Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (review)

Marjorie Garber dumbfounded many of her auditors at the 2002 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America by proclaiming that, while history is unfailingly interesting and helpful to the literary critic, our proper work is the analysis of literature, the study of how a poem or play works and why it is the way it is. Her larger contention—that early modern studies are, like most kinds of criticism, inevitably cyclical, and that we are now entering upon a new phase of formal analysis—is one among several indicators that design has again become a respectable object of scrutiny. Another is the special issue of Modern Language Quarterly edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown titled Reading for Form (2000). Still another is the publication of the volume reviewed here.

"The aim of this collection is to encourage a shift in the study of English Renaissance literature, a shift toward a fuller and more self-conscious engagement with questions of form" (1). So begins the editor's gently polemical introduction to a book conceived to contest and supply an alternative to "modes of analysis that for all their methodological sophistication tend to interpret Renaissance works as bundles of historical or cultural content, without much attention to the ways that their meanings are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form" (1). This is about as rebarbative as the discussion gets: throughout his introductory remarks Rasmussen remains measured and generous about the major players on the critical stage.

His roster of contributors includes both new and old names, but it is fair to say that Rasmussen has not rounded up the usual suspects; and for that, as well as clear prose and constructive tone, he is to be commended. The collection divides into two main sections, "Toward a Historical Formalism," and "Renewing the Literary." Anyone who has not been living in a cave since 1975 will immediately recognize the motive of each of these categories, the influence of historicism in the first instance and the concomitant depreciation of the literary in the second. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the essays in the first section, those by Stephen Cohen, Douglas Bruster, Heather Dubrow, and Joseph Loewenstein, engage readily with theoretical problems and offer to assess the murky status of the current critical scene; and that the essays in Part II, those by Paul Alpers, Mark Womack, William Flesch, and Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, focus more specifically on the "literary" properties of texts and demonstrate ways those properties might be treated. But the two categories are not discrete, since most of the critics in Part II perforce raise questions of theory, and most of the theorists in Part I also examine literary artifacts. The book concludes with an overview by Richard Strier, a characteristically lively piece Fishily titled "How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't Do Without It."

The single most valuable feature of this book is that Rasmussen and his contributors do not regard recent interest in formal questions as a "return" to some happier state of criticism, an ideal mode unwisely abandoned decades ago and now fortunately reclaimed. On the contrary, they seek to understand how our methodologies for treating the distinctively literary qualities of imaginative works have been altered by the dominant voices of the past two decades, specifically the work of the new-historicist critics. Rasmussen (with several others) points out that an irreconcilable antagonism between formalism and historicism is an inescapable feature of new historicism's early need to define itself, and, as an alternative, he proposes to plot the intersections and contiguities of the two modes: for example, he cites Montrose's interest in "the cultural functions of literary form" and reminds us that much new-historicist work has been attacked "as a disguised formalism that takes culture, rather than literature, as the object of its analysis" (12n). Similarly, Rasmussen and most of his contributors explicitly eschew such labels as...