Valerie Traub

The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear

Many scholars have argued that King Lear draws inspiration from the early modern sciences of anatomy and cartography, even as it critiques the modes of knowledge (violent and penetrative or rational and imperial) they represent. Taking its cue from the conflation of anatomical and cartographic tropes in Shakespeare’s play as well as in scholars’ accounts of it, this article tracks the material and ideological interaction of anatomical illustrations of the human body and representations of human figures on maps; it then reinterprets the play in light of that confluence. Rather than offering judgment on the efficacy or pretensions of science, the use of anatomy and cartography in King Lear participates in an emerging epistemology of human embodiment: a universalizing logic of the grid by which humans would be identified and differentiated, classified and compared. Read in relation to the play’s invocation of nature, Lear’s creation of an abstract, representative human reveals a genealogy of the modern concepts of norms and the normal. Scholars have contended that the logic of normality first emerged in the Enlightenment and gained traction over the nineteenth century. From the prospect provided by Lear, we access a prehistory to the discourse of normality—one that shows the concepts of nature and norms interacting, not through shared prescriptions of bodily conduct, but through their common commitment to universalizing styles of reasoning. In addition to shedding light on the play and critics’ treatments of it, this genealogy of normality enables a reassessment of aesthetic appraisals of Shakespeare’s “greatest tragedy” as well as the critical controversy that long attended the play’s performance history. King Lear bequeaths to us the terms of abstract universal humanity—a discourse of normality infused with and bolstered by appeals to our common nature—by which we still judge the play, and each other.

Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (review)

make his book valuable and illuminating to early modern scholars from a range of disciplines, he examines cultural materials that are more usually the domain of historians and art historians, but he analyzes them in a way that demonstrates his training as a literary scholar. In the first section, Montrose examines Elizabeth’s personal history and focuses on such issues as legitimacy and succession and all the intertwined family, legal, political, and religious topics they entail. In reviewing period debates on female rule, Montrose is careful to discuss Mary Tudor, as well as Elizabeth. Part 2 looks at questions of imagery, policy, and belief and at what the Reformation repudiation of idolatry meant for Elizabeth and the Elizabethan state. Part 3 examines both foreign and domestic examples of what Montrose calls “the Elizabethan geopolitical imaginary” (116). This section examines how England’s enemies such as Spain and Rome construed Elizabeth in order to present the conflict between nations in intensely personal terms. Many scholars consider Elizabeth’s reign to be clearly split into two parts, with the last two decades being much more difficult for the English people, owing to the high cost of war, inflation, bad harvests, and fears about succession. In part 4, Montrose looks at intense popular dissension and resistance to royal authority in both England and Ireland. Montrose’s analysis of symbolic violence against the royal image by disaffected subjects, Catholic and Protestant, is especially valuable. These violent actions against portraits and images of the queen are fascinating examples of the connections between belief in magic and political action. In part 5, Montrose regards the aging body of the monarch and the complications caused by her status as an unmarried woman. He carefully articulates how Elizabeth and her court employed portraiture and selfdisplay in order to neutralize the contempt for the queen felt by many at the end of her reign. Montrose’s study describes the shifts in Elizabeth’s image during the course of her reign; he successfully argues that the cult of Elizabeth was far more than an object of belief or a courtly game. Rather, it was a complex core component of Elizabethan statecraft. This is a very rich book by an author who has spent much of his professional career studying Elizabeth and who has an encyclopedic knowledge of texts about her. It is full of very sophisticated close readings and well repays the attention it demands. The Subject of Elizabeth will be read and discussed for many years to come.

The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge

In Richard Brome’s stage play, The Antipodes, a comedy first performed in 1638, a theme of sexual distress is introduced by a reference to two women lying in bed together. Martha Joyless, a countrywoman suffering from a virgin’s melancholy straight out of Robert Burton,3 is dismayed that her marriage of three years has never been consummated; she reports to her new London acquaintance, Barbara, of her equally melancholic husband, Peregrine: “He ne’er put child, nor anything toward it yet | To me to making.” At the same time, she expresses ignorance about the actual means of conceiving children: “For were I now to die, I cannot guess | What a man does in child-getting” (1.1.252–3).4 Joyless and clueless as she is, however, she is not altogether without sexual experiences, as becomes clear when she relates to Barbara this memory: I remember A wanton maid once lay with me, and kissed And clipped and clapped me strangely, and then wished That I had been a man to have got her with child. What must I then ha’ done, or (good now, tell me) What has your husband done to you? (1.1.253–7)

RECENT STUDIES IN HOMOEROTICISM

ELR bibliographical articles are intended to combine a topical review ofresearch with a reasonably complete bibliography. Scholarshp is organized by authors or titles of anonymous works. Items included represent combined entries listed in the annual bibliographies published by PMLA, YWES, and MHRA from 1970 through, in the present instance, 1998 with additional items. The format used here is a modified version ofthat used in Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence F? Logan and Denzel S. Smith, 4 vols. (Univ. ofNebraska Press, 1973-78). The ELR series is edited by Elizabeth H. Hageman of the University of New Hampshire and supported by the Department of English, UNH.