Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (review)

In the lucid introduction to their thought-provoking anthology, Curtis Perry and John Watkins announce their project to reconsider “Shakespeare’s invention of the Middle Ages” by giving new attention to “the medieval invention of Shakespeare” (p. 3). Seeking to move beyond the critical master narratives that read his plays as testimonies to an emergent modernity (or as restagings of history that resist the otherness of the past in subordinating its particularities to Tudor triumphalism) and at the same time to add nuance to the revisionary practices that rediscover characteristics of “the modern” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these essays aim to complicate notions of periodicity and historical teleology. In particular, the collection seeks to replace any single critical narrative—whether one of rupture, of transformation, or of continuity—with an emphasis on the multifarious and simultaneous traces within the Shakespearian oeuvre of “written and oral sources and cultural practices that now strike us as quintessentially medieval” (p. 3).

The resulting miscellany offers fascinating work (in some cases on some quite surprising texts) by scholars from both sides of that negotiable medieval/early modern divide. In its preliminary section, “Texts in Transition,” Christopher Worley addresses a striking deployment of the metaphor of “fee simple” in “A Lover’s Complaint,” arguing that the lamenting maid’s representation of her (lost) self-possession nostalgically evokes a feudal ideal of absolute value, even as her appropriation of its idiolect for the purposes of reflexive abstraction bears witness to a transitional historical moment in which self-reflection is hovering on the verge of self-commodification. Two powerful and complementary essays by Sarah Beckwith and Elizabeth Fowler reexamine Shakespearian drama in the post-Reformation (or rather not quite post-Reformation) moment. Beckwith, pondering the text and performance of Shakespearian “resurrections” (with an intriguing side-glance at Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy) suggests that the secular stage’s interest in the dead person returned to life translates the rituals of medieval Eucharistic worship into a new language for thinking about penitence, redemption, and the recreation of community. Discussing Hermione’s resurrection in The Winter’s Tale, she argues that Paulina’s insistence on the need for reawakened faith and Leontes’s stunned declaration, “O, she’s warm!” evoke the Corpus Christi cycles’ faithful celebration of embodiment. Fowler, by contrast, focuses upon the remaking of the social person in a Protestant world. Her subtle rereading of The Merchant of Venice argues that the play speaks to post-Reformation anxieties triggered by the attrition of the community once generated by sacramental worship. Its knottiest and most disturbing moments (Portia’s disposition of both her own person and of Shylock’s legal identity), she proposes, anatomize the limitations of those new social contracts of title and possession that locate themselves entirely in the public sphere, threatening to erase more complex social, civic, and spiritual identities. Moving into less familiar Shakespearian territory, John Watkins examines the reimagining of twelfth-century power politics in King John, arguably the author’s most “medieval” play. Watkins is especially interested in its representation of “models of sovereignty that are not nation-based” (p. 79) in the wake of the Tudors’ abandonment of their last claims to French territory. Dramatizing the usurping John’s morally dubious victory over Arthur, the technically legitimate—but “French”—heir to the English throne, Shakespeare’s representation of the undoing of dynastic Angevin claims to territory and sovereignty writes back into history a nascent notion of “Englishness.”

In a section on “Medievalism in Shakespeare’s England,” three scholars variously address the inscription of both the past and the act of reconstructing the past in the Shakespearian text. Patrick Cheney locates an intricate pattern of “traduction” and intertextuality in “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” arguing that Shakespeare’s enigmatic poem ventriloquizes and repurposes both Spenserian epic romance and Chaucerian dream vision in the process of synthesizing a tragic voice that encompasses “Chaucerian self-effacement and Spenserian self-crowning” (p. 113). While Cheney...