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Shakespeare Quarterly 52.2 (2001) 298-300



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Book Review

Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words


Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words. By Simon Palfrey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 298. $85.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

The past few years have seen the revival of an old debate about what to call Shakespeare's last plays. For a time it seemed that "romance" had triumphed, thanks largely to the influence of Northrop Frye and the archetypal critics, but recently it appears that "tragicomedy" has begun to gain strength. The dispute over nomenclature, of course, stands for larger interpretive disagreements, and the latest voice in that sometimes contentious discussion is that of Simon Palfrey. In Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words he prefers the former term but deplores what he considers the limited sense in which criticism has understood and employed it. As might be expected, Palfrey opposes the idealists and mythographers, chiding J. M. Nosworthy for permitting nothing to "undermine his apprehension of Elysian fields" (3) in his Arden edition of Cymbeline. Perhaps less predictably, he also reproves recent historical critics, such as David Bergeron and Leah Marcus, whose approach "has remained basically allegorical, only now with the ambition of discovering specific, local, topical sources" (5). Terry Eagleton is too neatly dialectical (85). Even modern editors are suspect: texts are quoted straight from the Folio, since "to read the texts in the 'original' print, spelling, and punctuation allows the words to 'breathe', and . . . give[s] one some sense, however imperfect, of the accents and rhythms of the period" (34).

Palfrey sedulously tries to avoid systems and orthodoxies, and the result is a book that is original, quirky, occasionally brilliant, and almost always demanding. It is informed by a wide range of influences--Marx, Empson, Bakhtin (especially), deconstruction, political readers such as David Norbrook--but Palfrey's independence of mind and combination of disparate critical modes yield a bracingly idiosyncratic approach. His resistance to easy formulations makes it difficult to summarize his argument [End Page 298] in a few sentences, but it is fair to say that his book proceeds from the conviction that "the modern academic tradition has lost access to something of the plays' keenness and vim" (2). These last two nouns effectively indicate the energies that Palfrey favors and seeks to restore to the critical discourse.

Identifying two major strains of English romance at the turn of the seventeenth century, the epic-pastoral variety of Spenser and Sidney and the crude popular treatments of archetypal heroic tales, he finds that "Shakespearian romance--distinct from both, drawing from each--offers a further generic vivification: a new word in old worlds" (36). Or, one might say, a new world in old words, since Palfrey stresses Shakespeare's commitment to the compensatory value of language and to the substantiality of the verbally-configured dramatic realm. Irony is the effect he seems most to prize and tends to underscore, particularly its contribution to formal hybridity and tonal variegation. Further, he insists on the political imperatives of Shakespearean romance. His scrupulous view of Shakespeare's theatrical politics does not lead him to read the dramas as bald lectures directed at a court audience and pertaining to topical events and controversies. But he does effectively demonstrate that travesty and irony unavoidably shape a skeptical response to aristocratic hegemony and royal absolutism while encouraging sympathy for the demotic and marginal. Defending his admittedly "bastardized" methodology, he argues that

[t]he critical challenge is how best to reconstruct renaissance discourse, engaged as it is with recovering, revamping, and at times challenging ancient models: in order to thus build up, however, one's readings must first break things down a little. Shakespeare's intellectual world is kinetic, disjunctive, swiftly alive to contradictory possibilities. Above all, it is this fact of a world in process, unfinished, clamorous and turbulent, which must be respected and, through rigorous attention to the plays' mnemonic and metaphoric multiplicity, retrieved.

(13-14)

At all times Palfrey's eyes and ears are trained on heteroglossia, formal travesty, and ethical and political counterpoint...

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