Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representations in Early Modern England (review)

Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representations in Early Modern England is a provocative collection of fifteen essays, with an excellent introduction by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, and a concluding essay by Michael McKeon. Conceived as a collection of case studies written by scholars working in different disciplines, all of whom are engaged with either early modern conceptions of the life or with conceptualizing the biographical project, the volume represents an attempt to apply the same subtlety that has been shown in the interpretation of literary texts to the interpretation of early modern lives. The editors hope that the application of the methods and approaches of recent criticism to the lives of early-modern men and women will "enhance and extend the biographical archive and project" (v). The volume accomplishes that goal, and, in doing so, it contributes to the creation of a theoretical discussion of biography which has been lacking in literary and historical criticism. However, because ordinary lives are not represented at all in this volume and only four of the fifteen essays deal with the lives of women (all of whom are queens or aristocrats), the collection does little to dispel the stereotype that biography is a predominantly male phenomenon.

Each of the essays in Writing Lives explores in some way the terms in which early-modern persons understood and wrote their lives, and many of them go further to suggest the implications such different understandings may have for our practice as biographers. Formally, each essay emphasizes the micro-historical and the fragmentary over grand master narratives taking their cue from contemporary theory. Michael McKeon, in the concluding essay, writes the grand narrative, seeing in the period a movement from the exemplary life understood as one of social greatness and political prominence to a celebration and publication of ordinariness, of the common man.

Following the work of feminist historians, in particular Elspeth Graham and Patricia Crawford, the volume as a whole examines the emergence of biography as a recognizable genre from the myriad ways early-modern persons understood and wrote their lives. Individual essays often begin by remarking on the generic openness of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century modes of life-writing. Essays are organized loosely around the materials out of which early lives were fashioned: literature, painting, spiritual practices, and affective relationships. The editors hope to expand the resources for biography beyond the archive and to counter the privileging of the factual in traditional biography (5). A major theme of the essays is the acceptance of the imagined or fantasized life into the archive of biography. Andrew Hadfield describes Edmund Spenser's fantasy of a voyeuristic Queen Elizabeth peering in envy through his bedroom window on his wedding night to underscore Spenser's "erotic selfhood, … and his transgressive political daring" (5). Essays by Thomas N. Corns and Harold Love, writing about John Milton and Roger North, suggest that rumor, innuendo, and gossip, because they are constituents of "social selfhood," should also be admitted as an important biographical resource. Two essays interpret paintings as one of the central sites for early modern self-presentation. Alastair Bellany's essay on George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham, reads a series of Rubens' equestrian portraits to illustrate how Villiers transformed himself from the younger son of a decayed gentry family into the all-powerful royal favorite with a dukedom and unparalleled influence over domestic, military and diplomatic affairs. Julia Marciari Alexander's essay "Painting a Life: The Case of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland" is especially important for its attention to the need to read the nonverbal—but, nonetheless permanent—ways in which early modern women might have constructed their public personae (184).

Closely linked to the emphasis on the ways lives were imagined or fantasized is the focus on material evidence of affective traces in writings and documents. Frances Harris, the only published biographer writing for the collection, articulates...