Essaying Shakespeare by Karen Newman (review)

REVIEWS 283 often highlight a lack of masculinity; be it through an unmanly lack of beard or guileful female eyes, any suggestion of femininity unsurprisingly indicated a lack of manliness. In his discussion of the penis and sexual performance, Neal revisits a much expected topic: impotence. Accusations of impotence or insufficient genitalia could permanently tarnish a man’s reputation; conversely, excessive libidinal desire could equally suggest a man’s lack of personal control, as sexual abilities corresponded to his husbandry, substance, and property. Neal cites conduct books to discuss other ideals with bodily control in behavior and dress, but much of this representation comes from prescriptive evidence (such as conduct books), courtesy literature or Latin school book phrases, which articulated the standard rather than the extent to which those expectations were upheld. Neal’s final chapter, “Toward the Private Self: Desire, Masculinity, and the Middle English Romance,” asserts the relevance of medieval romance in understanding masculinity, contrary to what other historians may believe. Neal acknowledges the instability of the genre and the general difficulty historians have experienced using fiction as a primary source, but finds that fiction—especially the medieval romance—offers historians an opportunity to access the mentality of the literary subject in a way traditional sources do not. The romance is especially concerned with identity, and Neal finds that the emotional shifts and desires evidenced in these texts reveal a wealth of information for reconstructing medieval masculinity. Analyzing (among several others) Partanope of Blois, Bevis of Hampton, Ywain and Gawain, and Lybeaus Desconus primarily through a psychoanalytic lens in the vein of Sigmund Freud and Nancy Chodorow, Neal depicts a masculinity exploring different iterations of parent-child relationships. The importance of parent-child dynamics in a culture concerned with marriage, property, and appropriate sexual relationships cannot be overlooked, as Neal argues that contemporary neuroses surrounding these subjects are evident throughout the medieval romance. As he sifts through representations of masculinity in unconventional sources, Neal develops critical terminology with which to engage his readings. Here he is exceptionally successful in emphasizing the symbolic nature of language in understanding the representations he hopes to recover. There is the possibility that his use of psychoanalysis in romance may seem obvious to literary scholars who have employed such readings for decades, but Neal’s adventurous use of transdisciplinary sources must be applauded. Well-written and with marvelous anecdotal support, Neal’s Medieval Masculinity proves an excellent text for historians and literary scholars of the medieval period alike. CAITLIN CORNELL HOLMES, English, Washington State University Karen Newman, Essaying Shakespeare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009) 199 pp., ill. Karen Newman’s new book is a collection of essays that “essay” Shakespeare or rather, that “essay” the dominant trends that have arisen in the academy over the last twenty-five years as they have been applied to Shakespeare studies. Rather than undertake a systematic, self-conscious critique of those schools of thought, Newman gathers into one convenient volume the essays she has written over the course of her career that employ those schools. The essays them- REVIEWS 284 selves have appeared in prestigious journals and in Newman’s previous booklength projects. They are reflective of some of the best ideas that this most recent period of scholarship has produced. My criticism is not the content of the individual chapters collected herein, but rather the impetus for the project as a whole. I will treat the chapters individually, as they merited at the time of their original publication, and my overarching concerns at the end of the review. The first chapter, “Myrrha’s Revenge: Ovid and Shakespeare’s Reluctant Adonis,” deals with Shakespeare’s borrowings from Ovid, from the then-new perspective of psychoanalysis and feminism. She historicizes how Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have understood Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, then examines the implications of the early modern reading on more-recent readings of the Shakespearean poem. Finally, she reorients the psychological interpretations of the myth so that it takes into account a feminist reading of Venus’s centrality to the poem. “Hayman’s Missing Hamlet” first appeared in 1983 as an article in Shakespeare Quarterly. In her introduction, Newman calls it “a note...