Voices of Dissent

Abstract

VOICES OF DISSENT The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton by Richard Strier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 328. $46.00 cloth.Taking his cue, and virtually his book title, from Michel de Montaigne's essay Of Repentance (Du repentir), Richard Strier argues that major Renaissance, Reformation, and CounterReformation authors did not necessarily uphold what he calls official values of time: reason, patience, moderation of anger, subordination of physical to spiritual, ordinary decency and morality, rejection of materialism and worldliness, and assertion of need for humility. Authors could, on contrary, challenge all these values and often did. This argument recalled to my mind a moment in a Shakespeare Association of America seminar years ago in which a prominent English academic, having been hauled over coals by seminar members, finally said, Oh, I see. You want me to be humble. Well, I won't be.For Strier, official values represent a Christian-Platonic synthesis to which all were expected to subscribe. Strier wants to make case that, in being bumptious, full-throated, perhaps perverse (2),Renaissance and Reformation authors frequently proved recalcitrant, yet reader may already pull up short to ask, Who ever thought otherwise? Names like those of Pietro Aretino (surprisingly, not mentioned in book), Leon Battista Alberti, Michelangelo Buonarotti (as poet), Giordano Bruno (one footnote), Niccolo Machiavelli (passing reference), Galileo Galilei (passing reference), Pico della Mirandola (not mentioned, although the dignity of man looms large in book), Francois Rabelais (not mentioned), Benvenuto Cellini (passing reference), Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Ben Jonson are known to everyone and not known for tame acquiescence. (God forbid that we should recall painter Caravaggio here.) Even if one is not on lookout for more insurrectionary spirits, which major English Renaissance author was free of bumptiousness, fullthroatedness, or perversity? William Shakespeare? George Chapman? John Donne? Philip Sidney? John Marston? Thomas Middleton? Andrew Marvell?The question, then, is why Strier feels he has to argue a point that, on face of it, no one would dispute. Part of Strier's implied answer is that resistance to official values could be pursued on a principled, systematic basis. It wasn't just a matter of bad boys (or girls) acting out. (Regrettable, in a way, since resistance to official values thus tends to become more a matter of principled, civil debate than misbehavior.) If official values were Christian and Platonic, Renaissance authors could appeal against them to Aristotle for vindication of proper pride, of greatness of mind or soul, and of just self-estimation. Those values could be opposed to official ones on both ethical and worldly grounds; ethical in that they discountenanced excessive or futile self-abjection (not without its own overreaching vanity); worldly in that they gave credit to dignified social appearances. According to Strier, this ethical Aristotelianism placed humanistically schooled Renaissance writers implicitly, but nevertheless often and deeply, at odds with leading Protestant Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of them insisting on radical human unworthiness and depravity. In reformers' book, repentance was certainly called for, even if it remained unavailing without grace. Yet even when a writer like John Milton marched under banner of Protestant Christianity, he remained, in Strier's view, an unrepentant Aristotelian. Strier additionally argues that even Neoplatonism of Plotinus could be enlisted against prevailing Christian-Platonic synthesis. Plotinus's conception of value, unlike Plato's, gave pride of place to multiplicity, diversity, and expansiveness rather than unity and circumscription. His conception of value can therefore be seen as underwriting triumph of infinite variety (2. …