Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (review)

Stephen Greenblatt's remark, "I began with the desire to speak with the dead," might well serve as the epigraph of this book, for Philip Schwyzer argues that "the longing to converse with the dead has probably never been absent from the study of literature" (22). We generate that discussion when we study past writings. In so doing we resemble those colleagues who conduct archeological digs: "Literary scholars read messages from the dead in textual form, whilst archaeologists handle physical artefacts and remains" (27). The "border station" between the two fields is the focus of Schwyzer's book, and the terrain has never before been mapped so compellingly.

In a chapter that begins with an account of Kennewick Man, unearthed in the state of Washington in 1996, Schwyzer explores disparate writings: a late medieval poem about St. Erkenwald, reports by Matthew Paris and Gerald of Wales, and Spenser's Faerie Queene and View of the State of Ireland. What these works share is an interest in "the excavation of the bodies and artefacts of subjugated peoples, namely the ancient Britons (the ancestors of the Welsh), and the Irish" (39). The connections that Schwyzer draws are intriguing, as are the parallels between the excavation of corpses in early modern England and the discovery of Lindlow Man, now on display in the British Museum. What we may feel in looking at long dead bodies is not unlike what our ancestors felt when they examined bodies of their own ancestors: a blend of fascination and disorientation, of "unanticipated intimacy and self-alienation" (49).

Schwyzer also addresses the Elizabethan preoccupation with ruins, which were in evidence nearly everywhere, thanks to the dissolution of the monasteries. What distinguishes Schwyzer's treatment is the conviction that writing about the past led to a "fascination with the problems of perspective" (75). He maintains that Shakespeare's contemporaries "describe a gaze that not only refuses to reduce the ruin to an integrated whole, but which somehow doubles back to split the viewer" (83). That word somehow seems problematic, and I found this discussion the least persuasive in the book. But John Weever's and Samuel Daniel's encounters with monastic ruins prove most interesting, and Schwyzer's conclusion seems incontestable: the Elizabethans found in ruins not the peace and sublimity later registered by, say, Romantic poets but "ugliness, anguish, shame —and, in some cases, liberation" (98). His analysis culminates in a treatment of Titus Andronicus, in particular the puzzling account of a soldier leading an army of Goths to Rome: "I strayed / To gaze upon a ruined monastery," he says, and then hears a baby crying —the child of Aaron the Moor. According to Schwyzer, the allusion to the monastery, with the ambiguities that surround it, prepares us for our divided attitude toward the Moor, who is both scheming sadist and doting father: "The (mental) image of ruin thus serves as a visual prompt, preparing the eyes to apprehend the ambiguous spectacle that lurks behind the wall," Aaron himself (101).

Archaeology and writing again overlap when Schwyzer turns to the burial practices of Elizabethan England. "As Mortimer Wheeler insisted, the essence of all archaeology is exhumation: 'the archaeological excavator is not digging up things, he is digging up people'" (112). Imaginative writers, for their part, skillfully evoke the specter of the dead coming to life: "In their encounters with ghosts, both Hamlet and Macbeth do not immediately assume that they are beholding spirits, but rather the actual bodies of the dead, vomited forth by the grave" (121–22). It is the nightmarish prospect of exhumation that unhinges the living. In an analysis of extraordinary sensitivity, Schwyzer applies the fruits of his mediation on archaeologists and writers, exploring in Titus the significance of the vault of the Andronici, which becomes both "sacred receptacle" and "earthy prison." "It is a prison, moreover, created by the living precisely in order to cage the dead and prevent their re-eruption into the world of...