Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (review)

386Comparative Drama sense of the work's coherence, probably because Tulloch tries to achieve too much. He is interested in two canonical playwrights, in audience reactions to their plays, in directors' decisions to mount productions based on assumptions about audience reactions, in the power of the theatrical event, in TV productions such as the BBC Cherry Orchard as well as live theater, in research methodologies , and in students' responses to an author they have read as a school text. He also focuses primarily on Australian and English productions, so when his surveys include American students, his perspective seems unnecessarily broad.A narrower focus, for instance on Chekhov stage productions in Australia and Britain, would have enabled the book to engage more fully with its complex theoretical framework. Nonetheless, for anyone interested in audience research and theatrical events, Tulloch's book is an excellent read. It encourages us to consider the ways in which we might best theorize individual audience experiences at theatrical events. Gretchen E. Minton Montana State University Thomas P. Anderson. Performing EarlyModern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. viii + 225. $94.95. There are at least three ways to think about what happens when we describe the past in narrative. One view, associated with Hayden White and Roland Barthes, holds that we inevitably understand the past in narrative terms, and that what seems like an independent "event" is in fact comprehensible only in relation to a sequence ofevents.Without narrative, no past.A second view, articulated by a range of writers from Thomas Carlisle to Michèle de Certeau, holds that the past is tragically lost to us, and that the stories we create about it inevitably suffer from gaps and breaks: narrative never quite recaptures the past. A third view, loosely based on a psychoanalytic model, holds that the past is traumatic , and that we attenuate this trauma by telling orderly stories about it.Yet the past resists repression, sometimes erupting dramatically in the narrative intended to manage it; narrative tries, without full success, to forget the past by tidying it up. Thomas P. Anderson has written a book that offers this third view, with occasional doses ofthe second. He argues that the earlymodern historical imagination in England dreaded certain traumatic aspects of the past, including (among other things) regicide, the relation of the dead to the living, and the Reviews387 interpretation of the sacrament. According to Anderson, English drama of the period, especially Shakespeare and Marlowe, as well as the work ofMilton and Marvell, enacts the attempt to diffuse and integrate these historical traumas within orderly narratives while at the same time revealing the failure of this attempt: the past takes its revenge on the present. This is an ambitious book in the sense that Anderson wants not only to describe the literary effects of repressed trauma but also to advocate an ethical attitude toward history, one in which citizens refuse to think oftheir cultures past as completed, separate from the present. In this advocacy, he relies on the recent work of the philosopher Gregg Horowitz, who writes about the perils that modernity poses to the historical imagination. To what degree these post-Kantian concerns can be persuasively translated to a pre-Enlightenment context remains a question for me.Yet when PerformingEarlyModern Trauma is at its best, it delivers striking examples of past traumatic moments refusing assimilation into narrative mediation: the rape and maiming of Lavinia (in Titus Andronicus), the beheading of King Charles (in An Horadan Ode), and King Edward's death cry (in Edward II). The two chapters on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and on Milton's and Marvell's responses to the execution of Charles I both advance highly complex arguments, which occasionally lead to obscuritybut also to the best insights of the book. In the case of Titus, Anderson juxtaposes the play's language ofvow, promise, and warrant with the shifting status of the sacrament and of contract law. Protestant theology tried to replace real presence—where the wafer simultaneously represents and enacts Christ's dispensation—with a figurative interpretation that imposed a gap between sign and divine referent. Likewise, legal theorists were in the process of replacing...