Performing the Middle Ages from "Beowulf " to "Othello" (review)

Performing the Middle Ages from "Beowulf " to "Othello" is a courteous and well-written book, though not exactly a book about performance. Rather, the book seems to be about male aristocratic or chivalric subjectivity. Although Johnston has a few paragraphs about a performative theory of subjectivity in the introduction, the fact that he does not return to this concept in several chapters of the book makes the use of the term "performance" in his title rather gratuitous. It may also, lamentably, throw scholars interested in his subject matter off the trail. The term "performance" may serve as something of a catch-all (as I discuss below), since, indeed, the unifying subject matter can be difficult to discern, given, as the author is, to interesting but rather lengthy digressions. Hence, perhaps, the book may be best looked at as four or five significant chapters on some of the key texts of our discipline grouped together within a vibrant purple cover.

Each chapter is lengthy, digressive, generally rewarding, and offers as much perspective on the critical reception of the texts as on the texts themselves. This is why I call it a courteous book, because Andrew James Johnston has read his comrades carefully and thoroughly, displaying a scholarly generosity in doing so. Rarely does one find this type of close reading of critical material any more, since single-sentence generalizations have become almost normalized. Johnston follows the argument of even the most thorny and unwieldy secondary scholarship closely, and, with adeptness, locates the lacunae to allow him to situate his own critical intervention. In this way, he pays great respect to the discipline, ensuring that he is not repeating former arguments but in fact is building upon them. And since he is working with some of the most canonical texts of the discipline, his task in sorting through the critical tradition is huge and his achievement in doing so impressive. Any critic cited in this text might consider herself or himself fortunate to have such an interlocutor as Johnston.

However, there are also some drawbacks to such tenacious commitment to the literary discipline. When Johnston does engage with extra-literary issues that have an impact upon a literary event—for instance, the issue of confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—he tends to cite other literary critics for material on confessional practices rather than consult Duns Scotus or Wyclif himself. At one point, Johnston criticizes Michel Foucault for his transhistorical and abstracted theory of confession, remonstrating that "he does not deign to wallow in the mire of medieval theology, penitential literature, or historical sources" (142). Such a statement might aptly be applied to Johnston himself. There is a surprising paucity of citations to primary texts outside the literary ones that constitute the material of his chapters. In his chapter on Othello, in one of his characteristic digressions, Johnston spends some twenty pages examining the myth of Cortés's apotheosis as a deity by the sixteenth-century Aztecs (this is by way of contesting Stephen Greenblatt's one-sided application of "improvision" to the European conquistadors and arguing that one might as well locate the theme of "colonial" apotheosis in a medieval romance, Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval). Astonishingly, although he cites several historians' interpretation of Cortés's letters, he seems never to have consulted the letters himself, as he fails to refer to them, nor are they listed in his bibliography. Since the letters appear important enough to Johnston to merit such space in making his point, they surely merit their own scrutiny. While Johnston is intent upon examining the "binary" logic that divides the Middle Ages from modernity, he seems relatively content to maintain the rather flimsy distinction between the literary and historical disciplines as they have been traditionally constructed.

The achievement of this book is not in bringing new sources to bear upon well-known texts but in offering new insights into some of the major...