To celebrate the career of Arthur F. Kinney, the founder of English Literary Renaissance and a wide-ranging scholar of Shakespeare, humanism, and Renaissance poetry, James M. Dutcher and Anne Lake Prescott have gathered together eighteen brief but learned essays that represent the many scholars that Kinney has touched through his work and friendship. Organizing such a Festschrift is always tricky, since what unites the writers is often nothing more than affection for the scholar being honored. Dutcher and Prescott sensibly pull their collection together around the theme of the multiplicity of historicisms. In their introductory essay, they explain that they do so “to stress that there is more than one way to relate what Renaissance humanists called ‘bonae litterae’ to history, to time” (17). A historicist critic does not have to address issues of power but can attempt multiple approaches to the relationship between history and literature.
The essays do represent a wide range of historicist approaches. In different ways, F. W. Brownlow, A. D. Cousins, David Swain, and Barclay Green follow Kinney's work in humanist literary history, while Christopher Martin uses biographical criticism to supplement Kinney's reading of Sidney's Defence of Poetry. Two important essays on Spenser by William Oram and Donald Cheney look at the poet's self-creation in his dedicatory sonnets and in his “undergoing” of Ariosto. Editing the manuscript life of Sir Martin Barnham, Lena Orlin usefully situates the narrative as a representation of the socioeconomic and cultural changes of early modern England. Placing Marvell's Horatian Ode in the contexts of Irish politics and Irish language poetry as well as republican and monarchist political theory, David Norbrook represents historicist engagements with both postcolonialism and political history. In looking at the psycho-sexual and religious experience of witchcraft and magic in relation to the wonder of The Winter's Tale, Kirby Farrell produces the closest to a New Historicist essay in the collection. In a parallel essay, Mary Ellen Lamb engagingly uses biographical criticism to account for the failure of wonder in the second half of Mary Wroth's Urania. Her essay belongs to the historicist rediscovery of women's voices, an interest shared by Elizabeth Hageman's essay on Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Leah Marcus and Steven May explore the history of the book in their important essays on Shakespeare's so-called “bad” quartos and on the manuscript circulation of James VI and I's poems, while Anne Lake Prescott's essay on the Heptaméron looks at how translated editions altered the way Marguerite de Navarre's skeptical voices were received in England.
Not all the essays fit the “historicisms” umbrella quite so well. Harry Berger's characteristically witty and insightful essay on horse word-play in Henry V, for instance, seems more akin to a formalist close reading than a historicist exercise. Likewise, Helen Wilcox's thought-provoking exploration of the Renaissance nothing seems historicist mostly in that it deals with early modern texts, though she is attuned to intellectual context, particularly at the end of her essay. Only Malcolm Smuts's essay on Macbeth consciously engages historicist methodology. Smuts, a historian, applies the method Kinney develops in his important book Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” and the Cultural Moment (2001), using microhistory to make chains of connections (or “lexias”) to the literary text. Smuts shows how the lexias generated by writings concerning James's succession, his lineage, and hereditary monarchy in general might have resonated in the minds of the play's original spectators.
The book as a whole would have benefited from more of such direct attention to the methodologies of historicism. It may seem churlish to complain about something lacking in such a collection of rich and varied intelligence, but we have come to a point where the historicisms practiced so expertly by Kinney and his generation of scholars are under constant attack from many directions, some calling for a return to formalism, others calling for a turn to “presentist” concerns. By the beginning of this decade, it had become cliché to say that we were all historicists now, but today the label generates as much resistance as it did when the New Historicism first broke the dominance of the New Criticism. Although the historicism of the past three decades never developed a unified methodology beyond finding as many different ways as possible of responding to Fredric Jameson's slogan, “Always historicize!” (Google Books gives the titles of 611 books that use the phrase), it might now need a more precise definition to survive in any meaningful way. If just about any analysis of an older text can be seen as a form of historicism, then the term ceases to have much analytical value — and it becomes susceptible to the presentist caricature of historicism as a breed of boring antiquarianism that sets texts at an alien remove from the issues of concern to present readers. The essays in this collection are definitely not boring, and their varied approaches help make the past vivid, breaking down the binary of historical and present implied by the term presentist. I hope the juxtaposing of these varied essays can help start historicists on a project of renovating and defending their methods.
