Shakespeare's Neighbors: Theory Matters in the Bard and his Contemporaries (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Neighbors: Theory Matters in the Bard and his Contemporaries Yaakov Akiva Mascetti Rocco Coronato , Shakespeare's Neighbors: Theory Matters in the Bard and his Contemporaries. New York: University Press of America, 2001. 194 pp. In the preface to Shakespeare's Neighbors Rocco Coronato writes that his work is composed of essays "orchestrated into a choir of different styles and tones," with "no point to make, no thesis to defend, no relation to prove" (ix). The critic's methodology and theoretical background do not present themselves within the traditional and unnerving overtones of the "falsely positivist faith in a thesis to be proven" (ix) but provide a refreshing alternative to the repeated interposition of what Terry Eagleton calls an "ungainly bulk" between the reader and the text, "between product and consumer."1 Instead of being a "handmaiden to literature," a mediator of an otherwise incomprehensible fabric of thoughts and feelings of the past, most contemporary translations of William Shakespeare's thought have consciously and fervently mingled particles of their "own mass"2 with the object of their hermeneutic mediation. The consequential "unspeakable crime," as Eagleton calls it,3 which Coronato delineates and disclaims in the brilliant theoretical preface to his book is the illegitimate and violent "appropriation" of the text by the critic. The stance assumed by the author is that of an orchestra director who elicits from the chosen texts no music at all. Between the critic and the text lies, in other words, an unnerving region of silence, combining both interaction and distinction. While Coronato does confess, as we all do when polishing our hermeneutic tools before engaging in textual dissection, that his essays do rest on theory, he claims that his "chapters ultimately try to reach a point where theory itself is absent, a place of suspension where the interrogation of words enhances how the literary text may be read through the partially fading connotations of those self-same words" (ix). The enlightening statement Coronato makes is that his interest as a literary scholar is not on "what did indeed occur" in the composition of a text within the complex fabric of contemporary discourses and language games, but in what "did not occur" or better "what might have occurred" (ix). The void, or [End Page 173] space of absence separating the modern reader from the Renaissance text allows, to a certain extent, a productive series of speculations on the way a certain text is not rather than is. Coronato's method derives from the "thick" Oxbridge school of archaeological recovering of contemporary discourses, aimed at the reconstruction (as thick —in the Geertz sense of the word —as possible) of the possible range of intentionality and meaning available to a specific actor in a specific network of language games. While endeavoring to undermine the Kuhnian abyss that separates the modern literary critic from the Shakespearean paradigm, with his theory of "neighboring silence" Coronato produces something similar to a musical counterpoint, in which he leaves the reader doubtful of her own assumptions and hermeneutical efforts, while still unwilling to relinquish the yoke of an "interrogation of [the text's] words" (ix). The inquiry into the problematic concepts of meaning and intention of a text climaxes, for Coronato, at a point where "theory itself is absent," and in which the attention of the reader is displaced between "Shakespeare" and his "neighbors," between "literary and non-literary texts" (ix). Disrupting the complex "networks of meaning" triggered around the literary text by "clusters of non-literary" sources, and turning away from this "connoted nebula of meaning," allows Coronato to displace the attention of his reader from Shakespeare and to structure his work as a "protracted indwelling on the outskirts of a star" (ix). A closer look at two of the book's chapters will help exemplify the critic's methodology. In "A Descent into Richard III," the documented thickness of Coronato's brilliant research into the confessional doctrines of Shakespeare's time, Catholic and Protestant, and his admirable knowledge of Late-Mediaeval and Renaissance tenets of self-accusation serve to shape the theoretical agenda of his work: suspension and interruption, instead of penetration and violation. His intention, in fact...