Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity by Nichole E. Miller

Abstract

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...