Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse, and the Stage by Richard Hillman

Abstract

REVIEWS Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse, and the Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). x, 309. $55 (U.S.) cloth. If the first great commandment of Western civilization is “Know Thyself,” the second, like unto it, is “Report Back.” “I know that I nothing know,” “I have that within which passes show,” and “I think, therefore I am” are among the more notable dispatches from the front. The two selves, the one to be known and the one to be identified in speech, are not, of course, exactly the same. The first is private, the second public; the first, the object of introspective study, the second, the subject of communal discourse. Sidney glosses the phenomenon, albeit in a very different context, with admirable succinctness: “I am not I: pity the tale of me.” Richard Hillman’s most recent book takes for its subject precisely this: the speaker’s tale of him/herself, together with the gaps between the “I” and the “not I” that the tale necessarily exposes. He terms the phenomenon “self-speaking,” and here examines it throughout the range of early modern drama, from the cycle plays to late Jacobean tragicomedy, in all the forms of self-representation that the drama allows, soliloquies, asides, monologues, and even silences being among the most notable. The result is challenging, original, and exceedingly dense. In it Hillman brings together a wide range of matters of contemporary literary and critical interest: speech-act theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, early modern subject-formation, and intertextuality are among the varieties of knowledge that constitute his province. He is nothing if not ambitious; the book sets out to define its subject as a distinctive discursive category, rather than as a form of dramatic technique or convention, and in the process to challenge what he takes to be dominant New Historicist/Cultural Materialist assumptions about the formation of the early modern subject. Indeed, Hillman’s departure from New Historicist/Cultural Materialist orthodoxy is made early in the Introduction, where he announces his in­ tention to “appropriate the freedom to focus on texts independent of their socio-historical connections and to allow those texts to make sense freely in relation to each other and to broader signifying patterns” (2). He is con­ cerned, that is, not with the socio-historical subject per se (about which, he argues persuasively, we know too little to generalize after the fashion of Jonathan Dollimore or Catherine Belsey), but with its dramatic representa­ tion considered as a semiotic construct. He is also concerned to challenge the New Historicist/Cultural Materialist tendency to deny the emergence of the “subject,” appropriately equipped with the requisite sense of inferiority or selfhood, until early in the seventeenth century. Hillman, by contrast, discovers persuasive continuities in the representation of subjectivity from Everyman on. 473 ESC 24, 1998 As the self-speaking with which Hillman is concerned covers virtually the entire range of English drama (and beyond) to 1642, his canvas is necessarily broad and the detail variable. The book is organized into a broadly chrono­ logical and generic pattern as it progresses from medieval drama to “Tudor Transitions,” Elizabethan revenge drama, Jacobean tragedy, and Jacobean comedy and tragicomedy. The only notable break from the pattern is pro­ vided by the concluding chapter, “(Off)Staging the Female Subject,” which on examination turns out to be primarily concerned with female masturba­ tion in Love’s Labour’s Lost. With the exception of the last chapter, Hillman’s procedure is consis­ tent throughout: to scrutinize a wide variety of texts for examples of those representations of subjectivity that exhibit a slippage between, in Emile Benveniste’s terms, le sujet de l’énoncé, the subject of speech, and le sujet de l’énonciation, the speaking subject (43). The implications of such slip­ page he then expands upon and develops in a variety of different contexts. The conceptual framework that informs the work as a whole is the subjectformation theory of Jacques Lacan, and the tool he uses most consistently is the Lacanian concept of aphanisis; to explain it, he quotes Lacan himself: The subject appears first in the Other, in so far as...