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Home , Ecstasy (emotion)

Critical Essays on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint: (review)

A. Robin Bowers

Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 311-313 (Review)

Published by Renaissance Society of America

For additional about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/212601

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] REVIEWS 311

, while the Nays view it a “chronicle, a morality” with “savage words” for the protagonists, even “‘criminality’ for Cleopatra, ‘satyriasis’ for Antony” (28). Further, however, Rosenberg shows how the Yeas and Nays pattern is intrinsic to the divided world of the play — Rome and Egypt, patriarchal and matriarchal , cold reason and hot , hero and villain — while the overflowing language of hyperbole, antithesis, and oxymoron mirrors the “vastness” (11) of the personalities, of the geographic space, and of the evoked in the play. Scene by scene (with three additional chapters focused on Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavius), Rosenberg progresses through the play, urging the reader to speak aloud the crucial lines of the play in order to discover whether the words resonate as a Yea or a Nay for the reader of the book and examining the critics’ Yeas and Nays at each turn. From the beginning, Rosenberg does not hide his own conviction that Shakespeare intended his play as a grand Yea: a play in which the actor, reader, and audience share with Antony and Cleopatra in “a profound experience of life and , of hurt and healing,” and “a deep caring for their people” (33). Students of literature and actors may well find Rosenberg’s process a valuable experience, for it comprises both a sustained personal interaction with the play’s text and a scholarly survey of critical-theatrical responses. The last chapter, “Is Anthony and Cleopatra a Tragedy?” offers the student a good model of genre debate, written by Mary Rosenberg as an interaction with her husband’s notes on the subject (she is a self-confessed Nay). The appendices are most valuable, perhaps, to scholarly research: “A Note on the Historical Cleopatra 69 BC–30 BC,” a “Critical Bibliography,” and a “Theatrical Bibliography.” The “Critical Bibliography,” while it is not intended as a comprehensive survey, nevertheless contains around a thousand entries. The “Theatrical Bibliography,” again not an exhaustive list, nevertheless spans four centuries, six continents, and thirteen languages. The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra offers teachers, directors, actors, and students a refreshing model for the and for Shakespearean language and scholarship that creates excitement in the classroom — Rosenberg was teaching a freshman seminar on the play through much of his drafting of the book — and on the stage. Most valuable, perhaps, is Rosenberg’s demonstration of the vast scope, not only of the play, but also of the reactions of the viewing and reading public. Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” (2.2.246) is well demonstrated to be an intrinsic of this magnificent play itself. TITA FRENCH BAUMLIN Missouri State University

Shirley Sharon-Zisser, ed. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. x + 204 pp. index. illus. bibl. $94.95. ISBN: 0–7546–0345–8. The short narrative poem A Lover’s Complaint is an enigma: it first appeared at the end of Thorpe’s first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609 and then was 312 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY not printed again until Benson’s edition of 1640; its author and date of compo- sition are still under debate; and it is not clear that the poem is complete in its present form. The first part of Critical Essays is a competent and useful survey of the critical history of the poem as background material for the essays presented in this volume. It supplements and brings up to date the critical past as recounted by Hyder Rollins in the New Variorum (1938), but does not relay Rollins’s considerable about Shakespeare’s authorship, based on the writings of several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics. Some of this doubt is recognized, however, in the views of Brian Vickers (currently in a minority), but the essayists in this volume generally accept Shakespeare’s authorship, in keeping with the conclusions of Katherine Duncan-Jones and other recent editors. In regard to the form of A Lover’s Complaint, the poem is puzzling in that it seems to end abruptly after a short 329 lines written in rhyme royal, with a final exclamatory, apparently ambiguous stanza spoken by the female complainant. The narrator’s voice has not returned to give closure to the poem. While placement of a complaint narrative was not unusual at the end of a sonnet sequence, the abrupt ending and the absent narrator provide rich fodder for postmodern critics who thrive on the instabilities of language and form. The editor and a colleague, Stephen Whitworth, both psychorhetoricians, write a critical history survey that includes abstracts of the subsequent articles presented in this volume, which demonstrate “the variety and high quality of work finally being done on...themost neglected portion of Shakespeare’s poetic ar- tistry” (48), showing the value of “interpretive instability” (49) in the critical life of A Lover’s Complaint. A series of nine chapters follows, ending (culminating?) with the psychorhetorical criticism by these same two scholars. Both of their essays focus on the melancholic masochism of the female complainant, and shuttling between Freud and Lacan, they explore the psycholinguistic structures of the poem which give rise to the “suffering ecstasy,” or jouissance, expressed in the orificial body language of the poem’s rhetorical structures, particularly the orgasmic Os of the final stanza. The earlier seven chapters (one reprinted from a previously published work) offer a refreshing range of views based on contemporaneous stances of Virgilian- Ovidian authors (Cheney), use of early modern religious and nonreligious confessional practices (Stegner and Bell), intertextual referencing with other works by Shakespeare (Roe and Dubrow), and psychological analysis of seduction (Schiffer). They are generally well-written but sometimes unnecessarily turgid in . The collection as a whole is self-referentially intertextual (probably the result of conferencing of authors), and there is considerable homage paid to most recent editors, such as Duncan-Jones, Kerrigan, Burrow, and Roe. More attention could have been paid to comparing A Lover’s Complaint with the other narrative poems, and it seems to me that there are some profound critical dangers in using an early modern text to explore postmodern psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, this volume is REVIEWS 313 useful as a reference tool and commendable for encouraging further critical inves- tigations of the intriguing text of A Lover’s Complaint. A. ROBIN BOWERS Plymouth State University

Linda Charnes. Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium. Accents on Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2006. xii + 152 pp. index. bibl. $31.95. ISBN: 0–415–26194–5. In Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, Linda Charnes engagingly employs Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henriad as starting points and for the discussion of political events and cultural preoccupations of contemporary Western , from the 1990s through the turn of the millen- nium and including the continuing war on terror begun and supported by the United States and Great Britain. In the process she analyzes both the texts and cinematic interpretations of these plays, the contemporary films L. A. Story, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Blade Runner, the genre of film noir, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and more. However, while she considers both highbrow and lowbrow materials, hers is no whimsical exercise, but a rigorous, theoretically- based mining of the assumptions and underlining life in the Western world today. According to Charnes, “The essays here concentrate on the legacies be- queathed to Shakespeare’s two most famous, and culturally durable, royal sons: the princes Hal and Hamlet. Both have highly vexed relations to monarchy in par- ticular and to paternalism in general; but each has bequeathed to us a drastically different model of the social and psychological politics of succession” (8). Con- sidered in the light of this day and age, “the two princes epitomize the debate — as fraught in our own day as in Shakespeare’s — about the duties, dangers, and burdens of inheriting, and spin-doctoring, legacies” (8). In chapters memorably entitled “The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince,” “It’s the Monarchy, Stupid,” and “Operation Enduring Hamlet,” Charnes troubles the categories of literary criticism and the notion of modernity. She looks into the psyche of the United States — an ostensible democracy which still seems to yearn for a monarch, and whose citizens seem unwilling (Hamlet- and Hal-like) to take responsibility for the actions of their government. She also examines the enduring potency of the symbol of the monarchy in modern England, and diag- noses the “cynical idealism” of the ultimate modern prince-avenger: George W. Bush, whose preemptive “closely resembles totalitarianism” (111). Hamlet’s Heirs is part of Routledge’s Accents on Shakespeare collection, edited by Terence Hawkes — an extension of the New Accents series, which has “helped to establish ‘theory’ as a fundamental and continuing feature of the study of literature at the undergraduate level” (ii). According to the publisher, the Accents