The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, and: "The Muses Common-Weale": Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (review)

Reviews Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, ed., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. ix + 377 pp. $42 cloth, $14.95 paper. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, ed., "The Muses Common-Weale": Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989. viii + 223 pp. $28. by Christopher Hill These two volumes make curious reading for an outsider like myself, an Englishman and a historian interested in literature. I start by wondering in a philistine way whether anyone outside a tiny academic circle cares whether these critics call themselves historicists or new historicists, bigendians or little-endians. What does matter is whether their approach helps us to appreciate literature better and to understand history better. If they do that, as the best of the contributors to these volumes do, a little jargon and invocation of saints can be forgiven, even if not applauded. It is gratifying that the names of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan no longer have to be invoked three times in every essay, as insecure Marxists in my younger days invoked Marx, Engels, Lenin. De Man and Althusser have taken back seats recently, with Stalin. Some of my unease was clearly felt by Richard Strier, Leah Marcus, Richard Helgerson, and James G. Turner, who participated in a stimulating discussion at the end of "The Muses Common-Weale" (henceforth referred to as "M"). "Literary theory is turning into a hermetic and airless orthodoxy," complains James Turner (p. 215). He wants to "call into question the whole process of labelling critics old-fashioned or new-fangled. ... It would be genuinely innovative, even subversive, to cut the designer labels off our discourse" (p. 217). Richard Strier remarks that "the propagandists for 'new 44BOOK REVIEWS historicism' — much more than the major practitioners — have promulgated a certain amount of cant. . . . What seems important to me is not that 'new historicism' theorize its practice, or define itself clearly against its 'competitors,' but that the people who do it get on with their practice" (pp. 214-15). "Many contemporary scholars who would consider themselves New Historicists," say Heather Dubrow and Strier in their Introduction to The Historical Renaissance (henceforth referred to as "H"), "are doing work that is closely related to that of their predecessors" (p. 4). How could it possibly be otherwise? What needs watching, they delicately indicate, is the danger that new historicism becomes old antiquarianism, and an assumption that "a striking anecdote is representative or revelatory" (p. 10). Stephen Greenblatt has a happy knack of picking on revelatory anecdotes which have representative significance: not all of his admirers are equally perspicacious. Perhaps I may give an example of historical imagination usefully at work which I came across recently when I was working on Bunyan. Countless Bedforshire scholars have identified places in The Pilgrim's Progress — an old bog that could be the Slough of Despond, a little bump in the flat Bedfordshire plain which could just possibly be the Delectable Mountains, and so on and so on. None of this helps us to understand Bunyan'sallegory. ButJames Turner, in "Bunyan's Sense of Place" (in 7"r»e Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey), pointed out that the giants and monsters who oppose the pilgrim act precisely like enclosing landlords trying to prevent itinerants and vagrants using the King's highway or squatting on what used to be common land, in order to force them to work for the landlord's inadequate wages. Giant Despair has jurisdictional rights and a lock-up: he is a Justice of the Peace. That insight does help us to recapture social criticism which Bunyan's contemporary readers, and his eighteenth-century readers, would at once have recognized. Nineteenth-century nonconformist readings and twentieth-century academic readings have come between us and what Bunyan wrote. Giant Despair, writes Turner with some relish, is "less an abstract or existential inner state than the emotional response of the poor Christian to repression and social contempt." By enabling us to recover the text as contemporaries must have read it, Turner has given us a fresh understanding. BOOK REVIEWS45 Among the...