The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare by Christopher Pye (review)

Christopher Pye’s ground-breaking new book is certain to cause excitement, as well as consternation, among students of early modern culture. Its basic claim is that the idea of the “aesthetic” as an autonomous realm of experience was developed in the Renaissance rather than in the Enlightenment. This is a challenge to several generations of critics, who found the early modern period interesting because of its supposed lack of distinction between art and other social discourses. Whereas modernity conceives of aesthetics as separate from politics or economics—so the conventional argument runs—the people of premodern England experienced life as a totality, in which such allegedly distinct spheres mutually determined one another to the degree that they could not be conceptually or experientially distinguished.

Thus Stephen Greenblatt famously differentiated the “embedded” art of the Renaissance from the “free-standing” art of post-Enlightenment culture (28), while Hugh Grady pointed out that the word “aesthetic” is not used until the mid-eighteenth century. Grady described the age of Shakespeare as “transitional,” since the aesthetic was still struggling to “purify” itself from the traces of other social practices. For such scholars, Renaissance Europe was the last age in which people enjoyed immediate access to the totality. The later seventeenth century produced T. S. Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility,” whereby experience was irrevocably divided into discrete, incompatible discourses. This interpretation has inspired a variety of influential critics, and Pye sets his sights on a formidable target by seeking to undermine it.

He directs his fiercest fire against the putative causal connection between the emergence of autonomous aesthetics and the rise of the commodity. Many recent historians have claimed that the habits of thought produced by the market led to a general imposition of symbolic exchange value on immediate experience, thus producing an identifiably “literary” or “aesthetic” sensibility. As Pye puts it, “Autonomous literariness has been affiliated with the dizzying supervention of exchange value implied by the commodity” (24). But Pye takes issue with the priority assigned to the market, opining that “early modern aesthetics needs to be dislocated from its familiar affiliation with economy and commodification; instead, the aesthetic bears on the prior, intractably political constitution of the very space of the social” (5). The “social” is here a wider category than the “economic,” and it must therefore be considered “prior to commodification” (28).

Pye develops a learned case, drawing examples from across the cultural sphere. He concentrates on Shakespeare, providing especially perceptive readings of Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, but he also studies plays by Kyd and Marlowe, the visual art of Leonardo da Vinci and Hobbes’s Leviathan. The aim throughout is to establish what Robert Williams, cited by Pye, calls “the autonomy of culture as a whole—its emergence as a complex, yet integrated set of codes, a realm defined by the power of representation” (16). To demonstrate this autonomous “power of representation,” Pye quotes from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Lines, circles, letters, and characters—/Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires” (1.1.53–54, p. 24). Here Faust fetishizes the efficacious power of signs per se; he does not limit his desire to the economic realm. In Pye’s opinion the play thus “brings us back to the cultural relation between literature and commodification, and of what there is of the literary that may not be subsumed in that analogy” (26–27).

But surely Marlowe’s message is that there is nothing that cannot be subsumed beneath commodification. It is the commodification of Faust’s soul that sets in motion the phantasmagoric march of performative images, in which statues of Helen and Alexander seem to come alive, while reality is reduced to a succession of empty signs. “What means this show?” Faust asks Mephistopheles, receiving the inevitable reply: “Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal...