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  • Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare
  • O. Bradley Bassler (bio)
Angus Fletcher , Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, 2007), 185 pp.

Angus Fletcher's new volume Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare considers the impact of the "New Science" on the culture of renaissance English poetry. In ways a revaluation of the Elizabethan world view, the book is more ambitious than Tillyard's classic work in its attempt to look for the core motivation behind the New Poetry in the transformation rather than the perpetuation of cultural strands. Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry rewrote the terms for considering the current development of the American poetic tradition; his most recent volume is even more ambitious in scope, revamping the landscape of poetry in the English language.

It is out of a twinned sense of cultural destabilization and aspiration occasioned by the New Science's overthrow of the medieval world view that Fletcher's portrait of the "New Poetry" emerges, set against the probing backdrop posed in the question "whether the human yearning for fixed cynosures is not the actual source of long term instability." In terms of this paradoxical dialectic of stability and instability, Fletcher traces the drama that the New Poetry itself plays out upon the stage of early modern literary history.

The early modern natural philosophers developed a counter-language set against the traditional Aristotelian description of natural motion, with consequences for the classical Aristotelean idea of dramatic unity as well. In the Aristotelian vocabulary, "things had to act like persons." The point of the reverse translation Fletcher identifies in the New Poetry is not to make persons act like things; rather, this reversal makes possible a precedence of human actions over human character. If the qualitative description of nature which Aristotle promotes is transferred to the dramatic domain, then what wears itself on its external sleeve, so to speak, are precisely human actions.

The linguistic consequence of this reversal is that actions are taken up into words and then redoubled in the dramatic re-presentation of action, leaning heavily on the theatrical sense of "drama." To mine this theatrical sense, Fletcher focuses intensively on the metrical structure of poetic language: how it simultaneously conveys quantitative rhythm and emotional expression. In this respect, it is the twin of music. Motion is taken up into language at an almost presemantic level, but one which [End Page 342] stands in intimate proximity to what, following Fletcher, we might call "semantic crossover." Most interesting are those cases like Donne's and Shakespeare's, where the metrical structure of poetic expression is loosened from strict metrical devices but in a way which not only preserves but in fact intensifies the musicality of language.

The need for a wresting of metrical rhythm from all Procrustean beds leads to Fletcher's insistence that "the drama gives the moving action its embodiment." To convey the dramatic, in particular, action must outstrip commentary. And so there is a critical issue of tempo in the dramatic presentation of action, for in reality we act "on the fly," with niceties of comprehension traveling in action's wake. It is just this pacing of dramatic action which saves it from the threat of rigidity always faced by allegory, and which makes possible the dynamic sense of forward motion which is needed for plausible embodiment. As Donne remarks in a passage Fletcher cites, there is never "[t]ime enough to have beene Interpreter / To Babells bricklayers," as is reflected particularly in the "rapid verbal transport" of the then raging pamphlet wars. Fletcher cites also Anthony Nutall's diagnosis of the rhythms of Timon of Athens in "the curious way in which Shakespeare's mind continually races ahead of itself," and it is such racing which makes possible that trait of Shakespeare's characters' capacity to overhear themselves which Harold Bloom identifies throughout the Shakespearean corpus. No doubt this explains in part Bloom's particular fondness for Macbeth's "proleptic imagination," which Fletcher glosses in terms of "an insane drive to accumulate and annihilate the traces of his past, whipping them into his future, before...

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