Why the question of world at this moment in early modern studies? The topic is apt, of course, for an era defined by the prospect of new worlds, and given to understand itself in terms of microcosms and macrocosms or as a theatrum mundi. The current collection, an appropriately intelligent and provocative testament to Jonathan Goldberg’s thought and teaching, is less concerned with affirming the foundational character of such metaphors than bearing out the instability of the hierarchical orderings they imply. In essays ranging from the Faerie Queene to contemporary performances of Urdu erotic tales, from Marlowe’s footstools to cognitive theory, the essays take up the productively vexed nature of distinctions of gender and sexuality, and the porousness of the divide between matter and spirit, friend and enemy, animate and inanimate. In the world evoked here, furniture makes claims on tyrants, and the king harbors the outlaw as the condition of his sovereign being. Still, given such an antinormative orientation, why frame charged matters of desire and political force in terms of the seemingly anodyne category of “worldmaking”?

The turn to world might best be seen as a response to the cultural materialism that has dominated theoretically inclined approaches to the Renaissance in recent decades. With their constructionist orientation, such analyses de-essentialize subjectivity and gender, understanding those categories as a function of the historical culture within which they are embedded. But if antiessentialism is in order, don’t we need to question the reference to world as an already given cause, to understand world as open not just to interpretation and change but in its status as phenomenally existent? Thus the recent recourse to Heideggerian phenomenology and Jean-Luc Nancy’s radically creationist variant of deconstruction.

The complexity of such a reorientation is evident in the range of accounts of what world is in the volume, as well as in some of those accounts’ internal tensions. For Brent Dawson, who explores the fascinating generative/degenerative “slime” evoked in Spenser’s House of Alma episode, or Daniel Juan Gil, who finds in Henry Vaughan a surprising anticipation of Bourdieu, world means the materiality of a given habitus. If there is a necessary gravitational pull in such accounts, it may be toward essentialism: note how muck as the “necessary point of [categorical] indistinction” becomes valorized at other moments in Dawson as what is “most material about materiality,” what is “foundational” or “common” to life (26, 30, 32), or the way the Cartesian oppositions Gil so cogently critiques in the discipline’s embrace of humoralism, on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other, risk becoming reinstated as a teleological narrative running from the “ontological reality” of an “embodied” world to the promise of the transcendent life toward which matter’s redemptive seeds hearken (169, 172).

Others conceive world as a radically deontologized condition. Thus David Glimp subtly uncovers in the Marlovian extremities of the geopolitical state of emergency dramatized in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam a politically promising suspension of the distinction between desire and repulsion, friend and enemy; Meredith Evans recognizes in the interval of Hamlet’s sea voyage a suspension of the vectors of historical temporality itself, a remarkable interpretive opening coordinate with England’s inchoate status as nation state; and Madhavi Menon finds in the popular Urdu dastangos a thrillingly eroticized undoing of distinctions of time, realm, and gender running athwart imperial aesthetic norms and recalling the performative effects of Shakespearean comedies. If, speaking very broadly, there is an inevitable pull in this orientation it may be toward the liberatory claim, the claim to find “the ability to let go of categories” in such moments, with the transcendentalism that posture risks, and thus the possibility of valorizing the world against which such freedoms as freedoms are defined (226).

For Robert Matz the corrective for such a tendency is balancing attention to the problematizing of categories of self-sameness such as authorship—his focus is Shakespeare’s sonnets—and the retention of their inevitable limiting authority in the name of historical specificity and as matter of political urgency, given the institutional climate for the humanities right now. A more radical take, and one more directly pertinent to the question of worldmaking, is suggested in Evans’s subtly precise account of just what’s entailed in the instances of suspension toward which many of these essays are drawn. The pause of Hamlet’s voyage “is both ‘the openness of interpretation’ and the occasion of interpretation itself. What Hamlet’s thieves of mercy steal for him . . . is not simply an escape but a space of time that is also the condition of representation itself” (148). That interval is indistinguishably a breach and an inscribing condition, a constitutive space—a habitus—and no space at all. To conceive world—the conditions of phenomenal existence as such—in such terms means rethinking political reading through and beyond dualities of freedom and necessity, division and totality.