Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama by Douglas Bruster

Abstract

158 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Douglas Bruster. Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xi + 268 pp., $55.00 Reviewed by William N. West On the first page of his Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture inEarly Modern Drama, Douglas Bruster quotes two words?"bricolage" and "thickness"?that reveal the divided critical loyalties of this ambitious refashioning of how we best interpret early modern literature. Split between the New Historicists' Geertz and Derrida's Levi-Strauss, but firmly in the camp of cultural anthropologists, this book offers a cor rective to what Bruster sees as the partiality of recent criti cism. Rather than correcting the oft-cited problems of New Historicism by moving to a closer study of non-literary writ ten sources and material artifacts, as much recent work has tried to do, Bruster reaffirms the grounding of history?both its telling and the elusive thing itself?in literary texts and their interrelations. Elsewhere Bruster has been more emphatic on how little a materialist emphasis changes criti cal practice. In "Shakespeare and the Composite Text" (Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen [New York: Palgrave, 2002]), he observes that many recent works look at cultural "texts" much as their predecessors looked at "literary" ones, reading "parts of books themselves as the sources of a larger cultur al text. Critics have reversed the objects of the procedure, then, but have left the procedure intact" (48). In Quoting Shakespeare, Bruster looks again to the sources that make up texts. Analyzing the wide range of practices that he calls "quotation" (how texts re-use prior texts, distort them, absorb them, and thus comment on them), he recovers the temporal dimension that escapes the synchronous readings of New Historicism and reintroduces the possibility of track ing agency through the swirl of culture. Bruster in effect suggests the possibility of a revitalized literary history, with equal weight on both terms. The critical manifesto of the first chapter introduces two crucial concepts in this project: "quotation" and "position." Quotation is the "textual incorporation" of bits of other Reinews 159 texts, "midway between citation and imitation" (4). Bruster stresses the importance of picking out patterns of borrow ings rather than isolated striking echoes. While quotation provides Bruster with a formal basis for connecting texts across time, such patterns reveal what he calls "position"? consistent personal or textual attitudes, expectations or beliefs?and introduce the possibility ofmoving from strict ly formal analysis to the discourses of, for instance, "ethics, historical study, and feminism" (6). Although this project has affinities with the reception aesthetics of Jauss, Bruster distinguishes his approach by his avoidance of broad claims about horizons of expectation and his focus on readings of individual works in all their polyphony of commitments. Bruster's analyses seek to return the historically individual writer and reader back to literary texts, avoiding the mud diness and absence of agency involved in concepts like the "circulation of social energy" without reinstating or presup posing an ahistorical text-immanence. Either method tends to reduce cultural copia to one or two oversimplified posi tions; by paying attention to quotation and the multiple positions that it reveals, Bruster argues, we can recognize the polyvalent differences of individual writers and actors and see how they maneuver within a heterogeneous cultur al terrain as (limited) agents. Bruster's subsequent chapters put his critical theories to work on a variety of texts. His subtitle "Early Modern Drama" is too modest; each chapter brings a range of con temporary materials to bear in the explication of particular texts. Chapter 2, for instance, looks at the Theocritan ances try of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd" and its afterlife in later lyrics and dramas. Observing that this lyric demands a response because it so completely excludes one, and that it is often quoted as a precursor to sexual violence, Bruster suggests that the persuasive Marlovian rhetoric of the piece was associated with a dangerously narcissistic attitude that eclipsed the autonomy of its addressee. As Bruster notes, this conclusion could hardly be reached through close read ing of Marlowe's text, nor is it supportable from what are...