Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn, and: The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (review)

There is a tide in the affairs of academia which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune—or its pale academic equivalent. Are we in fact at such a moment of tidal shift now, as new historicism enters its third decade as the dominant critical paradigm of early modern studies? Douglas Bruster, in his astutely reasoned and provocative critical brief toward a paradigm shift in Shakespeare studies, argues that the tide is indeed ready to shift—or should be. Bruster begins by investigating the ubiquity of the term culture in Shakespeare studies since the 1980s. By no means completely negative in his assessment of cultural criticism, Bruster is nevertheless on target in his claim that an important weakness of most such criticism has been a preference for the local and the particular rather than the general and the broad, especially because this disallows criticism whose strength lies in the disclosure of forests rather than trees. The second book under review here, Agnes Heller's The Time Is Out of Joint, exemplifies the kind of book that Bruster argues has been unjustly slighted by critical privileging of the local and particular.

His antidote to Geertzian thick description is what Bruster calls "thin description," which "involves counting, . . . casting one's net as widely as possible" (49), and adhering to rules of evidence. But it also involves "deep focus," which "let[s] viewers see . . . various planes at the same time and 'place' their objects in relationship with one another" (60). In these two different metaphors, then, Bruster implicitly defines the Scylla and Charybdis of his proposed method. Counting and casting is pointless without deep focus, without study of a proposed theory of the interrelationship of objects—stage props, plays, books. But deep focus can be meaningful only if its objects are in fact representative of the culture that produced them—a requirement that Bruster identifies as having been often neglected by the new historicists. In short, the proponent of thin description has to find a path between mere pedantry or pointless empiricism on one side and the empty, arbitrary connectedness of nonrepresentative artifacts on the other.

Bruster offers examples of thin description with three essay-chapters in the middle of the book—chapter 3 on the interplay of style and self in the print world as leading to an emerging public sphere, chapter 4 on patterns in the use of stage props in the development of the English professional theater, and chapter 5 on the portrayal of female-female eroticism in early modern drama. These chapters are interesting and intelligent, contributing fresh viewpoints on the topics under consideration. Whether they cumulatively illustrate a coherent new critical method is less clear.

For me, the most successful of these demonstration chapters is chapter 3, "The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England," which combines its copious research material with a paradoxical and compelling thesis about the liveliness, theatricality, and obsession with things bodily and personal in what Bruster contends is an emerging public sphere in the 1590s. I cannot do justice to the intricacies of Bruster's discussion here, but it will be rewarding to all interested in understanding the formation of a truly public sphere of discourse in early modern England.

The last group of chapters—Part 3, titled "Critical Culture"—focuses on contemporary criticism in Shakespeare and related early modern studies. Chapter 7 focuses on the underdiscussed topic of what constitutes evidence. Bruster asserts that there is a mismatch between the avowed aims of today's historicist criticism and the methods it actually employs. If scholars of English literature should shift focus from the interpretation of texts to the interpretation...