Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters by Lynne Magnusson

Abstract

ESC 28, 2002 form and distinctive poetic language, and indicating a link with later poetry of personal introspection. The final essay, thus, promotes the expansion of the canon even as it problematizes scholarly methodology in doing so. None of these essays will bring about a revolution in how we understand the early modern period, but gradually and incre­ mentally they help to bring about a process of defamiliarization of that period peopled with established authors. A reading of this book recalls an experience that Katherine Eisaman Maus relates concerning a leave she took in which she randomly read through the microfilm tapes of titles in the short-title catalogue and was “astonishingly instructed” by, as she explains, “how lit­ tle I knew ‘my period’” (413). These essays make us wonder if we can really understand Red Crosse Knight’s debate with De­ spair without some knowledge of the English dialogue genre, if we can appreciate dramatic tableaux without reading emblem­ atically, if a code of sexual violence undergirds depictions of romantic love, or if Shakespeare’s histories are in dialogue with other historical presentations we have neglected. The book pro­ vides a fresh and valuable defamiliarization of the period and, thus, alerts us to its complexity and the limits of our under­ standing about it. WORK CITED Maus, Katherine Eisaman. “Renaissance Studies Today.” English Lit­ erary Renaissance 25 (1995): 402-14. PAUL W. HARLAND / Augustana University College Lynne Magnusson. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1999. x, 221. $59.95 cloth. Lynne Magnusson begins with the laudable aim of discovering some common ground between close reading (“new criticism”) and cultural poetics (“new historicism”) in order to understand the rhetorical and social dynamics that govern Elizabethan let­ ters and Elizabethan literature, especially Shakespearean. Her 512 REVIEWS central idea is “that being heard enables speaking— that lin­ guistic production is shaped in part by its reception” (ix), or, as she further modifies the point, by its anticipated or expected re­ ception. Elizabethan speakers have a finely honed sense of social positioning— of the rank and power of their auditors, interlocu­ tors, and addressees — and that sense enters deeply into their language, their speech-acts. At its most interesting, this study demonstrates how Shakespeare’s creativity with language is a social phenomenon, an inventiveness widely shared by (perhaps in important ways learned from) his contemporaries, especially his epistolary-minded contemporaries. The book is divided into three sections, with the first part focussed on “The Rhetoric of Politeness.” Drawing on discourse analysis — Bakhtin and Bourdieu— and on linguistic descrip­ tions of “politeness” by the cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, the section explores the ways in which speakers negotiate the considerable risks that conver­ sation entails, especially when the participants have unequal power. Not all readers will share Magnusson’s enthusiasm for the Brown/Levinson scheme of “positive politeness” versus “neg­ ative politeness,” which seems a little wooden, but the analysis of conversational risk is persuasively illustrated with examples of advice-giving from Henry VIII. The first section continues in a second chapter with a more interesting comparison of Sidney household letters and Shake­ speare’s sonnets. Seizing on the striking phrase “the power to hurt,” which appears both in a letter to Sir Philip Sidney from Edmund Molyneux (secretary to Sir Philip’s father Henry) and in Sonnet 94, the chapter argues that what, in the context of the sonnets, is often seen as an expression of lyrical and in­ ward emotion can be shown to be the rhetoric of a particular social situation, a “language of social exchange” (54). Magnusson suggests that “proposing self-blame [may be] as much a part of ‘Molyneux’s moment’ as it is part of ‘the Shakespearean moment’” (52). This suggestion complicates a reading of the sonnets that emphasizes only the inner springs of character, but, as Magnusson concedes, “it is difficult to imagine a person habitually adopting such deferential language without the lan­ guage coming to affect his feelings and predispositions” (55). Moreover, the letters she examines, both from Molyneux and 513 ESC 28, 2002 from Lady Mary Sidney, seem remarkable for the way they balance deference...