As Lauren Shohet explains in her introduction to Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare, the volume's “essays attempt no exhaustive survey of kinds of forms and kinds of temporalities,” but instead “collectively delve into some exemplary case studies” (5). The contributions grew out of “conversations at recent Shakespeare Association of America conferences” (xv) and offer a range of approaches to time—as history, as plot mechanism, as felt phenomena, to name but a few. They offer probing explorations into the title's key terms, heightened by the volume's organization; though grouped into five parts (“Illuminating,” “Synthesizing,” “Misaligning,” “Proliferating,” “Pleating”), one notable strength of the volume is that its essays also speak to one another across these conceptual categories. Contributions from Philip Lorenz, Meredith Beales, and William C. Carroll, for example, all contend with what Lorenz calls the “relationship between dynastic succession and dramatic form” (58). Likewise, considerations of how time inflects individual genres gains additional purchase because of the dialogue produced by Kent Cartwright's account of “comic time,” the temporality of Shohet's “romance logic” (115), Valerie Wayne's sense of the “density” of time—folded, stacked, collapsed—in romance, and Rebecca Bushnell's discussion of how editorial decisions can heighten or disrupt generic effects. Shohet's point that “staging temporality can make subjective time available for shared consideration” (3) helpfully positions a recurring emphasis in the essays, which treat the “shared” and “collective” contour of temporality that live performance supplies for a theatrical audience. Robin S. Stewart's investigation of “collective temporality” addresses the question explicitly, as does Raphael Falco's essay on the “Shared Experience of Time,” which reconstructs how early modern drama produced a common experience for playgoers “bound in suspension” (45).
Three essays—Andrew Griffin's on Henry V, Matthew Harrison's on Love's Labour's Lost, and Lucy Munro's on The Knight of the Burning Pestle—make an alluring case for how the assumptions that undergird our critical approaches to periodization might be productively challenged by thinking in more nuanced ways about the early modern period's own parsing of contemporary trends, tastes, and cultural memories. As Harrison writes, “to speak of the temporality of literary criticism is to explore how we revise the past” (127). His essay reveals the early modern stage as a quirky compendium of poetic forms as he traces how a literary “conversation” happens “at the scale not just of decades but of years, even months” (126). Not only does he reconstruct poetic style as a moving target, but he also shows what early modern audiences might have understood about poetic norms (as well as the role theater played in educating its viewers about those norms). Alongside these insights into an extensive catalogue, Harrison also models how particular poetic forms (e.g., the quatrain or the couplet) furnished mechanisms for argumentation and thinking. In advocating for critical accounts that consider how “representations shift in meaning over time” (135), Harrison's essay supports Griffin's suggestion that the “early modern history play” merits consideration as a distinctive generic category. By attending to Henry V's habit of announcing its approaches to history, Griffin complicates contemporary purchase on any past to demonstrate drama's role in forcing us to rethink the “intelligibility” of the past, whether recent or remote. Munro resituates Beaumont's play—including original and recent stagings—by showing how its most obtrusive characters are also its most modish cultural critics, fluent in conventions culled variously from theater's “current output” (145) to popular romance's “familiar poetic archaisms” (147).
Lara Dodds's essay on Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam works to craft terminology out of a reading of the play's “complex temporal effects” (194). Her careful parsing of discrete kinds of temporalities available in different story lines within the play supports an account of counterfactuals that showcases how imagined, invented, and competing temporalities supply resources for communicating affective response. Her compelling argument surpasses her taxonomy (the splicing of “narrative” and “passionate” counterfactuals), but the explicit conceptual framing provides a useful guide, sometimes elusive in other contributions to the volume. Still, this intriguing collection of essays works both to begin and to extend a valuable conversation, and indeed offers provocative sketches toward “analytic models for future investigations of permutations unplumbed” (6).
