Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello' (review)

In his study, Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello', Andrew James Johnston sets out to 'explore the cultural self-knowledge of medieval texts' and to reveal how those texts critique a concept of modernity which 'attempts to define itself through casting the Middle Ages in the role of its absolute Other' (p. 313). His concurrent mission seems to be a dismantling of scholarly constructions that fix the Middle Ages 'in the realm of the mindlessly archaic' against the supposed self-awareness of the Renaissance (p. 313). Johnston chooses as his field of exploration the area of aristocratic nostalgia and heroic chivalry; he also chooses five texts, each of which presents an image of the chivalric warrior and critiques the culture which produced it. These five texts - Beowulf, Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale', Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Shakespeare's Othello - share an uneasy relationship, representing different periods, genres, and places in the canon, yet each, Johnston demonstrates, reveals an alternative reading of medieval chivalry.

Johnston's approach is reassuringly methodical. He opens each chapter with an extensive survey and critique of the scholarly literature. He then moves on to a close textual analysis of one or more passages that reveal either a self-knowledge or narrative contradiction within the structure of the text. Central to each chapter is a discussion of either orality or narrative subjectivity, as Johnston uncovers self-consciously literary forms of discourse which function as a means of cultural self-scrutiny and self-fashioning.

The most immediate impression of Johnston's 342-page volume, however, is that of the overwhelming amount of scholarly debate (presented with a surfeit of footnotes) surrounding passages sometimes as brief as five lines. Johnston spends a lot of time sorting critics into proponents or opponents of New Criticism, and maintaining a critical distance from the New Historicism, which, he claims, reduces the heterogeneity of texts to a 'total explanatory system' (p. 14). While introducing his own approach as fundamentally historicist, he does trot out a requisite list of various critical theorists whose work has informed his understanding. His methodology relies primarily on traditional textual analysis, along with a liberal dose of literary anthropology and cultural history, and his arguments are ultimately text-based, dealing with matters of semantics, syntax, structure, translation, and dramatic irony. But at times he offers up Foucault (most often as a foil) and Bakhtin, along with a few other postmodern theorists, to bolster his interpretation. Johnston's frequent comparative detours - touching on twentieth-century crime novels, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Aztec deification myths, among others - are always interesting, if somewhat tangential and lengthier than perhaps necessary, and they add a postmodern eclecticism to his medievalist view.

Given the title of this monograph, one might expect Johnston to make more use of theories of performance and performativity, which in his introduction he claims offer 'a particularly elegant way of investing a text with the potential for generating meanings for which a given culture may at first glance possess no modes of direct expression' (p. 17). However, his exploration of 'performance' is limited to a reading of the narrative interplay, contextuality, and intertextuality enacted by a particular text. Johnston thoroughly describes but does not always add to the orality/literacy debate, camping on the side of literacy when it comes to Beowulf and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and while he also investigates performativity as identity construction (á la Judith Butler) when dealing with Othello and Renaissance self-fashioning, his interpretation again focuses on narrative strategies and textual nuances. Building on this interpretation of 'performance', Johnston examines Queen Wealhtheow's use of oratory and ritual gestures in Beowulf, the Knight's voyeuristic narration of Emily's religious rituals and subsequent loss of narrative control, Gawain's moral struggle with confession and secrecy, the feigned orality of the Wheel of Fortune and the Alliterative Morte Arthure's...