Circumstantial Shakespeare by Lorna Hutson (review)

Few would dispute that Shakespeare’s plays are marked by what we would now call psychological depth. A more contentious issue is why this is so. Since the eighteenth century, the most common explanation has been that Shakespeare prioritized character over plot. His chief interest, so the argument runs, was to find ways of representing real-life thought processes. More recently, performance criticism has explored how inner life onstage is actually an effect of various material aspects of theater, an assemblage of gestural and scenographic elements that point inward but ultimately remain tethered to the outer sensory world of sight, sound, and touch. In Circumstantial Shakespeare, Lorna Hutson proposes a very different approach to the issue, one that begins with a turn away from character altogether. Hutson argues instead that psychological depth is a product of plot and, more particularly, of the dramatic rendering of “‘circumstances,’” which in Renaissance rhetorical theory denoted the kinds of information “that made any human action intelligible and able to be narrated and enquired into” (2). Shakespeare’s use of circumstantial rhetoric not only contributed to a spatially and temporally rich dramaturgy (the “where?” and “when?”) but also helped to create a sense of characterological complexity (the “how?” and “why?”) (3). With this argument, Hutson returns us to language but does so in a way that remains sensitive to the unique manner in which language functions in theatrical environments. The result is a book that offers a genuinely new way to historicize what is at once the most distinctive and most elusive quality of Shakespeare’s art: its almost uncanny ability to represent inner life.

Based on the Oxford Wells Shakespeare lectures that Hutson delivered in 2012, Circumstantial Shakespeare is a short but dense book comprised of an introduction, four chapters, and a brief conclusion. The introduction lays out an intellectual context for the ideas treated in the rest of the book and carefully explains the complex network of rhetorical terms and concepts that underpin the chapters that follow. Most importantly, Hutson establishes in the introduction that Shakespeare’s plays were securely embedded in neoclassical compositional practices and that therefore his characters were components (even products) of careful plot construction. This claim runs counter to two critical orthodoxies, both of which have been default assumptions since the eighteenth century: first, that “Shakespeare’s plays transcend . . . neoclassical rules,” and second, that his characters “transcend and don’t need the fussy mechanics of ‘plot’ and ‘argument’” (4). Hutson’s goal is to “reverse this way of thinking” (4).

Each of the book’s tightly argued chapters is devoted to Shakespeare’s handling of a different circumstantial topic: “when?” in Romeo and Juliet, “opportunity” in Lucrece and King Lear, “where and how?” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (and The Maid’s Tragedy), and “motive” in Macbeth. In these chapters, Hutson shows that the rhetorical and dialectical aspects of humanist education shaped both the compositional strategies and theatrical effects of Shakespeare’s plays. A particular strength of these discussions, I think, is the way they engage the wider field of dramatic production in the period. Shakespeare is neither artificially extracted from the professional and literary culture in which he worked nor taken as some kind of synecdoche for English Renaissance drama in general. Among the pages of Circumstantial Shakespeare, readers will find rigorous analyses of Gorbuduc and The Maid’s Tragedy and substantial commentary on plays by Lyly, Marlowe, and Jonson. This allows us to see more precisely how Shakespeare made special use of what was in fact a commonly deployed imaginative resource.

In terms of method and vision, good scholarship in our field tends to fall into one of two categories. In one, we have studies that seek to carve out a small but secure plot of academic real estate. Highly specialized, these books make targeted claims propped up by sustained and meticulous critical positioning. In the other, we have studies that seek to rise above the scholarly fray and address the field as a...