Shakespeare Minus 'Theory' by Tom McAlindon Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Frank Erik Pointner (review)

Abstract

768 Reviews hungry theatregoers of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, if the author's claims for the unique treatment of Shakespearian comedies are treated with caution, this monograph provides a valuable detailed study of a range of texts that have received little serious scholarly attention. Oxford Brookes University Rebecca Rogers Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. By Tom McAlindon. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2004. xii +210 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-3981-9. Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets. By Frank Erik Pointner. Heidelberg: Winter. 2003. 226 pp. ISBN 3-8253-1504-5. Shakepeare Minus 'Theory' is very largely a collection of previously published es? says and, as with all such collections, particularly given the increasing availability of journals on-line, the general and bald question of 'why republish?' raises itself. For McAlindon, the answer is a clear one: these essays are gathered together the better to present his challenge to what he sees as the current radical yet hegemonic orthodoxy in criticism of English Renaissance literature, an orthodoxy constituted in the main of the work of New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics of the 1980s and 1990s. That challenge is necessary for reasons beyond the personal; McAlindon does a good job of avoiding giving the impression that he is simply a disappointed traditionalist, raging against his tribe's loss of power. He is, as he is happy to declare, a traditional liberal humanist but he takes pride in that label not because it identifies his critical position but rather because it identifies the principles he wishes to demonstrate in his criticism?in particular the belief in scholarly standards that may be shared between opposed critics and opposed schools of criticism, standards whose sharing guarantees both intellectual tolerance and intellectual honesty, and allows productive debate. For McAlindon, the reign of the current orthodoxy is worrying as it has narrowed, homogenized, and impoverished the practice of criticism. This is a serious matter not only as it damages the profession but also because it threatens to deny undergraduates the liberal and liberating pleasures of the text that traditional humanist criticism has celebrated. Many?though, pace McAlindon, perhaps not most or all-but-a-few?have challenged this picture of the role of traditional humanist criticism, and particularly its belief in the possibility of standards that are more obviously objective than they are the self-interested means of legitimation of particular groups' practices. McAlindon does not engage directly in the theoretical arguments that centre on such issues; in? stead, in five of the nine chapters, he offers readings of Shakespeare's plays and, in a sixth, of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. These are intended to expose the limitations of the current radical but orthodox readings by offering themselves as evidence of the more productive practice of a traditional and humanist criticism. They are all interesting essays, respectively dealing with: the complexity of the Henry of Henry V; Falstaff's quasi-religious (Oldcastlean) grace under questioning; the tragedies' wonder at human nature; Coriolanus's essentialism; the importance of worship and love in The Tempest, and of setting Caliban's cursing within a dialectic of prayer; and the importance of human nature, and not just the nature of society, in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. However, while they give good evidence of McAlindon's willingness not simply to tear down but also to build up, and so demonstrate well the intellectual honesty he calls for,as essays they are more effective in exposing the limitations of other readings, generally New Historicist and Cultural Materialist, than they are in demonstrating the clear superiority oftheir own readings. This is particularly so when they suggest that anti-essentialist arguments may be discounted if we acknowledge MLR, 100.3, 2005 769 properly the importance of an Empedoclean view of nature. McAlindon's point that one can have an essentialist view of nature which nevertheless sees nature as radically unstable is an important one, and was well elaborated in Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); I am not convinced, though, that such a view provides a satisfactory explanatory model for the psychology of Shake? speare's dramatic persons. Given that, I wonder whether McAlindon's aim might have been...