Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism, and Renaissance texts (review)

312 Reviews Sejanus, he considers the ways in which selfhood is perilously shaped by the sharing of secrets and the instigation of intrigue. In Epicoene, he finds that despite the pervasive concern 'with the threat of intimate, private actions to subvert public identities and responsibilities, there is simply no mechanism for generating the illusion of a private self (p. 79). The play rather undermines notions of a 'private, potent male self, as fashioned in contemporary legal, political and theological discourses (p. 103). Perhaps the most impressive line of argument running throughout the book works around issues of secret knowledge and textual interpretation. The prefatory material in Jonson's plays is rich in statements attacking readers w h o seek to 'decipher' the texts, searching for a topical interpretative code. Slights combines a critical questioning of these authorial directives with a subtie analysis of interpretation and misinterpretation in the plays. The strong final chapter on Bartholomew Fair argues that all the characters are searching in some way for 'licence to pursue their own individual desires', and the play's comedy principally derives from then misconstruction of authorising texts (p. 148). Like the critics Jonson attacked, the characters of Bartholomew Fair constantly look beyond appearances, towards arcane yet self-justifying interpretations, of anything from the Bible to a ballad. Social interaction thereby collapses under the weight of obfuscation and confusion. The play's 'common mode of discourse ... is the secret whose sense escapes everyone on stage' (p. 166). Ben Jonson and the art of secrecy does not completely fulfil its initial promise, fading short in its claim to analyse the 'cultural work' of secrets in early m o d e m England. The author's careful reading, however, produces some valuable analysis of Jonson's major texts, particularly in the chapters on Sejanus, Volpone and Bartholomew Fair. Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Strier, Richard, Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism, and Renaissance texts, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xiii, 239; R R P US$38.00. Recent studies in Early M o d e m literature have evidenced an emergent scepticism about the dominant critical practices of the past twenty years. Scholars seem increasingly able to view poststructuralist theory and the new Reviews 313 historicism with a sense of historical perspective, and increasingly willing to revive notions of empiricism and humanism. In Resistant structures, Richard Strier claims a place at the forefront of this loose revisionist movement. His eight essays, concerned at once with dismanding the power of theory and demonstrating the enduring values of close reading, demand the attention of anybody interested in the future of Renaissance studies. Strier's tide sets the 'resistant structures' of literary texts against attempts to impose potentially restrictive systems of interpretation. H e targets readers weighted by theoretical or historical presuppositions, who fail to attend to the often surprising particularities oftexts.H e admits a debt to William Empson, for 'his verbal and philosophical alertness, his nonprogrammatic curiosity and bafflement, and his complete lack of theoretically imposed inhibitions in approachingtexts'(p. 7). This approach, for Strier as for Empson, is combined with an eye for the politics of literature. One of the most impressive aspects of this book is its challenge to strategies, which Strier identifies in both 'old' and 'new' historicism, in the work of E. M . W . Tillyard as in that of Michel Foucault, which limit the range of the thinkable in a past age. Strier works instead to uncover the 'impossible radicalism' of his period. The book'sfirstsection examines several 'general schemes' embraced by different critics (p. 4). Given Strier's aim to challenge current orthodoxies, it is odd that he should devote a chapter to the dusty controversy between Empson and Rosemond Tuve, and another to the soft target of Stanley Fish's quirky Self-consuming artifacts (1972). The following chapters, however, suffer only from brevity. A piece examining the influence of 'the Yale version of deconstruction' collapses into the form of a review article. H e raises timely objections to the 'thin and metaphorical use' of terms such as 'politics' and 'economics' (p. 48), and is characteristically harsh on analytical shifts such as the discounting of...