Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare by Ronald Huebert (review)

Ronald Huebert's book is a widely ranging meditation on how early modern English writers wielded the idea of privacy. Privacy took on a newly idealized status in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to the current scholarly consensus. Previously, daily life offered fewer opportunities for individuals to withdraw from the presence or knowledge of others as well as fewer expressions of a desire to do so. This consensus crosses disciplines of history, philosophy, and literary studies, including contributors from Jürgen Habermas to Lena Cowen Orlin. Huebert adds to the conversation with a historicist argument that, although "the line between public and private was not drawn in precisely the same place by early modern writers as it would be today," privacy was highly valued in the period from Thomas More's Utopia to John Milton's Paradise Lost.

This book's great strength is its survey of a diverse collection of literary works, including manuscripts and printed works, authors from the canonical to the obscure, women writers as well as men, and plays, lyric poems, utopian fiction, domestic advice tracts, commonplace books, and diaries. Huebert divides his analysis into four clusters, each of which identifies a theme crucial to early modern privacy: status, property, secrecy, and interiority. He devotes two chapters to each cluster. To some extent, chapters bring together works linked by genre or authorship, although Huebert also juxtaposes genres or periods as it suits his themes. For example, while a chapter on invasions of privacy compares Shakespeare's Hamlet and Twelfth Night, one on voyeurism addresses Renaissance painting, Robert Herrick, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. This framework allows for interesting insights into the way genre shapes the themes of privacy as well as a focus on authors' biographical contexts. Huebert often links authors' views to the conditions of their lives; in a particularly inspired example, he connects Milton's blindness to the portrayal of privacy as interiority in Paradise Lost.

The book takes a genial, curious, and appreciative stance towards an array of early modern literary works, but Huebert too quickly dismisses arguments that attempt to discern the shifting landscape that must have characterized the transition from premodern to modern privacy. Such studies often note how oddly performative early modern assertions of privacy can be, how positive evaluations of privacy coexist with negative ones, and how the realm called "private life" continued to be public and communal in ways that surprise us today. Huebert sharply rejects the view, asserted by literary critics and historians including Stephen Greenblatt and David Cressy, that early modern privacy is a slippery concept and that the distinction between private and public modes was neither clearly demarcated nor rigid. Reductively, Huebert takes such views as bald pronouncements that privacy is irrelevant to early modern writers, a straw-man position that is easy to refute. Thus, in spite of a wealth of critical readings of privacy in Hamlet by others, such as Katharine Eisaman Maus, Huebert sets himself to prove that "the distinction between the private and the public does matter" to Hamlet, Shakespeare, and early modern audiences. Similarly, Huebert's chapter on "Private Devotions" finds a "spiritual turning inward" in both Protestant and Catholic texts, similar to arguments made by Cecile Jagodzinski, Richard Rambuss, and others. That Huebert finds proleptic echoes of modern privacy everywhere he looks is neither surprising nor, as he claims, at odds with the scholarly consensus that privacy in this period is characterized by change.

Huebert is at his best when noting nuanced differences in the meaning and value of early modern privacy among his authors. One chapter's conclusion that men were more likely than women to "experience privacy as a socially sanctioned and temporary retreat" suggests the extent to which privacy was perceived and desired differently by men and women, but more readily claimed as a privilege by men. This observation is relevant to privacy and gender today. Thus, Huebert's careful analysis of...