The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture (review)

The Forms of Renaissance Thought is a festschrift in honor of Stephen Orgel, whose work is certainly well known to readers of Shakespeare Quarterly. From his early writings on Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones up to his recent book on Shakespeare, Orgel has been among the most influential voices in Shakespeare criticism, theater history, and Renaissance studies. He has published on art history, Renaissance literature, gender and sexuality, theater, and the history of the book. It is very much to the credit of its editors that Forms of Renaissance Thought reflects Orgel’s broad range of expertise. Barkan, Cormack, and Keilen organize the book around three topics: reception (essays by Barkan, Keilen, Michael Wyatt, and Margreta de Grazia); sexuality, desire, and the body (Jonathan Goldberg, Cormack, Peter Holland, and Valerie Traub); and materialism (A. R. Braunmuller, Anston Bosman, William Sherman, and a coauthored essay by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass). As the list of authors suggests, the essays in this volume represent work by some of the most innovative and interesting scholars in early modern studies today. Moreover, any number of these essays could have fit under other topics. For instance, Sherman’s essay is as much about reception as it is about materialism. He underscores how the desire for authenticity may give rise to tensions between users of library collections of old books and those employing an internet archive housing electronic files. Braunmuller’s essay on bearded ladies on stage and more broadly in Tudor-Stuart culture is as much about sexuality, desire, and the body as it is about material culture and practices. This observation is not intended as a criticism of the volume. Rather, it speaks to the strength of the essays, which demonstrate Orgel’s influence in their difficulty to categorize, and to the volume as a whole.

One of the more interesting aspects of Forms of Renaissance Thought is that the editors present it as a muted festschrift. Their aim is less to praise Orgel’s career than to expand the implications of his scholarship and move early modern studies forward. Taking issue with the idea that social and material networks of meaning and power fully account for literary and artistic production, while mindful of history’s determining force, the editors situate the volume at the crossroads of history and imagination, between the historicism of the past thirty-five years and the formal and aesthetic questions that may supersede it. How do works of art register social and material networks? How do works of art pass beyond what is thinkable at a particular historical moment? For Barkan, Cormack, and Keilen, the key term is form, which—following Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes—they propose is both saturated by historical context and simultaneously unmoored from that context. Form is determined and free, derivative and imaginative, a means of imitation and a source of invention.

In the essays themselves, form becomes a fairly roomy analytic tool. One of the pleasures of reading Forms of Renaissance Thought lies in exploring the various ways in which the essays play with form as a critical device. Form might have to do with the shaping of an old volume of poetry. As de Grazia argues, attending to the formal arrangement of Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems allows us to see the work less as an edition and more as an imaginative reading; this in turn changes the very concept of what a seventeenth-century edition might be or a seventeenth-century book publisher might do. Or form might have to do with the shaping of the past—as Keilen maintains in his discussion of the figure of the golden age in C. S. Lewis, Nashe, and Lyly—or the use of the past to shape the present—as Wyatt demonstrates in his analysis of Florio’s translations of Boccaccio. Or form might have to do...