Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (review)

Reviews 251 Hillman, Richard, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage, Basingstoke, Macrnillan, 1997; cloth; pp. x, 309; R.R.P. not known. The use of modern theory with regard to pre-modern texts usually evokes one of two responses; for some, such a strategy can be daring, creative, and genuinely insightful, whereas for others it seems like a nonsensical project from the outset. Richard Hillman's book will no doubt drive most readers firmly to one conclusion or the other, as it makes no excuses for applying complex Lacanian theory to a range of medieval and Early Modern texts, in a largely non-historical fashion. Hillrnan argues for this non-historical examination of dramatic self-speaking (loosely defined as the representation of subjectivity), using a combination of intertextual study of Early Modern dramatic texts and the application of Jacques Lacan's subject formation. H e appropriates Lacan intertextually rather than historically, yet at the same time he suggests that 'some of Lacan's fundamental ideas and discourses of subjectivity . . . were very m u c h present to contemporary audiences (if not always seen for what they were)' (p. 13). This is a radical departure from the strong historicist trend of N e w Historicism, Cultural Materialism and some feminist criticism of Early Modern drama, all of which Hillman explicitly defines Wmself against, albeit not very convincingly (Jonathan Dollimore, Catherine Belsey and Stephen Greenblatt are difficult to undennine in a mere few pages). In his introduction, Hillman sets u p a number of connections between Early Modern dramatic self-speaking and Lacan's subject formation. H e suggests that the Renaissance uses of the mirror and book as m e t o n y m y for identity '[intersect] with the Lacanian paradigm' for the constitution of subjectivity. In the textual analysis 252 Reviews that follows, his readings, particularly of medieval uses of the mirror and the book, dofitwell with Lacanian theory, but seem no more insightful than other studies of these metonymic devices. He also makes m u c h use of the poorly explained term 'aphanisis' as central to his readings of the texts, but often this too fails to illuminate the text. Hillman focuses on the myth of Babel and its prominence in the Renaissance period, taking the view 'that the Early Modern hermeneutics of Babel anticipate poststructuralism's problematization of the processes of signification' (pp. 24-5). Again he attributes Early Modern thinking with thoroughly anachronistic poststructuralist understandings of the signified and the signifier, the result of which seems to either point to the Early M o d e m period and its texts as the hint for the ideas of Derrida and Lacan, or make the reader highly suspicious of Hillman's project as a whole. Overall I found Hillman's application of Lacanian theory difficult to follow, which could be due in part to its highly complex nature, but also, I suspect, due to the problems of Hillman's overreferencing and turgid, convoluted style. A great number of other critics are mentioned in the introduction either to be discarded or appropriated, but this creates a sense of eccentric eclecticism that undermines the radical nature of the approach, rather than clearing a distinct path the reader m a y follow. H e also uses (and rather facetiously defends) an irritating convention of quoting everything in the original language and then translating it himself, which is cumbersome and a little pretentious. O n a more positive note, Hillman does come up with some rather interesting close readings of the individual texts which, i f not strong arguments for a Lacanian view of the given text, certainly offer something worthwhile. For example, he puts an intriguing and, I thought, convincing case for masturbation as the defining theme of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost (pp. 246ff.). Reviews 253 However, his introductory discussion of masturbation as 'a specific sexual activity, shown in the process of becoming psychologically fraught' (p. 246) again asks the reader to assent to either a brilliantly transhistoricist Lacan, or a precociously modern Early Modern mindset. Also, while the extended intertextual examination of the use of the owl...