Recent Books
- Recent Books
This Festschrift for David Scott Kastan is a beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated volume that gathers together a number of important essays. Its originating claim is that the polemical title of Kastan’s book Shakespeare After Theory has been misread: the turn in much recent scholarship to the material peculiarities of particular texts should be read as an extension of, and not as a refuge from, theoretical insight. This is a claim on which the essays in the volume make good, showing how literary analysis and attention to the minutiae and contingencies of printed texts can be symbiotic rather than antagonistic. Particularly useful is the manner in which the volume acknowledges the charge that has frequently been levelled at book history, sometimes with good cause—that it over-values books as objects at the expense of the ideas that they contain—and turns it on its head. The question of how much significance or potency resided in a printed book was an eminently live one for early modern authors (Milton’s claim that ‘a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit’ is only its most famous and eloquent expression), and the authors of these essays interrogate rather than assume the value of the material text, often by exploring early modern writers engaged in parallel acts of interrogation. There are flaws of organization—the grouping of the chapters into vaguely justified groups adds little, and seems designed to justify the interesting but anomalous closing essays on Shakespeare’s reception history—but the content is generally of a high quality.
Includes: A. Kiséry and A. Deutermann, ‘The Matter of Form: Book History, Formalist Criticism, and Francis Bacon’s Aphorisms’ [approaches the recent resurgence of formalism via Bacon’s interest in the intertwinement of form and matter, arguing for a ‘historical formalize’]; M. DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare after Queer Theory’; A. B. Farmer, ‘Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality’; B. S. Robinson, ‘Book Fetishes’ [a particularly valuable essay, moving from English accounts of the Qur’an as a fetishized text to European struggles with the cohesion of the Scriptures, ranging from Herbert to Spinoza]; T. Festa, ‘Spenser’s Thaumaturgy: “Mental Space” and the Material Forms of The Faerie Queene (1590)’ [an exploration of the uncertain materiality of Spenser’s Faerieland, brought to bear on the circumstances of its original printing and Spenser’s late revisions]; D. Vitkus, ‘Indicating Commodities in Early English Discovery Narratives’; B. F.-C. Calabresi, ‘“His Idoliz’d Book”: Milton, Blood, and Rubrication’; S. A. Kelen, ‘New Poet, Old Words: Glossing the Shepheardes Calender’; C. Wheatley, ‘Glossing the Margins in Milton’s The Reason of Church-Governement’; C. McEachern, ‘Hot Protestant Shakespeare’; W. H. Sherman, ‘Early Modern Punctuation and Modern Editions: Shakespeare’s Serial Colon’ [a fascinating account of the stakes of minute editorial decisions in the editing of Shakespeare’s sonnets, showing the concrete differences between different editions created by seemingly neutral choices of punctuation, and insisting that any punctuation mark is a contested locus of meaning]; Z. Márkus, ‘Unser Shakespeare in 1940’ [a rich exploration of the attempts in England and Germany to claim Shakespeare’s [End Page 518] legacy during World War II, growing into a rumination on the recurrent impulse to appropriate Shakespeare amidst different historical crises]; and A. G. Hooks, ‘Making Histories; or, Shakespeare’s Ring’ [an exploration of the history of attempts to stage Shakespeare’s histories as a continuous cycle, forging them into a unified national epic, again focusing on the Anglo-German axis as crucial for disentangling Shakespeare’s various legacies].
Cambridge
Joe Moshenska
