Fulke Greville and Robert Southwell are not two names normally found together. The Calvinist courtier and the Jesuit priest occupied two very different spaces, physically and intellectually, in early modern England. The former became a baron and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The latter was executed at Tyburn in 1595 on charges of treason, for his Catholic missionary efforts. Nevertheless, Precarious Identities rethinks how far apart these two writers actually were, particularly in their attempts to present “the fragility of the self” (251).
In ten main chapters, the collection pieces together an enlightening montage of the two men's oeuvres, reading their works through the lens of “self-fashioning” (1). Chapters 1–6 examine the less popular, though more diversified, works of Greville. Alison Findlay explores how Greville's Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, after the poet's death, serves as an example of Protestant mourning, in which Greville crafts a discourse with the dead—even though the dead, while evidently present, never actually speak. Likewise, Elizabeth Mazzola presents Greville's poem Caelica as challenging the Petrarchan tradition, by depicting women “as suitable readers and partners,” rather than objects, in love (58). Rachel White and Robert Applebaum provide two excellent chapters on Greville's nonfiction prose. The former highlights the tension latent within Greville's intellectual curiosity and the boundaries that he understood human potential should operate within. Looking at A Treatise of Human Learning, White describes Greville's epistemology as one of internal ascent rather than an accrual of data, where the self humbly accepts and assents to “the place of humankind” (90) within objective reality. Similarly, Applebaum fleshes out Greville's political thought, which was organized around an enabling aporia. Greville's political expressions are essentially dualistic, expressing support for the monarchy while at the same time readily critiquing some of its fundamental features. The complexity of Greville's political identity is further exemplified in Brian Cummings's and Vassiliki Markidou's chapters on his dramatic works Mustafa and Alaham, which provided a different sort of literary space for Greville to reflect upon the moral and practical tensions within the politics of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart courts.
The last four chapters shift attention to Robert Southwell's devotional works. Although Southwell was the more popular of the two writers, the construction of his selfhood seems less precarious. Like Greville, Southwell critiqued the English court. Theresa Kenney demonstrates that in Southwell's meditations on Christ's incarnation, there is an intentional contrast between the sumptuous pomp at the Elizabethan court and “Christ's royal simplicity” (159). Emily Ransom and Afroditi-Maria Panaghis offer chapters that focus upon devotional themes in Southwell's works. Ransom compellingly argues that Southwell deployed the popular mode of complaint in his poetry as a “literary strategy” to attract English Protestant and Catholic readers alike (172). In works like Marie Magdalens funeral teares, the complaint became a site that validated the expression of human passion and suffering while reconciling it to a love of and for Christ. Panaghis sees a similar emphasis upon bodily and spiritual suffering as a means of defining, and refining, the self in Southwell's prose devotionals. However, what is missing from the Southwell chapters is a sense of the precariousness of the self, which is much more evident in Greville.
The tension running through much of Greville's writings is contrasted with a Southwell whose identity is much more solidified. He crafts works in order to comfort certain readers and evangelize others. As Alison Shell demonstrates, Southwell's readership included many Protestants, like George Herbert and Michael Drayton, and this was not by happenstance. Responses to his writings varied, often along confessional lines, but people continued to read him.
This adventurous collection ultimately struggles with its own identity. Holding everything together is an opening historical overview by Sarah Covington, which follows the book's introduction. Covington's contribution is very insightful, but it highlights the fact that these two men actually had very little in common and raises the question of why they are, together, the subject of the book. Ultimately, while the harmony of the whole does not quite hit the mark, the constituent parts provide worthwhile contributions to furthering our understanding of the ways in which the human self can be erased, refashioned, and reinvented.
