Abstract
What’ s in a period name? Had Juliet had asked the question this way, her answer could well prove satisfying to Shakespeareans today. As a group, Shakespeare critics face a similar dilemma when deciding whether what they read is “Renaissance” or “early modern” literature. For some time now, “Renaissance” has dominated the critical culture of Shakespeare studies. But its popularity and cachet do not stop there: “Renaissance” is everywhere we turn. As I write this chapter, in fact, the current telephone book in Austin, Texas, lists more than a dozen “Renaissance” businesses—firms or institutions, that is, that call themselves “Renaissance__________.” These concerns include a computer store, a women’s hospital, a hotel, a builder, a senior living community and beauty shop, a glass company, and a pest control service (this last perhaps an ironic match for a word that promises rebirth). In this context, “Renaissance” is an all-purpose modifier that seems to assure us of the quality of services rendered. A business using “Renaissance” in its name—for instance, “Renaissance Stone Design”—shares a family resemblance with “Prestige Roofing,” “Deluxe Carpet Cleaners,” “Classic Pizza,” and “Elite Electrolysis and Waxing,” all listed in the same telephone book.
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Notes
Joseph Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). On this work’s influence, as well as on the concept of “the Renaissance” generally,
see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Jules Michelet, Histoire de France jusqu’au XVIe siècle, 17 vols. (Paris: 1852–67).
See Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948), 173 ff.
Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 5 vols. (Paris: 1863–64);
J. J. Jusserand, Histoire littéraire du peuple anglaise (Paris: 1894, 1904).
Mandell Creighton, The Early Renaissance in England. Rede Lecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895).
H. E. Rollins, ed., Old English Ballads, 1553–1625, Chiefly from Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920).
D. C. Allen, “Symbolic Color in the Literature of the English Renaissance,” Philological Quarterly 15 (1936): 81–92; at 81.
See Thornton Graves, “Notes on the Elizabethan Theaters,” Studies in Philology 17 (1920): 170–82; “Recent Literature of the English Renaissance,” Studies in Philology 19 (1922): 249–91; and “Some References to Elizabethan Theaters,” Studies in Philology 19 (1922): 317–27.
See Louis B. Wright, “Variety-show Clownery on the Prerestoration Stage,” Anglia 52 (1928): 51–68; “Handbook Learning of the Renaissance Middle Class,” Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 58–86; “The Reading of Renaissance English Women,” Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 671–88.
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), viii.
J. William Hebel and Hoyt H. Hudson, eds., Poetry of the English Renaissance 1509–1660 (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1929);
Martha Hale Shackford, Plutarch in Renaissance England (N.p.: Wellesley? MA: 1929);
Lily B. Campbell, “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology 28 (1930/31): 281–96;
Israel Baroway, “The Bible as Poetry in the English Renaissance,” JEGP 32 (1933): 447–80;
and H. O. White, Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1935).
See Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990).
Joan Shelly Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991);
and Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar with Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen (New York: Noble and Noble, 1935), 291–93.
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941).
See Charlene Avallone, “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1102–20. On the decline of “Renaissance” as a period label in German scholarship,
see Eckhard Bernstein, “What Happened to the Renaissance in the German Academy: A Report on German ‘Renaissance’ Institutes,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.4 (1999): 1118–31.
F. O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
Heather Dubrow, “The Term Early Modern,” PMLA 109 (1994): 1025–26; at 1026. On “early modern,” see also Randolph Starns’s forthcoming essay, “The Early Modern Muddle,” JEMH 6.3 (August 2002).
Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” Annales Economies Sociétés Civilisations 13.4 (1958): 725–53.
Braudel , La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Phillippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949); Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981–84).
Quoted in Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales’ School 1929–89 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 50.
Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Past and Present 33 (1966): 16–55;
Alan Everitt, “Social Mobility in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 33 (1966): 56–73.
Lawrence Stone, “The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640,” Past and Present 28 (1964): 41–80.
Keith Thomas, “Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England” (Reading: University of Reading, 1976);
Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978);
J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (York: Bothwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, 1980).
Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
and Jean Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–43.
Greenblatt A, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990);
and Howard , “Crossdressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418–40.
Howard , The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994).
Leah Marcus, “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992), 41–63; at 41.
Heather Dubrow, “The Term Early Modern,” PMLA 109 (1994): 1025–26.
Frances Dolan, “Reply” (to Heather Dubrow), PMLA 109 (1994): 1026–27.
Michael Dobson, “Cold Front in Arden,” London Review of Books 18 (1996): 24–25; at 24.
Marjorie Garber, “Roman Numerals,” in Symptoms of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 179–97; at 181.
See, for only one recent work of medievalist criticism that calls into question common assumptions about periodicity and “modern” forces, Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 250.
Arvid Gabrielson, “Early Modern English I/r (+ cons.),” Studia Neophilologica 3.1–2 (1930): 1–10; E. J. Dobson, “Early Modern Standard English,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1955): 25–54.
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© 2003 Douglas Bruster
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Bruster, D. (2003). Shakespeare and the End of History. In: Shakespeare and the Question of Culture. Early Modern Cultural Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05156-1_6
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