Yr ysgol Gymraeg

I was among the first generation of undergraduates to use the term "early modern" as a matter of course. There was no Renaissance for me, as much as I needed one, nor sculpted lectures on the awakening of an expressive consciousness lying half awake beneath a veil. My renaissance was more pugnacious, less blinking eyes adjusting to the light, and more dragging you into the parking lot for a swift kicking. A nervy sort of insolence emanated from the faculty who taught me Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne, which, as I came to understand, arose from their perception that they were engaged in a struggle to rouse literary studies from its torpor. This was 1988, poised between Jean Howard's essay "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies" and the second edition of Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, a time when developments in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature seemingly set the agenda for all literary criticism.

I was an undergraduate at the Cardiff University studying under Catherine Belsey and Terence Hawkes, having arrived not only as an undistinguished student but also as a borderline delinquent who should not have been admitted were it not for the fact that two colleges had merged that year and had seats to fill. There was also the minor miracle that was an 'A' in my English Literature 'A' level, an accomplishment I had managed by memorizing large passages of A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy and folding them into an essay on Hamlet. As such, I possessed no concept of what literary criticism might be beyond a contorted language of connoisseurial affect, the like of which I had never heard in real life save for when my parents made fun of posh people. Studying for an exam meant cultivating an ear for pastiche.

If literary criticism had been a ventriloquist's trick, I credit my introduction to the term "early modern" with showing me all it could be. In contrast to art-historical labels that set the past in amber, early modernity revealed a vista of change and discontinuity that illuminated the many points of articulation between literature and the world. Texts were no longer static objects waiting to be rhapsodized, but garrulous, dialogic sites of social contestation in which one was suddenly able to trace patterns of, say, gender formation, or the relationship of work to class, from Bosworth Field to the present day. Freshly armed with Raymond Williams's concept of the differential dynamics of emergent, dominant, and residual trajectories, I felt as if I had been suddenly alerted to the existence of the tectonic plates and could see the continents being formed.

If it sounds revelatory, it is because it was—for me. Not only had something vital been made of this inalimental thing called criticism, there was a second aspect that I enjoyed immensely—a knocky partisanship that placed you on one side of a notional barricade that, this being Britain, was naturally drawn along class lines. Early modern aligned you squarely with critics whose work was both broadly Marxist and infused with "theory," then understood as a loose aggregation of suggestive intellectual moments from which one might borrow piecemeal prior to its imminent repackaging as "Continental Philosophy," a rightly rigorous discipline that would require far more rigor than many of us were up for. It was no accident that the most enthusiastic champions of theory were professors in departments like Cardiff, or that other hotbed of cultural materialism, the University of Sussex, departments that bore their provincialism as a badge of honor, outsiders leading the assault on the unreconstructed heart of Oxbridge academia. This thrilled me, as merely by dividing my time between the pub and the library, I could bring the Establishment to its knees. As finals drew near, I signed up for a PhD.

The dissertation I wrote—on the trope of iconophobic sight in early modern drama—was in every way a product of its moment, vaguely Foucauldian, vaguely Lacanian, worrying at an absent center as it sought to show how the anxiety of vision revealed a crisis in political representation that anticipated the English...