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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.2 (2002) 399-448



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Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

W. B. Worthen


Prologue

Enter AUTHOR (sweeping stage): Let's get it over with, the SEL review opening gambit: humility (with feeling) before the range and quality of this year's scholarship, art which well exceeds my scope; surprise (muted) at the overwhelming preponderance of work on Shakespeare to the near exclusion of his contemporaries; surprise (more muted) at the absence of important new fault lines or factions emerging; and (sincerely) a slight readerly fatigue.

(Pause). That said, there were a few modest revelations--a disappointing paucity of books engaging directly with theatrical performance--and perhaps even some slim trends: several intriguing books and articles on religion and religious censorship; the ongoing refinement of print studies, reflected both in monographs and editions; a renewed interest in Hamlet; a persistent complication of the multiply gendered, raced, sexualized, classed, (inter-) nationalized, politicized, theatrical "subject."

(Sotto voce). One last confession: arbitrariness (sigh) of the categorization below. I've departed somewhat from the fine recent reviews by William Carroll and Meredith Skura. This review opens with several general studies, books that undertake a wide-angle view of the drama's implication in medieval and early modern culture. I then turn to Shakespeare studies, dividing between works directed principally to a professional audience of scholars, critics, and teachers (criticism, annuals and anthologies, editions) [End Page 399] and those directed to students and general readers, including Shakespeare biographies. The final section reviews books of all kinds on other dramatists. Although single-author books predominate in the review, anthologies and editions have become a significant source for original scholarship, and several are discussed at some length.

And now (gesturing upstage) the players approach. (Exit, sweeping still).

General Studies

Despite its title, Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory is about considerably more than Hamlet, Shakespearean drama, or Purgatory. Greenblatt's writing is now synonymous with a particular cast of scholarship, but in Hamlet in Purgatory, the chiasmatic relationship between poetry and culture--cultural poetics, poetics as culture--is given a startling specificity, reading the force of Purgatory as a theological and a cultural institution at the fulcrum of social change in Tudor England. Protestant preach-ers and theologians were numbingly insistent that the absence of scriptural authority for Purgatory testified yet again to the flummery of papist spectacle, and anticlerical literature also demonstrates that Purgatory enabled its own mode of cozenage: scurrilous friars extorting the bereaved in exchange for the promise to relieve the suffering of the departed dead, and/or to pray for the gull's release from future torment. Yet Protestant animus against Purgatory also derived from Purgatory's "special relation to dream, fantasy, and imagination" (p. 35), particularly the pervasive desire that the spirits of the dead might still converse with the living. As Greenblatt argues through a reading of John Donne's celebrated sermon at St. Paul's on 21 May 1616, Protestants "charted the ways in which certain elemental human fears, longings, and fantasies were being shaped and exploited by an intellectual elite who carefully packaged fraudulent, profit-making innovations as if they were ancient traditions," but even their more rigorous contemplation of mortal acts, the terrified imagi-nation of degrading putrefaction, and the "almost frantic hope of Heaven" could not entirely displace an alternative imagining of the life beyond the grave (p. 45).

Purgatory has a long lineage, and Greenblatt casts it as a response to the imagination of death, the fear of loss, mortality. For this reason, religious theology is only part of the story: visual and narrative evidence amply illustrate the seductive grip that [End Page 400] the departed hold on the fantasies of the living. The desire to forge and maintain that contact with the dead grounds the epiphenomena of doctrinal change. Reading a wide range of texts, illuminations, and paintings from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, Greenblatt elucidates the connection between Purgatory and these more inchoate feelings, exposing a kind of lay poetics of the...

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