illuminate aspects of these periods beyond the reach of synchronically oriented approaches. Anderson takes seriously Derrida's assertion that "synchrony does not have a chance, no time is contemporary with itself" (Spectres of Marx, 111) and conceptualizes early modern English history as what Cathy Caruth calls "a history of trauma" (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 17). "For history to be a history of trauma," Caruth writes, "means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence" (17–18). But Anderson is interested not only in traumatic history's elusiveness but also in its intrusiveness. One of early modern England's most pressing cultural concerns, especially after the Reformation had abolished Purgatory and significantly altered in other ways the relationship between the living and the dead, was to find a way firmly to memorialize the past, render it history, and in the process clearly distinguish it from the present, Anderson argues. The primary interests of Anderson's book are the ways in which the past, as trauma, refuses to stay in the past but impinges upon the present and the ways in which early modern texts from Titus Andronicus to Marvell's "An Horatian Ode" both register and attempt to cope with these traumatic intrusions of the past. Given the Derridean framework of the analysis, it isn't surprising that the early modern texts Anderson scrutinizes fail to contain the trauma of the past but ultimately reiterate the trauma and loss in the very attempt: closure is always already subject to difference and deferral. Here one might have liked to see more engagement with trauma theorists such as Dominick LaCapra, for whom working through trauma is a real possibility. In fact, with a shift of emphasis, Anderson's notion of memorialization as simultaneously a repetition of the traumatic past and an attempt to put it to rest is quite similar to LaCapra's notion of working through. "[W]ith respect to traumatic loss," LaCapra notes, "acting out may well be a necessary condition for working through" (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 70). Even so, each of the book's chapters offers the reader illuminating readings that are as attentive to the literary as to the historical in their working out of the overall argument's logic. A chapter each on Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Edward II constitutes the book's first part, "Haunting Allegories," while the second part, "Exhuming Effigies" comprises a chapter on revenge tragedy and one on Eikon Basilike, Milton's Eikonoklastes, and Marvell's "An Horatian Ode." The book leaves a few conceptual loose ends — only intermittently, for example, does the book take up the introduction's provocative suggestion that "For [Jean] Laplanche, some form of sexual trauma is a formative primal scene for the subject because she is born too early to understand her sexualized condition in a social network; for Renaissance writers, it seems more accurate to say that representations of eroticized trauma articulate in displaced form the anxiety of becoming an historical subject" (8) — but this is only to say that the book opens...