This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature ed. by Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman (review)

The bold and intelligent essays in this collection explore how early modern literature depicts "the multiple worlds we inhabit" and how it "imagine[s] our world differently," capacities that the editors refer to as "worldmaking" (vii). This term oscillates between literal and metaphorical levels as it covers the matter of which the world is made and the social, political, philosophical, and spiritual horizons that make up our experience of the world. For example, Brent Dawson reads slime in The Faerie Queene as the basis of a shared materiality that in turn "offers a different mode of universal relation" across various social hierarchies (41), while Lynn Maxwell, looking at the "contradictory vision of female selfhood negotiated around the microcosm/macrocosm" trope in Donne and Shakespeare, claims that the materiality of women's bodies and reproductive capacities often destabilizes, through excess, that trope's attempted containment of female agency (199).

Worldmaking, then, is redolent of the aspects of literature Sidney praises in The Defense of Poetry, but This Distracted Globe revises our understanding of the content and form of early modern worldmaking because many of its contributors derive it from affects not usually associated with the aspirational, such as abjection, ambivalence, and vulnerability, and they engage with textual "impasses and . . . the sites of impossible divisions" (10). Zeroing in on the impossible choice between friendship and truth that Horatio faces at the end of Hamlet, James Kuzner finds a longing for political forms that, rather than excluding the vulnerabilities entailed by social attachment, allow us "to imagine how precarious lives might be lived because they must be lived" (116).

Even as it shows how vital and worthy a subject worldmaking is, the diversity of topic, methodology, and style in the collection makes it difficult to summarize. Though the volume is not explicitly a festschrift, some of the essays originated at a 2012 conference honoring Jonathan Goldberg (vii), whose work, such as Seeds of Things and Sodometries, provides points of departure for analyses of materiality and sexuality. Perhaps surprisingly, Goldberg's more historicist James I and the Politics of Literature is not one such touchstone, even though several contributors consider questions of sovereignty and political power. Instead, many of the essays follow from his theoretical and especially deconstructionist example as they break down binaries of mind/body, friendship/enmity, self/other, and human/nonhuman.

This is not to fault the collection for offering theoretical rather than historicist readings, for the contributors collectively make a powerful case "that the possibilities of theory have not been exhausted" (9). These possibilities extend to a theoretically inflected historicism, as we see in Lara Bovilsky's critique of historicist scholarship for "favor[ing] the representative case study over the contingent or exceptional one" (125). After a balanced and useful appraisal of previous readings of melancholy and same-sex desire in Merchant of Venice, Bovilsky charts how Antonio's masochism and his affection for Bassanio do not square with dominant early modern discourses, and she locates in this incongruity an important political, social, and economic critique. Likewise, Daniel Juan Gil draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus to contend that the monist resurrection belief in Henry Vaughan's poetry is more phenomenologically relevant than Galenic humoralism to early modern embodiment, despite the predominance of the latter in early modern official discourse and in current historicist scholarship.

Nevertheless, even with an introduction and ten essays, the volume takes up a narrower range of literary activity than the subtitle's "early modern literature" promises. Given that the book's main title comes from Hamlet, Shakespeare unsurprisingly looms large, but even his work is not that widely represented. Most of the essays do not stray far from authors and texts that already receive a fair amount of critical and theoretical attention, but to their credit they offer...