Elizabethan Silent Language (review)

In her Elizabethan Silent Language, Mary E. Hazard has addressed directly two of the most enduring problems to exercise scholarship on the early modern period over the past several decades, whether under the guise of new historicism, cultural materialism, or the new cultural history. These problems are how to account for the complexity of signifying practices that extend beyond the literary text, and how to devise an appropriate method for distinguishing among these signifying practices while still retaining a sense of their fundamental imbrication, both with one another and with the literary. It is difficult for critics not to view both "text" and "context" as forming a distinct totality or culture, all qualifications notwithstanding. Insofar as the difficulties of historicist scholarship have tended to reflect the contradictions of the theoretical paradigms it borrows, attempts to resolve these questions have become all the more ingenious and sophisticated (at best) or predictable and reductive (at worst). Hazard's book is no exception in that it evinces a genuine and impressive erudition as well as an appealing and idiosyncratic sensibility, but the volume finally undercuts its own originality by confining its analysis to topics that seem familiar from the work of scholars and by remaining curiously aloof from the theoretical innovations of earlier work.

Elizabethan "silent language," Hazard proposes, is best understood as the diffuse, ever-present, but largely tacit system of graphic signs and nonverbal modes of communication which was typical of many domains of Elizabethan culture and which created a pervasive web of meaning and significance for those who were adept at interpreting its codes. Hazard's study is not primarily a work of literary criticism, since it examines signifying practices across aristocratic culture as a whole; the works of Spenser, Sidney, or Shakespeare, for instance, appear in a largely illustrative way but do not themselves become privileged objects of analysis. The topic of the study might be summarized simply as the everyday symbolic practices of Elizabeth and her courtiers, and the overall lack of specificity surrounding this idea is the book's primary limitation. Although Hazard does provide a taxonomy for "silent language," organizing each section around what she views as a fundamental element of its syntax—line and plane; surface, shape, and substance; position, gesture, motion, and duration; figure and ground—her decision to survey a wide range of materials broadly rather than to focus at length on a few intricately linked examples reduces their differences and blurs conceptual distinctions. A gesture ultimately seems to create silent meaning in the same way that an emblem does, or a ritual progress, or a signature, or a graphic line in a map, despite their distinct modes of expression or individual contexts of utterance; and the kinds of meaning they generate also appear to be very similar: all reflect "a capacity for noncommittal expression, safe from the permanency of spoken or written word" (7); all "express another aesthetic sensibility," different from the one we are familiar with today (3), or "inscribe a significance beyond modern comprehension" (4).

As a consequence of this generalizing tendency, the book begins to feel reiterative; observations that should draw a discussion together instead offer vague connections and forced transitions. "The manner in which lines [lie] upon a plane is significant," Hazard concludes somewhat diffidently after citing a passage from Richard Haydocke's translation of Paolo Giovanni Lomazzo's 1598 Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge Caruinge & Buildinge: "It is now apparent that lines point to meaning—that they sometimes constitute it" (45). While the emphasis on texts and documents beyond the narrowly "literary" is justified, it also tends to diffuse Hazard's analytic effort and makes it difficult to assess what final conclusions she is drawing from her material. The thrust of the book becomes illustrative or thematic rather than argumentative or expositional, proceeding through the enumeration of details and concepts, all of which tend to carry the same...