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i n t r o d u c t i o n Nina Levine and David Lee Miller I am senseless of your wrath; a touch more rare Subdues all pangs, all fears. cymbeline 1.1.136–137 During the last decade of the twentieth century an interesting thing began to happen in the fields of literary criticism and theory, art history, philosophy , cultural theory, and anthropology. This interesting thing, the multidisciplinary branching and growth of the protean works of Harry Berger, Jr., had really been happening steadily since the late 1950s, but two new developments marked the close of the century. One was that Berger, who had spent much of his career scattering brilliant essays across a range of professional journals, began to see them gathered into books edited by younger scholars.1 The other was that he began to publish new books at a rapid pace. As a result of both these changes, the broad outlines of Harry Berger’s work, its remarkable scope and peculiar force, have been clarified for a wider audience. Berger’s articles in the field of English Renaissance literature have always had substantial influence among specialists, but the reappearance of these essays, often revised or amplified, in collections from university presses offered an occasion to reassess Berger’s place in the volatile history of critical theory and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. John Lynch and Louis A. Montrose began the process in their introductions to the first two of these collections, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, edited by Lynch, and Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, edited by Montrose, both published by the University of California Press in 1988. In 1997, Peter Erickson edited Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, published by Stanford University Press with a substantial critical introduction . The following year, five noted scholars responded to Making Trifles in a forum organized and introduced by Lena Cowen Orlin for volume 27 of Shakespeare Studies, and Michael Bristol capped a survey of ‘‘Recent 1 2 Introduction Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama’’ with an eloquent and savvy homage that began by comparing Berger to baseball great Willie Mays: Reading Harry Berger Jr.’s criticism is like watching Willie Mays play baseball . It’s not that they make what they do look easy, as people used to say about Mays. As a matter of fact half the time what Mays did looked pretty much impossible, except it was obvious he knew he could do it. Berger plays the hard game with the same breathtaking ease and confidence.2 In 2003 Joseph Loewenstein organized a Modern Language Association (MLA) panel on Berger’s work, and in 2005 another collection, Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations, focusing on theories of interpretation and cultural change, appeared with an introduction by Judith Anderson.3 With the notable exception of the introductions by Lynch and Anderson , these assessments have limited themselves to Berger’s place as a critic of English Renaissance literature. It is an important place, to be sure. In the Introduction to Revisionary Play, Montrose sees Berger as having ‘‘helped to lay the groundwork’’ for New Historicism.4 ‘‘No critic of English Renaissance literature in Berger’s generation,’’ he writes, ‘‘has had at once so formative and so liberating an influence on how we read that literature ; and surely none continues today, with such daimonic energy, to engage the work of others and to renew his own.’’5 Erickson, writing in 1997 in Making Trifles, echoes this tribute: I think I am not alone in finding Harry Berger a liberating, enabling figure because he is so intellectually uninhibited, because he so successfully defies the academic protocols and received intellectual conventions of Renaissance studies. . . . I know of no one else in his generation . . . who plays this vital role.6 Bristol writes that Making Trifles ‘‘takes on some of the most baffling problems in all Shakespeare criticism,’’ and he credits its success to the way Berger engages students and colleagues alike: What makes this a great book is the way it sustains an attitude of genuine socratic irony throughout its length. Berger teaches against resistance, but he never moves to break down or break through resistance. He doesn’t make things easy for his readers—or for his students either—but what is always present along with the toughness is unfailing kindness and unfeigned...

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