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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and the Middle Ages
  • Tamara Atkin
Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds. Shakespeare and the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv, 295. £56.00; $99.00.

Writing twenty years ago, Brian Stock argued that “the Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself” (Listening for the Text [End Page 360] [1990], 69). Shakespeare and the Middle Ages is predicated on two related premises: that Shakespeare invented the Middle Ages, and that he was invented by the Middle Ages. Moreover, since Shakespeare “has become a frequent stand in for the modernity of the early modern” (5), the volume seeks to approach broader questions about early modern modernity and interrogate critical narratives about the relationship of the medieval to the early modern. As such, Shakespeare and the Middle Ages contributes to a growing body of recent collections that seek to refigure accepted period designations.

Drawing together the work of a multidisciplinary group of scholars, the collection is arranged in three parts. The first, “Texts in Transition,” which includes essays by Sarah Beckwith, Elizabeth Fowler, John Watkins, and Christopher Warley, questions narratives about the transition from the medieval to the early modern as a shift from feudalism to capitalism, Catholicism to Protestantism, and dynastic to national identity. While at least one of the aims of this section is to dismantle some aspects of the sharp division between the medieval and the early modern, “the historiographic attractions of a rigid opposition,” (13) though playfully explored, are not always so successfully resisted. For instance, in his essay “Shakespeare's Fickle Fee-Simple: A Lover's Complaint, Nostalgia, and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” Warley argues that by combining the genre of the female complaint with the language of feudalism, A Lover's Complaint participates in the creation of a new, commodified system of social interaction. However, by ignoring medieval texts, like Piers Plowman, which similarly contribute to the emergence of commodification through a longing for originary value, his essay ultimately confirms rather than challenges conventional wisdom about periodization.

The second section, “Medievalism in Shakespearean England,” which features essays by Patrick Cheney, William Kuskin, Brian Walsh, and Curtis Perry, is concerned with the potency of the medieval past as an early modern construct. Here, attempts to challenge the linear progression from the medieval to the early modern are perhaps more successful, and nowhere more so than in Kuskin's subtle work titled “Recursive Origins: Print History and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI.” Resisting the kind of critical work that reads Chaucer as the dawn-star of the Renaissance, Kuskin recuperates such fifteenth-century authors as Lydgate, Malory, Skelton, and Caxton as powerful precedents for sixteenth-century literature. And, by attending to the ways that Shakespeare's first [End Page 361] printed play, The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594), both appropriates and subordinates the fifteenth century, he presents the compelling argument that Shakespeare's innovation is better understood as a process of “repeated return” (129).

The three essays by Michael O’Connell, Karen Sawyer Marsalek, and Rebecca Krug that make up the final section, “Shakespeare and the Resources of Medieval Culture,” similarly argue against Shakespeare's unique genius, here by tracing the continuities between various medieval traditions (morality plays, mystery plays, and religious exemplum) and his plays. In attending to the recurrence of motifs (the summons of death, the resurrection of the Antichrist, the debate between the four daughters of God, the bond story, and the casket story) across the medieval/early modern divide, these essays are concerned more with tracing patterns than they are with identifying sources. In the case of O’Connell's essay, “King Lear and the Summons of Death,” this leads to the useful conclusion that medieval drama is more properly adjacent than anterior to early modern theater. But elsewhere, as in Sawyer Marsalek's reading of the resurrected Falstaff in 1 Henry IV as a type of Antichrist, the lack of historical specificity can make some of the arguments in this section seem forced.

While the collection's broad aim to interrogate critical narratives about the Otherness of the medieval past might not...

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