Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (review)

In Culture of Accidents Michael Witmore has isolated a novel problem in knowledge for the early modern period: what can be learned from accidents, events that disturb the ordinary apprehension of things or causes. The accident, precisely because of its contingency, would seem to be unavailable for use as an epistemological category; yet Witmore's study shows how adventitious events were gradually absorbed in, and became indexes to, a Christian view of divine providence. What makes an accident an accident is not simply contingency but also the way in which it is embedded in an implicit system of value revealed by the act of narration: to find a piece of rusted iron while plowing hardly signifies as an accident, while to find buried treasure surely does.

That I need a story to illustrate the distinction is one of Witmore's handiest points. Thus he notes in his discussion of Aristotle: "accidents happen as the result of circumstances, not rules, and only narrative can lay out these circumstances as a matter of fact rather than a function of overdetermining causes" (39). The movement Witmore's study describes is, however, contrary to how narrative, understood in its broadest sense, serves to position the accident in relation to those "overdetermining causes" that reveal a heretofore occluded design. After his initial discussion of Aristotle, which sets up the view of accidental contingency, Witmore locates a movement to contain accidents within a model of overarching providence, a movement that begins with Cicero and continues through Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Oresme before culminating with Calvin. The next two chapters take on the phenomenon's relation to drama in early modern England. In The Comedy of Errors, which Witmore reads as an extension, not necessarily intentional, of the philosophical traditions he has earlier discussed, the multiple coincidence and accidents of nature, all displayed for comic misapprehension, offer a reminder that random actions do not always have a purpose higher than the farce that ensues.

The opposite is true in his reading of Hamlet, the subject of a substantial and closely argued chapter. The protagonist's fortuitous rescue by pirates occasions a meditation on how accidents both inside and outside the drama can direct one's "regard"—attention—away from the present and toward the otherwise-hidden providential design that they reveal, and which Hamlet, in Witmore's reading, comes to acknowledge by the play's end. This in turn is connected to the "boom in 'judgement' literature" (96) that surrounds the play. Just as the conscience quickened by a revealing chance event looks both at that event and at the motivating source behind it, so, too, Witmore argues, does the theatrical spectator shift attention from one perspective to another, aided by the drama's motivated reference to apparently fortuitous events: "Accidents are also, from our critical perspective, an invitation to become a subject of the knowledge that one is in the theater, a knowledge that is the structural condition for the recognition of deeper purposes in tragic misfortune" (105-6). The end of the chapter turns this argument on its head, calling attention both to the constructedness of the site and the ephemerality of insight into the providential order to which it gives access. In effect, theater becomes an experiment in divided consciousness.

The mention of experiment implies a rhetorical link (not overtly forged, however) with the subject of the next chapter, Bacon. The analysis, which offers evidence of Witmore's impressive familiarity with a wide range of Baconian texts, convincingly demonstrates that the recombinatory potential implicit in Bacon's doctrine of Formae bears some kinship with nature's capacity to produce monsters. Both, that is, can give rise to unusual or unexpected combinations, a similarity that effectively erases the boundary conventionally constructed between controlled experiment and chance: "Nature is also approximating experiment to the extent that it is bringing together the Forms in...