Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England by J. K. Barret (review)

J. K. Barret's excellently penned monograph begins, as it ends, with a close reading. To introduce the question of temporality as represented in the literature of early modern England, Barret turns first to Philip Sidney's Arcadia, arguing that one of the narrative's love stories hinges on the way the two relevant parties, Cleophila and Pyrocles, understand and conceive of their own futures. "[T]hough not its main subject," Barret writes, "references to the future are part of the architecture that supports and constructs the amorous encounter" (3). At the heart of their relationship rests an unusual binary, articulated by Cleophila as a tension between "never been" and "ever been"; the idea that their path was either inevitable or impossible (3). Barret carefully negotiates this tension, revealing the extent to which the text points instead to a wide array of possible futures, waiting to be uncovered and examined. Throughout Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England, Barret ties ambitious claims about both the sense of the present moment discoverable in the Renaissance as well as the current status of literary criticism to sharp, language-based readings of plays, poems, and prose narratives from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England. Over the course of five chapters, Barret "unsettle[s] the future" of both Renaissance England and its literary historians and critics, arguing that adherence to explanatory historical models overdetermines our understanding of the way early moderns thought about their own futures, as well as our understanding of particular historical moments and our entanglements with their literary texts (223).

Barret's study avoids what she defines as a series of pitfalls which typically plague examinations of temporality, united in their adherence to single, unitary ends: "poetic legacy and immortality," "apocalypse and last things," and "scientific progress" (4). Indeed, even the terms used for referring to the period taking place over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England belie a reliance on unified endpoints. Whereas "Renaissance" repeatedly ties the period to its own classical past (a linkage which encourages claims about poetic immortality and the like), "early modern"—a term intended to "counteract the limitations of approaching the period from a vantage deemed too narrow and elite"—necessarily tethers the period to an imminent and inevitable future, modernity itself (6). Barret thus seeks to avoid tethering a study of temporality to either the memory of a classical past or the promise of Enlightenment and modernity. What, then, remains? Indeterminacy, in its multivalent, uncertain, and impossibly manifold manifestations.

Of course, the author does not arrive at indeterminacy merely as a result of rejecting other, more anachronistic accounts of early modern England's relationship to its own future. Rather, Barret makes the strong case that open-ended futures were an organizing structure precisely because Christian eschatology had begun to lose its hold on early modern imaginations. But Barret is wary of scholarship which asserts these sorts of historical arguments, and then searches the archive for evidence of confirmation; rather, this book explores a variety of literatures in order to "investigate the certainty of future outcomes as narratological and linguistic problems" (10). Thus, although the shape of the book's argument places its stakes in intellectual history, its engagement with that history is tempered with close, careful examinations of linguistic features which reflect the uncertainty with which early moderns understood the future. Barret terms these linguistic features "microstructures," minute "formal resources" for reconstructing the various futures being articulated and explored in literary texts (11). Thus, Untold Futures builds an "archive of rhetorical formulations, linguistic structures, and narrative strategies" which refuse to accede to "deterministic conceptions" of the future (11). In this sense, Barret avoids making large historical claims—thus the focus on literature as a way of working through ideas—but at the same time articulates something about the period's "record of thinking" about the future (11).

Although Barret's methods and sense of the field are admirable...