1 - Critical Studies

Summary

GENERAL

Surprisingly perhaps, three of the best books this year recycle earlier material. Patricia Parker's Shakespeare from the Margins, Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing and Lisa Jardine's Reading Shakespeare Historically all contain much that is familiar from published essays by these critics, yet succeed in creating integrated and exciting new wholes. All insist too on the necessity for historicism while simultaneously displaying an impulse to distance themselves from the early 1980s thrust of New Historicism. Patricia Parker's book primarily concentrates on language, but from a perspective which is carefully tuned to the historical resonances of both individual words and discursive contexts. Her book comprises a set of wonderfully subtle and detailed explorations of particular verbal matrices within Shakespeare's plays, revealing more forcefully than any general argument could that there is no language free of ideology. As her title indicates, part of her project is to pay serious attention to plays hitherto marginalized in the study of Shakespeare, and her approach really opens up some relatively underexplored plays as well as the familiar ones. A further aspect of her title is its application to her method, which is often to begin with an apparently marginal or inconsequential quotation. In chapter 6, for example, she starts from the point of Parolles' advice to Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well to 'take a more dilated farewell' and works outwards from there towards a learned and wide-ranging study of the figure of increase. Her best work is quite simply dazzling, and demonstrates how much work remains to be done on the cultural specificity of language.