Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (review)

Paula Blank offers us a novel and fruitful key through which we can unlock hitherto ignored dimensions of Renaissance moral thought. Her focus is measurement and the attempt to quantify (and resist quantifying) various dimensions of life. Commensurating values or regarding them as incommensurable has become a central debate both within modern philosophy of science and within contemporary ethics, the moral variant of the question being whether values can be ranked according to some single criterion or whether values are incomparable heterogeneous goods. To this reviewer's knowledge, within literary studies this debate — much less the intellectual motivation that underlies it or its various ramifications — is virtually unknown. Blank's book mines Shakespeare's usage of measurement and quantification to uncover what strikes Blank as Shakespeare's insistence on the shortcomings and distorted imposition inherent to quantifying all dimensions of life. Right or wrong in her specific thesis, this attempt opens up a fertile gateway into a vitally important side of the psychology and morality packed into Shakespearean representations.

Blank first historicizes the ambivalent status of measurement within the early modern context: on the one hand, the already manifest predilection for publicly verifiable fact and the ubiquity of cardinal quantification that would later characterize the emerging new science. On the other hand, the powerful circulation of ancient skepticism with its capacity to destabilize any measurement by recursively demanding an (ultimately nonexistent) underlying arch-criterion. As Blank deftly shows, this latter problem, known in epistemology as "the problem of the criterion," attained a rather amusing embodiment in the annoying challenge to verify and unify weights and measurements in England. Who's "foot" constitutes the (measuring) foot? The monarch's? Perhaps an average of the size of sixteen left (!) feet of men that had just exited the church? Such options are mentioned along with the irritating problems that they inevitably spawn, highlighting the all-too-real distressing manifestation of skepticism. All this is important because when we think of skepticism in Shakespeare's England we typically have in mind rather lofty matter: Montaigne's influence or the rediscovery and translation of Sextus. We should accordingly applaud Blank for providing us with a much more palpable instantiation of the skeptical challenge and introducing us to its plebeian reach. This survey constitutes a prelude to a detailed discussion of the literary deployment of measurement within the plays and sonnets: the main stuff of the book.

All of the chapters exhibit rich, erudite, and unexpected contextualization of the plays that they discuss. The chapter on meter ably surveys literature that discomforts a simple assessment of Shakespeare as conforming to iambic pentameter. The chapter on Shylock and Iago mounts a surprising argument advocating Iago's Judaism. The chapter on Lear foregrounds the mathematical substructure of the play, not merely the quantification of love, but the question of determining merit. "How does one gauge merit?" asks Blank, opening up the (pre-Nietzschean) possibility that merit as such is a mirage, a playing out of a deeply-seated drive that is repaid and acknowledged by cultural institutions that pay homage to this need, but are in effect means for occluding the alarming, despondent bareness of a valueless reality. The chapter on Measure for Measure recovers valuable background on the deployment of the "lesbian rule" and the problem of casuistic problem-solving in the context of law, and this by way of situating the problems of judicial reasoning and action that are staged in the play.

This reviewer would have wished Blank to strengthen and amplify the hooks tying these discussions onto the overarching interests of the volume, as these are not always obvious (nor do the contextualizing discussions always lead clearly into the plays discussed). Some readers would also find it difficult to share Blank's move from textual analysis to Shakespeare's own beliefs: "Shakespeare remains uncertain as to whether mathematical measures of any kind, are apt to the purpose of determining justice" (147). Others would...