Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices

The contributors to this valuable multidisciplinary collection bring to the study of early modern autobiography a rigorous attention to a wide range of early modern autobiographical material. In their introduction, the editors argue that early modern autobiography demonstrates the "constant interplay between two poles: the grand ideals of selfhood . . . and the everyday terrain," and thus the objects of study are drawn from those poles and everywhere in between (2). Underlying the volume is the assertion that, as Lloyd Davis claims in his overview of the critical debates about autobiography, "detailed reflection on social, cultural, and historical factors" is essential to the study of early modern autobiography (23). Indeed, the strength of many of the essays in the collection is their attention to the cultural making of the "self" of self-writing. This volume is rich and full of insights into the construction and communication of the early modern self. Its inclusion of overlooked materials is refreshing and ambitious; however, the risk involved in this inclusion works better in some of the essays than in others.

The essays that comprise Part One, "Self Theories," examine the factors that influence how the early modern self may have seen itself. Conal Condren claims that the early modern self was the display of a persona or an assumed identity rather than a "moral individuality" (46). Ronald Bedford argues for a source for such personae: the theater. Bedford examines "the mimesis that occurs not when the dramatist or poet holds a mirror up to nature but when an audience member or reader is moved to imitate what is represented" (49). Philippa Kelly considers "the capacity of mirrors in language to help shape certain concepts and practices of self-representation and life writing" in her informative discussion of early modern mirrors (62).

In Part Two, "Life Genres," the contributors examine the effects of confinement on self-writing. Two of the essays, Peter Goodall's and Dosia Reichardt's, treat literal confinement. Goodall argues that an "authentic self" can be seen in the "literary representation of lived experience as nurtured in the study" (104). Self-writing was made possible, according to Goodall, because the rise of the private study created the opportunity for a person to retire to write about the self. On the other hand, Reichardt's prisoners did not choose their confinement, and the self-writing they produced reveals the tension between "desired reunification" and the "expression of individuality" (115).

The other essays in this part deal with different forms of figurative confinement—confinement to a period, to a portrait, by exclusion, and to a playwright's corpus. Anne M. Scott argues that Hoccleve is an "autobiographical poet," who ought not to be studied as merely belonging to the medieval period because "to give labels such as medieval, early modern, or modern, is to ignore the constant organic development of thought and attitude that transcends notions of periodization" (101). Scott's reading of Hoccleve's Complaint is very persuasive, and there is a "self-representation [that] emerges" in the poem (100); however, it is not entirely clear why that self-representation transcends periodization. Certainly, one might just as easily argue that there is something specifically medieval about Hoccleve's self-writing that is worth exploring. In her essay on Van Dyck's portrait of Suckling, Belinda Tiffen argues that the portrait is evidence of Suckling's self-fashioning and self-representation. Tiffen admits that an examination of "visual autobiography" is complicated by the painter, "who takes cues from the subject but filters them through his or her own interpretation" (165), but the essay does not deal with this complication as fully as one would like. Helen Wilcox's examination of exile and autobiography shows the effects on self-writing of being excluded from one's home. While her claim that "exile . . . is the space of autobiography" is very convincing (155), Wilcox's loose definition of exile undermines her overall argument. R. S. White's piece about Shakespeare's "autobiography" may seem ill-suited to this section—in fact, White notes a number of times that the reader may wonder what the essay is doing in the collection at all. On the contrary, the story that White tells about piecing together the life of Shakespeare from the confines of his published works complicates some of the main assumptions of the volume by questioning the truth of any self-writing. As White points out, Shakespeare's works "can be read as notes toward an autobiography of an identity, a self, but simultaneously as an evasion of the self" (186).

The case studies of the final part, "Self Practices," show the importance of the margins and professionalism in the construction of early modern selves. Isabella Whitney, as an unemployed and unmarried woman, lived on the margins of society. Yet, as Jean E. Howard's essay demonstrates, the "urban context in which the speaker lived and wrote" allowed Whitney to imagine a life in which she chose to remain single and write (230). In the Paston Letters, Helen Fulton recognizes "evidence . . . for an emerging subjectivity produced by the secular discourses of urban exchange" (213). This "exchange" between the city and the Pastons' properties in Norfolk, Fulton argues, shows a different kind of subject coming into being, because it is filled with "discourses of commodification, bureaucracy, urban centrality, and socioeconomic status" (213). According to Nancy E. Wright, the margins of the page are as important to autobiography as are the margins of society and urban centers. Wright examines Anne Clifford's use of first-person pronouns in the margins of her household accounts, and argues that Clifford "exercises her agency as a woman of property" for her "family" and "household," which "define her 'self'" (249).

Three of the essays in this final part elucidate the relationship between fashioning a self and being a professional. Inigo Jones, according to Liam E. Semler, self-consciously "assembled his desired self" in a "peculiarly textual way" (253). Semler reads Jones's notebooks and marginal notes for traces of this "self-assembly." Adrian Mitchell looks at William Dampier's assertion of his identity as a privateer not a buccaneer in order to unlock the "key to Dampier's self-imaging and self-valuing" (273). The final chapter in the book, Wilfrid Prest's, treats the reappearance of a "legal autobiography" in the writing of William Blackstone in the eighteenth century. Prest argues that Blackstone broke "the autobiographical drought" of over seventy years because of "the unusual trajectory of his legal career" (292).

Early modern selves, it seems, are made of and by many different things. From the self-reflective writing of Part One to the confinement of Part Two to the margins and professions of Part Three, Early Modern Autobiography gathers together sixteen important essays that consider early modern notions of the self, what went into forming that self, and how it could be expressed. Although the quality of the essays is at times uneven, the collection should prove an important resource for scholars of autobiography and early modern culture alike.