Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History by Andrew Griffin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History by Andrew Griffin Scott Venters Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History. By Andrew Griffin. University of Toronto Press, 2019. Cloth: $65.00, e-book: $65.00. 208 pages. Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama persistently opens the confines of reigning interpretations of early modern historical writing and establishes a place for the drama of the period as a serious mode of historical narrativity. The fundamental claim of Griffin's text is that in England prior to 1623, when occurred the first indelible signs of the institutionalization of history as a discipline, there existed a messy heterogeneity of conflicting historiographical methodologies. In this pluralistic environment, historically minded drama flirted and wrestled with providential, mythographic, humanistic, and antiquarian modes of historical discourse and engagingly articulated their epistemological antagonisms. To illustrate this transgeneric entanglement, Griffin explores sites at which biography, fatality, and history messily converge in what he terms an "untimely death"—a "narrative abruption or disruption," often reified at the locus of a protagonist's demise arriving "before it should have according to available forms of narrative explanation" (3). Griffin's examination of these dramaturgical fault lines exposes the broader historical narrative schematics employed by dramatists in conscious and unconscious ways to make sense of life and death. Griffin applies this conceptual formula to a select set of authors and texts to [End Page 103] produce intensely provocative, intertextual, and nuanced readings. His analyses are attended by comprehensive surveys of critical literature and dissections of each dramatist's peculiar, biographical relation to historiography. In chapter 1 he makes a strong case for Richard II as a problem tragedy because, according to Griffin, William Shakespeare self-consciously replicates the confused state of manifold historical sources available to him by ensconcing Richard's death in a plethora of discrete, contradictory probable causes. Against Annabel Patterson's dominant "proto-liberal" reading of Holinshed's Chronicles, Griffin iterates the text's "methodological overdetermination [within an] underpoliced field of historical inquiry" (41). Drawing upon that methodological porosity, Shakespeare fractures the line of Aristotelian tragic catastrophe bound to a single arc of logical action and characterological coherence. The intentional polyphonic texture of history in Richard II makes the untimeliness of Richard's death both a narratological and a historical problem. It also disturbs the prevailing maturation thesis of Shakespeare's oeuvre, or what Griffin calls the "teleological fantasy," that links the dramaturgical muddiness of the Henry VI plays with the author's vocational immaturity. Following a similar path of biographic reassessment, Griffin devotes sections of Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama to delineating the network spanning the theatrical and social activities of several playwrights. In chapter 2 he maintains that the generic confusion circulating around the false deaths of Moll and Touchwood Junior in Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which conflates the apparatus of city comedy with pastoral romance, is explicable only by first examining the playwright's involvement with various forms of civic histories. According to Griffin, most recent critics, influenced heavily by John Stow's chorographical commentary in A Survey of London, take a "synchronic" view of Middleton's representation of Cheapside, restricting the comedy to a mode of urban realism. When considered in light of Middleton's work as both a writer of mayoral pageants and London's chronologer, a diachronic pattern of Cheapside's "heterogeneous temporalities" emerges, invoking the district's sacral, cyclical, and commercial histories. It is Middleton the chronologist's understanding of Cheapside's semiotic richness and the variety of visages that London has worn that informs the commingling of Chaste Maid's satirical New Comedy and redemptive romance tonalities. Likewise, chapter 4 reads moments of Cyril Tourneur's involvement in the war against Spain within his Atheist's Tragedy and sets them against the contemporaneous pamphlet literature on the Siege of Ostend. Griffin argues that, unlike preoccupations with military strategy and technical innovation evinced in most writings on Ostend's fall, Tourneur imports an authentic scene of suffering into the domain of tragedy and fuses it with an empathic morality elegized in the play's ethics of vengeance. Using the well-worn structure of revenge tragedy, Tourneur, Griffin...