Lull & Bruno: Collected Essays. Vol. I.

Abstract

Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. xii + 190, hb. £35, ISBN 052162021XThis book follows a route alongside the one opened up by Francis Barker (The Tremulous Private Body, 1984), and more recently pursued further into the interior by Jonathan Sawday (The Body Emblazoned, 1995). Beginning with the broad issue, pace Burckhardt, of intimations of individuality in the early modern period, Hanson moves painstakingly from a theory-driven introduction to a series of chapters that seeks the inner workings of specific texts by Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon.The interplay between literal interiority and its metaphysical counterparts has been a theme in a flurry of recent texts, most notably and successfully dealt with by Sawday. Hanson creates a difficult agenda for herself by choosing to take a determinedly specific aspect of interiority, the invasion of the body through the medium of torture. She suggests that the notion of torture as a physical reality might be culturally mapped on to a fictional text as a metaphor by which the personae of those texts are 'discoverable'. That is, by reading some characters as concealers of secret truths that are to be discovered by others, the cultural reality of torture is aligned with the process of revelation of character. Hanson is at pains to demonstrate how a polysemous body of language can adhere simultaneously to the non-fictional language of torture and the fictional language of the work in question. Thus her investigation begins with a series of 'real life' cases, the language of which is examined. The product of the examination of that language is then aligned with the language of the fictional texts to demonstrate the degree to which the key vocabulary of 'discovering' is made polysemous in the fictional texts by its cultural reference.There are some interesting and enlightening readings here. The account of Measure for Measure, especially of the encounter between the Duke and Juliet, is at times especially thought provoking. So is the examination of Jonson's growth throughout the canon of his dramatic writings towards a keener understanding of the intercourse between stage and audience, especially in terms of complicity in the will to discovery. But although the careful and often (ironically) impenetrable introduction is at pains - and laudably so - to distance itself from 'the cultural materialists' ... tend [ency] to favour synecdoche, the trope in which the part stands for the whole', the accounts presented through the book as a whole occasionally fall into the kind of over-eagerness that the introduction eschews. The interrogations of text, often revelatory when they concentrate specifically on the text itself, become quite distorted when the temptation to pull them back into the main epistemological vein proves irresistible for the author. …