Adjusting the Mirrors

Abstract

In the two preceding chapters, we have sampled the persuasiveness of modern criticism in its learning, its intuitiveness, its theoretical agendas and its pathos, and we have also looked at the extremes of feeling in some early modern texts without reference to any critical comment. In Chapter 3 we considered Greenblatt’s persuasive presentation of Tamburlaine as a killing machine, and Lisa Jardine’s emotive account of `raw emotions’ as unleashed in Lear. We saw pathos being aroused to challenge conservative readings of Shakespeare, and to bring home the oddity of Margaret Cavendish — and, by contrast, we saw it being evoked in more muted but subtly engaging ways by Ringler and Flachmann, Baldwin’s editors, and by David Norbrook in his appraisal of Lucy Hutchinson. We looked, too, at Milton’s creativity in Paradise Lost as expounded by Harold Bloom; and at God’s shortcomings as Creator, viewed from Catherine Belsey’s feminist perspective.