The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt (review)

This collection of essays has a distinctly local flavour with all eleven contributors (apart from Greenblatt himself) being Australian-based. The Introduction begins with an account of the largely acrimonious response to Barry Kosky's 1998 production of King Lear and moves immediately into detailing the Touch of the Real: Communing with the Living and the Dead symposium at Canberra's Humanities Research Centre from which this volume of essays emerged. The casting of these two concurrent events against what Kelly calls 'the intensely ambivalent relationship that contemporary Australians have with Shakespeare' (p. ix) may lead the reader to expect a rehash of familiar 'colonial' perspectives on Shakespeare. Yet, the subject matter here is broader and more rewarding, focussing on a multiplicity of early modern writers and always conversant with the ideas of Stephen Greenblatt.

The collection seeks to cover three broad areas of early modern cultural studies – canon formation, the complexity of identity and the opening of new worlds. The opening essay by Greenblatt is a proper example of new historicist theory, reading Shakespeare via Austen's Mansfield Park as a springboard to discuss the more general status of Shakespeare's canon as England's 'substitute' constitution. The point here is the waning centrality of canonical English works in the more general appellation of English Literature which, in universities, are 'now being taught alongside a range of new figures, Salman Rushdie for example, or Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, or Derek Walcott' (p. 7). The message here seems to be that literary history is less about establishing a narrative of continuity and organicism, conveyed through a few select works, but about moments of unforeseeable rupture and shift, as reflected in the constant change of the English language itself.

Still the question remains, why is a book of historicist essays on early modern culture so narrowly focused on Shakespeare? Peter Holbrook supplies an interesting and mostly satisfying answer in his essay 'Shakespeare at the birth of Historicism'. Dating the birth of modern historicism to eighteenth-century Germany, and particularly to the work of Herder, Holbrook identifies the concurrent appropriation of Shakespeare by German Romantics as an affront to the neo-classicism of Napoleonic French cultural imperialism. In short, Holbrook wants to show that the connection between historicism and Shakespeare is more than accidental. It derives from the appropriation of Shakespeare as a medium through which to express the virtues of historicist readings, as well as the fact that there is 'something genuinely historicist in Shakespeare's texts' (p. 27).

Lee Scott Taylor's essay deals with another vital area of historicist study – appropriation and representation of Shakespeare on film. The essay is interesting in showing how we can discuss Shakespeare in a way that bypasses stage performance almost entirely in order to consider the internal conflict between the aesthetics of history and actual history. The contentious representation of Richard III in Shakespeare's play represents a reliable starting point for such discussions, and works particularly well here in relation to the 1995 film starring Ian McKellen as its aesthetic is a complex mix of Mosley's fascist movement in Britain and Nazism. Taylor is essentially arguing that history and aestheticism are not necessarily separate phenomena, but intertwined and Shakespeare's Richard III is a wonderful example, especially when transferred to film. Taylor reminds us that the plays are actively involved in 'making history', rather than simply reporting it.

Part One of the collection is rounded off with essays by Ron Bedford on the uses of irony in Milton and Bob White's study of 'Humanisms Old and New'. Bedford's essay points to a theoretical impasse for historicism, when dealing with abstract principles such as irony – in short the history and 'ownership' of irony at the point of usage, both of which are layered, continually obscured and indistinct...