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  • Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture ed. by Jonathan Gil Harris
  • Jyotsna G. Singh (bio)
Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. The Shakespearean International Yearbook, special issue 11. Edited by Jonathan Gil Harris. Burlington, VT, and Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. x + 286. $114.95 cloth.

Producing a Festschrift celebrating a respected academic’s scholarship poses obvious challenges. While it is a retrospective, it must also break fresh ground, complicating the critical legacy that the contributions honor. Jonathan Gil Harris, citing De Certeau, describes such a dilemma as the “tension within historiography between ‘a past that is its object, and a present that is the place of its practice’” (6). As the editor of Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, Harris skillfully mediates these productive strains within Neill’s own brand of historicist criticism—and as that criticism intersects with the essays in this volume.

“How do we understand ‘place’ and its relation to identity?” (2). This question structures Harris’s organization of six sections on “place,” each exploring the dynamics of “placement and displacement” (6). He begins with a biography of Neill’s early experiences of migration and displacement between Ireland, Britain, and New Zealand—what Neill acknowledges as “the formative significance of [his] history of migrancy” (253). Here, I think Harris implicitly offers a prompt to other scholars to inventory the formative traces of their own histories.

Harris identifies two important strands in Michael Neill’s contributions: textual editing and historicist criticism. He rightly praises Neill’s critical method of “locating differences within the writing and culture of the Renaissance—differences produced by other voices, but also by dissident ideas” (4); but I think Harris’s theoretical inflections of Neill’s historicism at times seem forced. Neill’s contribution is significant in representing multiple voices and contested histories, especially within transnational and transcultural disseminations of Shakespeare. However, his scholarly bearings are more empirically grounded than Harris allows, and perhaps less open to De Certeau’s theories of space and place than this volume posits. That said, Harris’s organizational strategy of “rethinking place in relation to early modern cultural [End Page 478] production” (6) is richly inventive in evoking multiple places, both literal and figurative, as evident in the sections below: “the place of words; resting places; the place of service; colonial dis/placements; the places of appropriation; and ‘Places!’”—“a term familiar less to literary critics, perhaps, than to theatre practitioners” (6).

MacDonald P. Jackson’s fine opening essay, “Gentle Shakespeare and Arden of Faversham,” pays tribute to Neill’s editing accomplishments, impressive in their philological and critical depths. Jackson makes a persuasive case for the part-Shakespearean authorship of Arden of Faversham, revealing the complexities of both editing and social ordering.

The next two essays by Gail Kern Paster and Marina Warner on “resting places,” perhaps the most evocative pieces overall, begin with Shakespeare’s meditations on death in Hamlet (via Neill’s preoccupations with the body), leading us into unexpected and nuanced explorations of the corporeal, psychic, and ethical dimensions of death and violence. Paster’s “Thinking with Skulls in Holbein, Hamlet, Vesalius, and Fuller” inventively rethinks skulls through cognitive theory, exploring the memento mori skull as it figures in Hamlet, Vesalius’s treatise De humani corporis fabrica (1543), and Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533). Overturning the convention of a death’s head as “symbolizing absence or undifference” (43), Paster looks afresh at “the skull as an object of meditation” and as “a way of thinking about thinking, a cognitive prompt” (43).

Warner’s essay, “‘Come to Hecuba,’” is a tour de force of complexity at the intersections of Shakespeare criticism and contemporary critique. Drawing on Neill’s notion of empathy, she explores the various reincarnations of Hecuba on stage. While stressing how Hecuba is a conduit of emotional empathy in Hamlet, “aligning aesthetic response with ethical principles” (80), Warner productively seeks to contrast “the tragic mode of empathy” of drama with the emotional dissociation of contemporary “apocalyptic” “entertainment artifacts” in the post–Abu Ghraib era (80). Thus, in beckoning us to the many...

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