Text/Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History (review)

For more than three decades, New Historicists have been arguing that printed Renaissance texts, which necessarily see actions from a partial perspective, have given “reports” or “interpretations” of occurrences, but never an objective “truth” of them. Sandra Logan uses this observation as the premise of her book and, concentrating on such writings, coins the term “text/events” for them. Her “poetics of history,” therefore, is an elaboration, often in extraordinary detail, of what has now become an accepted commonplace. “What I aim to uncover in this project, by reading across retrospective accounts, is some sense of that immediate experientiality, as well as a more profound sense of the mediating role of writers who shape the textual traces of history” (2). “Focusing especially on the representational strategy of moving readers and/or audiences toward a sense of intimate access and knowledge through logical, rational, ethical, and emotional appeals, this book considers the historiographic and dramatic reimagining of the Elizabethan past and present through inscriptive depictions of the (largely invented) feelings, motives, and goals of historical and fictive figures” (6). The book follows various uses of hypotyposis (“vividness,” “directness”) through characterization of persons, times, and places to suggest the effect such historical writings might have had in their own time. But such “counterfeit representations” (24) are not mimetic; they remain interpretive, at times running contrary to contemporary beliefs while “necessarily” representing “hegemonic perspectives” (23).

Four long, heavily-noted chapters deal in turn with accounts of the coronation entry of Elizabeth I into London, the 1575 Kenilworth entertainment staged for her by the Earl of Leicester, chronicle representations of Richard II, and 1590s dramatizations of that reign appropriated by accounts of the Essex trial of 1601. Amid the pressing crowds and noisy reception of Elizabeth I, no one could actually see or hear much of the queen’s coronation entry; they relied instead on the account of Richard Mulcaster, which was selective and shaped to support the queen as constant and Protestant, an account at odds with Henry Machyn’s diary, which recounted an event heavy with Catholic symbolism, and Alisio Schivenoglia’s dispatch to the Castellan of Mantova, which reported that the accession of an unmarried woman represented a decline in the monarchy. George Gascoigne’s poetic and sophisticated account of the Kenilworth entertainment was attuned to its semiotic signals while the printer Richard Jhones promoted the social role of the event and claimed thoroughness and accuracy. Robert Langham’s Letter describing the event, however, was a critique of Leicester.

The third examination compares the accounts of the reign of Richard II by the chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed. Hall puts a premium on immediacy and (often invented) speeches while refusing to rely on any one source including the reports of eyewitnesses. His aim is to memorialize the past and provide exempla for the present and the future; to assure this, he pictures rulers as making rational choices, not caught up in predeterminations of the day. Conversely, Holinshed’s Chronicles is heavily narrative and, refusing rhetorical embellishment, argues the role of providence in British history. His account of the confrontation of Richard and Bolingbroke, however, depends largely on “a French pamphlet that features a somewhat duplicitous Bolingbroke who arranges for the ambush and capture of the king” (234).

The final chapter examines the play of Woodstock, and the author’s support of the monarchy and his nostalgia for an eroding socioeconomic system, alongside John Hayward’s Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII with its Tacitean perspective —promoting “history’s didactic and memorial function” (291) — and Francis Bacon’s Declaration, which draws parallels between the treason of Bolingbroke and that of Essex. “Hayward’s Henrie IIII and Essex’s actions thus come to be mutually constitutive, with the history implicitly situated retrospectively as a means to alter public perceptions about the legitimacy of the earl’s coup d’etat, which had not been attempted...