The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England (review)

Reviews229 As to the "Magical Muse," ambiguity emanates from both editor and contributors, who diverge on whether their subject is Williams as muse or Williams's muse. "Afterwords," a transcription of the concluding panel discussion moderated by Colby Kullman, is evidence of this divergence as participants debate issues ranging from unlimited publication ofmanuscripts, homosexuality/homophobia, other genres, politics in Williams and Kazan, apocalypses and futures. The only certainty that emerges is that the muse— whether Williams or Williams's—has cast her magic yet again as this volume uniquely and engagingly "snatch[es] the eternal" from a fled millennium. Janet V. Haedicke University ofLouisiana at Monroe Chris Humphrey. The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in MedievalEngland. ManchesterMedievalStudies.Manchester and NewYork: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 113. $59.95 casebound; $19.95 paperbound. "For O, for O, the hobbyhorse is forgot," said Hamlet, just before the dumb show meant to catch the king's conscience (3.2.135); with this prompt regarding its"forgetting,"the hobbyhorse is ofcourse remembered, and the assembled audiences—those present at both the play and the play-within—are forcefully reminded that the trappings of festivity are never politically neutral. Hamlet's remark may be one ofthe earliest attempts in the history ofliterary criticism to underscore the link between festive cultural practices and local politics. Chris Humphreys The Politics ofCarnival: Festive Misrule in MedievalEngland,based on the author's doctoral dissertation, is a recent addition to the bookshelf of such studies. Its aim, reiterated often in the course of this brief text, is to take arms against a sea of post-Bakhtinian cultural studies of festive misrule (his conflation offestive with misrule,and ofmisrule with unruliness, are only two ofa number ofproblematic assumptions in the book), and by nominating their limitations, correct them. Repeatedly he insists upon the need for a scholarly praxis other than "just choosing between the mutually exclusive options of safety-valve or social revolt" (22, but see also ix-x, 1, 5-6, 11-13, 19-20, 34, 5253 , 94, 97, etpassim). Like that binary, to which I know ofno current adherents, Bakhtin serves as something ofa strawhorse,or rather a dead horse,repeatedly beaten; he is quoted just twice, once in what serves as an epigraph to the book (this passage is repeated on page 30), and again on page 31, and is mentioned a 230Comparative Drama few more times in the course of the book by way of other critics' assessments. He comes in as well for some condescending tolerance (and he's not the only one, as I note further on): "Suffice to say that the terrible privations which Bakhtin endured during his life give his celebration of the popular culture of the people an extra resonance" (29); hence, one supposes, his scholarly inadequacy. Toward the end ofthe book, Humphrey revisits his dead horse in order to dismiss him: Bakhtin, it turns out, was not really interested in "the problem of carnival" at all, but rather in " 'the problem of carnivalisation', the influence of carnival forms on literature and literary genre since the Renaissance" (97). In creating a widespread critical interest in matters ofmedieval festivity, Bakhtin, for Humphrey, has not served us well, failing as he did to resolve the problem of interpreting instances of carnival, the carnivalesque, festivity, and festive misrule when we encounter them.We are still left,says Humphrey,with that unfortunate if imagined binary: "the desire to capture the essence of misrule has tended to polarise opinion into two opposing camps, one that sees misrule as radical and socially oppositional, and other [sic] which takes the line that misrule is a safety-valve which dissipates pent-up frustrations and resentments. This situation has made it difficult for those new to the field to get hold of an adequate working definition of misrule..." (97). But cultural practices do not easily submit to the kinds of working definitions that "those new to the field" can put into service. As anthropologists from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, scholars of early modern culture such as Robert Weimann,Michael Bristol,and Leah Marcus,and medievalists KathleenAshley and Gail McMurray Gibson, as well as Michel...