Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe by Andrew Hadfield, Paul Hammond

Abstract

520 Reviews earliest to have been lost to his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors-which such knowledge implied. UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN RICHARD TODD Shakespeare andRenaissanceEurope. Ed. by ANDREW HADFIELD and PAULHAMMOND. (Arden Shakespeare Companions) London: Thompson Learning. 2004. xxix + 3I4PP. ?i6.99. ISBN I-90427-I46-4. What was Shakespeare's attitude towards Europe? To what extent were Shakespeare and his contemporaries influenced by European politics and literature? The signifi cant number of Shakespeare's plays that have continental settings-Verona, Venice, Athens, and Vienna, for example-suggests something of the fascination and allure that Europe held for Shakespeare and his audiences. But should we regard these settings as accurate depictions of Renaissance Europe, or are they rather excursions into an imaginary geography, the product of awriter who conceived of the world in literary and metaphorical-rather than political-terms? These questions are the focus of the latest volume in the handsomely produced Arden Critical Companions series. Andrew Hadfield introduces the essays in the col lection as an 'attempt to illuminate our understanding of the impact of Europe on Shakespeare's life as awriter' (p. I7). The volume offers awide-ranging exploration of this issue, with contributions from both literary scholars and historians on such top ics as 'The Politics of Renaissance Europe', 'English Contact with Europe', 'Shake speare and Italian Comedy', and 'Europe's Mediterranean Frontier: The Moor'. The scholarship evidenced throughout is impressive, and the material often fascinating, although at times a tension emerges between the contributors' desire to yoke Shake speare to his European context and their acknowledgement that Shakespeare's texts invariably resist this sort of contextualizing reading. At the outset Hadfield observes that 'Shakespeare was concerned to employ what John Gillies has called a "poetic geography", amode of perception that envisaged theworld existing in terms of ideas, not areas' (p. 3). This observation complicates the volume's attempts to set Shake speare's works in relation to their European contexts inways that are not always fully resolved. For example, Susan Doran's opening chapter offers a detailed historical survey of the politics of Renaissance Europe, and convincingly argues that Shakespeare's audiences would have been well informed about political and military affairs on the Continent through pamphlets, newsletters, and other printed material. However, she concludes with the admission that Shakespeare 'did not draw on European current affairs for the plots of his plays' (p. 52). As Paulina Kewes points out later in the volume, this is in direct contrast to Shakespeare's fellow dramatists, who 'produced remarkably acute and accurate depictions of specific [European] figures and events' (p. 5 I). In this way, the Shakespeare that this collection describes turns out to be a relatively apolitical writer, one more interested in the idea of Europe- and the way in which other Renaissance writers conceived of it-than the actuality. Stuart Gillespie provides an illuminating chapter on Shakespeare's reading of European literature, and his indebtedness to novelistic storytellers such as Bandello, Belleforest, and Cinthio, although even here Gillespie has to acknowledge that Shakespeare would have been more likely 'to connect writers through generic links than nationality' (p. 99). Perhaps the essay thatmost directly engages with Shakespeare's works is Francois Laroque's rich and suggestive piece on 'Shakespeare's Imaginary Geography'. La roque notes that Shakespeare's plays 'repeatedly emphasize locality, seen both as real places and as dream-like backdrops' (p. 193), and argues that Shakespeare writes MLR, IOI.2, 2006 521 within a tradition of 'impossible locations and imaginary geography' (p. I96). The fact that 'real' locations in Shakespeare's plays are often, as Laroque points out, paired with an imaginary twin-such as Athens and the wood in the Dream, or the Court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It-reminds us that we should not be too literal-minded in our attempts to pin down Shakespeare's geography. In this way, one could argue that the tensions at play in this volume stem from Shakespeare himself, and perhaps the book would have been yet more successful had this been acknowledged more fully. Nevertheless, this is an informative and scholarly study that is admirably open and exploratory in its...