Shakespeare played an incalculable role in shaping later impressions of the Middle Ages. Almost any book written on the Hundred Years War or the Wars of the Roses begins by explaining just how Shakespeare got it wrong. He conflated characters, condensed chronologies, cleaned up some careers, and sullied others. He turned Joan of Arc into a sexually voracious sorceress and suppressed Humphrey of Gloucester’s ambitions by characterizing him as a wise, disinterested councilor. His views of the conflict between York and Lancaster could not have been more biased. Even though we no longer see them as a reflection of Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture, we know that they derived more from sixteenth-century concerns about rebellion against the highly organized Tudor state than from anything like a modern scholar’s understanding of the parcellized sovereignty of late medieval England. If you want to know something about what actually happened during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Shakespeare is not the best place to start.
But if every medieval biographer and historian knows that Shakespeare got it wrong, they still talk about him as if his fictions not only prompted their investigations but somehow continue to authorize them in the minds of the reading public. Paul Murray Kendall concluded his biography of Richard III with two appendices arguing (1) that Richard did not necessarily murder the young princes and (2) that Shakespeare endowed the Tudor slanders against Richard with such vitality that they have endured for centuries. The final sentence of his book apostrophizes this uncanny power: ‘What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.’1 To the extent that Kendall frames his project as an answer to Shakespeare, he ends in disciplinary despair, as if he knew all along that Shakespeare’s art would prove stronger than even the most diligent historian’s research. Writing two generations later, Helen E. Maurer couched her biography of Margaret of Anjou as a similar defense against Shakespearean slanders. But as Maurer admits in her preface, her own ‘introduction to Margaret of Anjou came on a warm summer evening in New York City when Shakespeare’s Margaret strode across a stage in Central Park in a long, swishing skirt as if she owned the place.’2 Like Kendall, she sets out to correct the Shakespearean record in full knowledge that others have failed to do so before her: ‘Though no one nowadays reads Shakespeare for history, his portrayal of Margaret, in the rough dimensions of her character, has proven to be remarkably resilient. … although historians have long since rejected Shakespearean excess, [his] is the view of Margaret that generally prevails.’3
The extent to which Kendall, Maurer, and numerous other historians bemoan the persistence of Shakespearean interpretations of the Middle Ages suggests that people do read Shakespeare for history, or at least that Shakespeare colors historical understanding. For academic historians, this is a source of frustration, authorization, and even empowerment. Shakespeare may have gotten medieval history wrong, but he also made it matter to thousands of English readers for whom figures like Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV, and even Henry V would have been virtually indistinguishable if Shakespeare had never written. Henry III, who reigned for fifty-six years, arguably mattered more to England than Richard II, who ruled only for twenty-two. But there are more published biographies of Richard II because Shakespeare turned his reign into a defining moment in the English national experience.
While historians have concentrated on refuting Shakespeare’s distortions of the Middle Ages, they have neglected the larger question of Shakespeare’s role in defining their field in the first place. Shakespeare stands in some profound sense prior to our modern experience of the Middle Ages, despite our attempts at historiographical rigor. This priority explains the persistence of Shakespearean interpretations despite historians’ efforts to put them to rest. Even if we know that Shakespeare gave the wrong answers, he asked the right questions, or at least asked the questions that still shape our sense of what mattered during the Middle Ages.
Shakespeare’s invention of the Middle Ages is one primary theme of the essays collected in this book. But it is a theme that we approach with considerable ambivalence. For it has become too common within English literary studies to see Shakespeare as the inventor of nearly everything, from erotic love to modern constitutional theory to modern subjectivity or humanity itself. Closely related to the Shakespeare who invents the Middle Ages is the Shakespeare who invents himself and who, in doing so, invents early modernity as well. Seen this way, Shakespeare becomes a primary exemplar of the Renaissance hailed by Burckhardt and his followers as a point of radical disjunction with the past and as a moment of heightened creative exuberance, when everything from the state to the individual psyche revealed itself as a work of conscious artistry. Who could possibly be a more perfect Burckhardtian hero than a glover’s son from Stratford who not only fashions himself but singlehandedly creates a thousand years of English history?
In order better to resist the lure of a neo-Burckhardtian idea of early modernity, we have counterpoised against the Shakespearean invention of the Middle Ages the seemingly antithetical question of the medieval invention of Shakespeare. To what extent do his poems and plays bear the impress not only of Hall and Holinshed—the Tudor chronicles that mediated his knowledge of pre-Elizabethan events—but of written and oral sources and cultural practices that now strike us as quintessentially medieval? As writers like Bernard Spivack and Anne Righter have argued, Shakespeare’s plays sometimes advertise their departures from medieval theatrical practices.4 The ludicrousness of the rustic mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe play, for example, sets up a self-flattering contrast between Shakespeare and the weavers, joiners, bakers, brewers, and other guildsmen who staged the mysteries. But at the same time Edmund, Richard III, Iago, and even Falstaff ground their self-conscious villainy in the medieval Vice:
A king’s son! If I do not beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath, and drive thy subjects afore thee like a flock of wild-geese, I’ll never wear hair on my face more.
(1 Henry IV, 2.4.136–9)
Pat! He comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.
(King Lear, 1.2.134–6)
The debt to the old drama runs even deeper. Shakespeare found in it not only a model for individual characters but also a structural inspiration for some of his greatest scenes. Emrys Jones once identified Jesus’s apprehension by torchlight in the Garden of Gethsemane—a set-piece in almost every mystery cycle—as the basis for the Venetian posse that hunts down Othello at the Sagittary Inn.5 On an even larger scale of influence, Iago’s and Desdemona’s competition for Othello’s soul exposes the whole play as a tragic Mankind or Everyman in which the Vice triumphs.
Earlier critics tended to follow Shakespeare’s lead in seeing the movement from the Vice to Iago, or from Everyman to Othello, in triumphalist terms as a hallmark of Shakespeare’s greater genius. But over a generation of work in political, social, economic, religious, literary, and theatrical history has by now so undermined the traditional story of a secular Renaissance enlightening the gloom and superstition of the Middle Ages that the question of Shakespeare’s debt to the Middle Ages needs to be rethought completely. In some cases, we must consider new factual evidence suggesting that the boundaries between medieval and modern experience were less sharp than Shakespeareans once supposed. New work in theater history, for example, challenges long-standing assumptions about the inherent medievalness of the mysteries and moralities. We know that the Reformation did not lead to an abrupt mysteries’ end in the early 1530s, and we also know that Protestantism was not inherently opposed to theatrical representation. The cycle plays were not fully suppressed until the 1560s and 1570s, late enough for the young Shakespeare to have seen ones performed at Coventry. For playgoers of Shakespeare’s generation, and certainly for those a few years older, there was nothing medieval or culturally remote about such plays. They were contemporary theater. The moralities lasted even longer, since they were adapted to Protestant teachings as early as the 1530s.
More fundamentally, perhaps, we need to reconsider the interpretive oppositions that underlie the triumphalist vision of Shakespeare as the harbinger of modernity. That caricature establishes an antithesis between the Middle Ages and the early modern period on the basis of oppositions between sacred and secular, Protestant and Catholic, feudal and capitalist, communal and individualist, Latin and vernacular, manuscript and print. Historians have repudiated some of these category markers as inaccurate, or at least analytically unstable. In other cases, they have left the opposition intact but asked us to reconsider the assumption that the modern alternative to medieval experience is necessarily better. Even if something we now call ‘feudalism’ once characterized economic and social life—itself now a controversial claim—was it inherently less sophisticated, or less conducive to complex works of theatrical art, than capitalism? Must the individualism that so many critics have hailed as a defining aspect of the transition from Mankind to Marlowe be embraced as an improvement over the communitarianism that historians like Eamon Duffy have associated with the Middle Ages? If Duffy, on the other hand, exaggerates both the extent and the benevolence of that communitarianism—as several medievalists have charged—we also must contend with the possibility of something suspiciously analogous to market capitalism as early as the mid-fourteenth century.6 What if instead of expressing the values of a coherent Christian society, the mysteries staged a conflict between competing sectors of medieval society, between clergy and lay corporations, over the right to disseminate scripture? What if the centrality of attacks on ‘covetyse’ in plays like The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind arise not from an ancient Christian consensus against avaritia but from a topical resistance to new market practices that were creating a new class of prosperous burghers? In that case, we can hardly claim that the greater individualization that distinguishes Lear from Everyman or Iago from the Vice is a superstructural response to a basic intensification of economic competitiveness. Nor can we adopt a neo-Whig narrative attributing it to emergent middle-class creativity.
In short, the question of Shakespeare’s relationship to the Middle Ages— whether as creator or creation—intersects with the even broader question of the emergence of modernity. Shakespeare, that source of inexhaustible cultural capital, has become a frequent stand-in for the modernity of the early modern. Thinking about Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, therefore, means thinking about the narratives of transition with which we encapsulate Shakespeare and authorize our own discursive and institutional practices. We are concerned here both with the ways in which a Renaissance or early modern present was made out of the reconstructed knowledge of the medieval past and with the ways that these very historical categories, reified as they have traditionally been, have helped structure the scholarly milieus in which contemporary medievalists and early modernists work. Narratives concerning the transition from medieval to early modern underlie and help construct ideas about modernity that constitute our own intuitions about our present place in history. Hence the objection, first voiced some time ago but still true nevertheless, that the medieval as a category too often operates as an anterior Other against which narratives of advancing modernity (as characterized by liberal individualism, by Protestantism or secularization, by incipient nationalism, capitalism, or the invention of the human) can be poised.7
The conventional wisdom about period that this book seeks to interrogate rests upon a number of interlocking master narratives concerning the transition from the medieval to the early modern, each of which is now subject to considerable debate but which cumulatively still underpin an idea of historical rupture that largely determines our period specializations. One of these— originally based on an idea of the Dark Ages that has been used to re-make the present for half a millennium by now—is the story of the Renaissance as the rebirth of the individual. Though the Burckhardtian form of this story hardly requires rehearsal or rebuttal today, the idea that there is something uniquely modern about Renaissance subjects and their characteristic styles of self-fashioning and inwardness remains vital as an assumption within early modern literary studies despite the occasional protest from the medievalist in the next office.8 We are now much less likely than we once were to see this optimistically, as a Renaissance, though. Instead, in the work of Stephen Greenblatt and others, the early modern subject is figured in terms of the loss of the sacred, holistic medieval world, nostalgically recollected, of which the individual might once have been a part.9 The philosopher Charles Taylor calls this process ‘the Great Disembedding’, and sees it as a key, constitutive part of the emergence of ‘the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world’.10 Though early modernists may themselves feel a certain nostalgia for the Middle Ages conceived of as the time before this epoch-making shift in the social imaginary, it leads to the secularized genius of Shakespeare (not to mention the discriminating eye of the modern critic), and so can never be felt to be wholly a bad thing.
In this historicist stereotype, medieval Europe stands as paradise lost, with Shakespeare and his contemporaries cast in the role of postlapsarian moderns, brilliant, haunted, and skeptical, gathering up the pieces of a broken world. Thanks in part to the work of medievalists like David Aers and Sarah Beckwith, who have worked to discredit this view of the history of the subject, and of early modernists like Katharine Eisaman Maus, whose 1995 book Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance decisively decoupled the study of early modern ideas of inwardness from more grandiose notions about the emergence of the modern self, we are now less likely than we were in the 1980s and early 1990s to see claims about the emergent modern subject offered up unproblematically.11 But it is one thing to discredit a specific line of argument and another to dismantle the stereotypes about period that have grown up around it. Much of the most interesting work in early modern literary studies during the past ten years has attempted to relocate and complicate received wisdom about the modern subject—by focusing upon its problematic embodiment, for instance, or upon what Cynthia Marshall describes as its experience of shattering and fragmentation—but for the most part this project has gone forward without attempting to falsify the more foundational assumption that the modern subject in fact emerged as a distinct entity.12
The idea of the early modern emergence of the modern subject is by now inextricably entangled with two other dominant narratives of transition: the idea of the early modern birth of capitalism and the idea of the Reformation as the decisive moment in which an older medieval world was set aside. The Reformation, of course, took place near the beginning of the period we in English studies designate as early modernity or as the Renaissance. And so, most would agree, did some kind of transformation in the economic organization of human relations. What remains controversial, in each case, is the nature of these changes: how we think of their implications and what continuities and discontinuities they therefore imply. Once upon a time, the English Reformation was understood in Whiggish terms, as the triumph of Protestantism as a progressive force. But recent scholarship has instead emphasized the persistent appeal of traditional religion in England despite official efforts at reform, a perspective that makes it possible to speak of significant areas of continuity in the spiritual lives of English men and women despite the change in the state church.13 In the case of economic transformation, the theories of Robert Brenner and his followers have made it possible to think of capitalism as emerging in England out of internal contradictions of pre-capitalist society, a perspective that makes it possible to speak of capitalism as a by-product or continuation of medieval practices rather than just as a departure from them.14
This narrative of revolutionary transformation from medieval to early modern has also, of course, been reinforced by a political history emphasizing the emergence and strengthening of centralized monarchy, a development that provided the newly modern subject with a suitably modern state to inhabit. This argument advances on two related fronts. The first of these has to do with the idea that the sixteenth century saw the emergence of the modern nation-state. The sociologist Liah Greenfeld, in a well-known and controversial study, sees early Tudor England as the first modern nation, and literary scholars have likewise been interested in the sixteenth-century emergence of new forms of nationalized social imaginary.15 This claim is closely linked to (though by no means coterminous with) the idea, established more than fifty years ago by G. R. Elton, that the 1530s and 1540s witnessed a ‘revolution in government’ which set the monarchy on a sound bureaucratic footing by shifting the work of government away from the King’s personal household attendants and creating a more modern-seeming style of rationalized central government.16 But though it remains true that Tudor England saw an expansion of government and a shift toward increasingly nationalized ways of thinking about monarchy and sovereignty, it is by no means clear that Elton’s modernizing, bureaucratic revolution ever took place. David Starkey and others have demonstrated the persistence of household government through the reigns of the Tudors and beyond, and Starkey, in particular, has argued that the more important transformation occurred in the mid-fifteenth century when people began to imagine sovereignty in terms of the good of the ‘commonwealth’.17 As with the other master narratives of historical rupture, this challenge to the idea of a Henrician revolution in government paves the way for a reassessment of the continuities and discontinuities in government and political theory across the medieval/early modern divide.
None of this is meant to imply that our conventional period designations have no meaning. Certainly no one would debate the catalytic importance of developments like the Reformation, the invention of the printing press, or the discovery and colonization of the so-called New World. We do suggest, however, that the self-reinforcing confluence of these stories of modernization (especially in England, where what we call Renaissance and what we call Reformation are so closely contemporaneous) has encouraged scholars—and particularly early modernists—to imagine historical change as rupture or revolution and therefore to disregard the implications of areas of overlap and continuity in their approach to historical explanations. This has been especially true during the ascendancy within early modern studies of that nebulous field of literary scholarship known as New Historicism, which has tended to sidestep questions of historical transformation by relying upon a Foucauldian historiography of unexplained and unexamined epistemic change that avoids the problem of period instead of addressing it.
The problem of periodicity that this volume addresses is thus nested in turn within the historiographical problem of teleology. For this reason, Étienne Balibar has become a key theoretical guide underpinning our work on this book: Balibar discusses the emergence of modernity non-teleologically by displacing the threat and promise of infinity from the historian’s present to the past that he or she describes in its openness to multiple futurities. In criticizing prior Marxist narratives that treated the coalescence of the nation-state as a consequence of emerging capitalism, for example, Balibar stresses that ‘state forms other than the national have emerged and have for a time competed with it, before finally being repressed or instrumentalized: the form of empire and, most importantly, that of the transnational politico-commercial complex, centred on one or more cities.’ As Balibar reminds us, in contrasting the experiences of the Hanseatic League and the United Provinces with that of ancien régime France, European history finally offers no evidence asserting the conjunction of capitalism and the nation as a necessary criterion of modernity.18 It could have happened differently. We have attempted to keep this essential piece of wisdom in mind even while discussing aspects of the age of Shakespeare that prefigure modernity in telling ways.
Maintaining a sharp division between the medieval and the early modern has been valuable, in terms of institutional prestige, for early modernists. This is why the most trenchant critiques of caricatured or stereotyped assumptions about the transition have thus far come from medievalists. This challenge to the self-fashioning of early modernism has never been more urgent than it is right now, thanks in large part to James Simpson’s magisterial and ambitious recent survey of the period of transition, Reform and Cultural Revolution.19 Simpson’s book can be read as a salvo in this disciplinary turf war, an attempt to make the case that we should value medieval culture more than we have and value Renaissance culture less. For Simpson argues that the early sixteenth century experienced a cultural revolution stemming from the simplification and centralization of jurisdictional and institutional authority, and that this revolution extended to a narrowing of thought and expression manifested in the literature of the period as well. This argument effectively preserves the idea of the Middle Ages as paradise lost while denying the early modern period its corresponding claim to intellectual superiority.
There can be no question but that Reform and Cultural Revolution is a major achievement and, by extension, that it makes a persuasive case that there was a cultural revolution with something like the general contours Simpson suggests in the early sixteenth century. But a work of this kind—a massive act of synthesizing imagination drawing on the work of myriad specialists in multiple disciplines—is bound by its very structure to replicate some of the key, pre-existing assumptions of the scholarly fields from which it draws. To give but one example, Simpson’s chapter on politics relies on Elton’s outmoded account of the Tudor revolution in government to establish a clear and overstated break in political order, and then uses that as the scaffolding for a nuanced and insightful discussion of a range of political literature from Chaucer and Hoccleve through Skelton and More.20 The point here is not to quibble, churlishly, with a single omission in a massively learned and important book, but rather to suggest how the structure of this kind of synthesizing work winds up recapitulating the logic of disciplinary distinctions even as it remaps them. One cannot simultaneously synthesize the work of others and start from scratch, and so we might say that even the most radically revisionist of overviews is likely to be dependent upon some aspects of the received wisdom about periodicity governing the prior organization of the field under discussion.
The essay collection, as a form, is the inverse of the synthetic literary history, and its strengths are likewise of an opposite variety. Part of the objective of this book is to decouple and so reconfigure these linked stories of transformation so that individual aspects of continuity and discontinuity might be considered afresh. The traditional conjoining of so many theoretically distinct and variably accurate ways of thinking about the transition from medieval to early modern has created, we argue, an overly rigid sense of periodicity that obscures even as it illuminates. It is time to dissect this body of public knowledge about the past in order to create new ways of thinking and working for the present and future.
It is important, too, for early modernists to participate in this re-examination. For if the dominant paradigms concerning the transition from medieval to early modern have been structured according to the disciplinary agendas of early modernists, the counter-reformation inaugurated by Simpson threatens to be determined by the interests of medievalists. In each case, the field of inquiry is impoverished by the asymmetry. In their introduction to a recent special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies dedicated to Simpson’s book, David Aers and Sarah Beckwith describe how they asked several sixteenth-century scholars to contribute essays but wound up being unable to recruit more than one non-medievalist for the project.21 Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, though, is fully collaborative in the sense that the contributors bring to the project varied expertise in both medieval and early modern literary culture. Several, including Beckwith, Rebecca Krug, William Kuskin, and Karen Sawyer Marsalek, are primarily medievalists. Patrick Cheney, Christopher Warley, Brian Walsh, and Curtis Perry have primarily worked as early modernists. And three of our contributors—Elizabeth Fowler, John Watkins, and Michael O’Connell—have published extensively in both fields.
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages is organized around three distinct but interrelated theoretical approaches to the volume’s central concerns. The essays in the first section—entitled ‘Texts in Transition’—grapple with questions of historical change and the transmission of culture. They explore how literature can allow us to glimpse moments of historical transition in at least something of their original contingency, long before their eventual incorporation into modern narratives about the waning of the Middle Ages or the triumph of the Renaissance. Instead of treating literary texts as medieval or early modern, our contributors in this section expose the tensions and internal divisions inherent in historical changes as felt by articulate subjects living through them. Christopher Warley, for example, demonstrates how the poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, traditionally attributed to Shakespeare, articulates as-yet unconsolidated ways of thinking about class and social distinction in a period of transition. Like Balibar, Warley insists on the open-endedness of historical and literary historical development. So, though Warley analyzes the importance in the poem of medieval languages of property and ownership in relation to theories concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism, he rejects a style of Marxist reading that would seek to situate the poem on any stable trajectory between a feudal past and a capitalist present. Instead, Warley suggests that we should understand the work done by a poem like ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ in terms of its articulation of new social positions constructed as and in terms of commodification. In this way, his essay simultaneously offers a neo-Marxist critique of extant models of historical transition and reads ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ as articulating transition itself.
Sarah Beckwith’s essay on ‘Shakespeare’s Resurrections’ similarly resists the historiographic attractions of a rigid opposition between a unitary Catholic medieval past and an equally unitary Reformed present. The essay begins as a commentary on ‘resurrected’ characters like Hero, Claudio, and Hermione, who appear ‘present as reminders of an ineradicable past that must be confronted in the lives and thoughts—in the self-recognition—of those to whom they so hauntingly return’. But as the argument unfolds, Beckwith explores those characters as embodiments of a medieval theology of grace and penitence that, far from being repudiated by the Reformation, arguably achieves its strongest articulation in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespeare’s late plays, Beckwith argues, and in particular The Winter’s Tale, draw upon medieval paradigms of resurrection in order to create what she calls a ‘grammar of theater’ capable of re-imagining this theology even in the wake of the Reformation.
Like Beckwith, Elizabeth Fowler finds in Shakespearean drama a post-Reformation recasting of forms of community once produced via the sacraments of the medieval church. But instead of reading the significance of sacramental community primarily in theological terms, Fowler suggests that we see in it an important form of social contract theory that has typically not been recognized as such because of the pre-enlightenment vocabularies in which it is couched. So, she suggests, a great deal of early modern ‘economic and political thought about what glues human beings together into polities grows out of sacramental discourse and its constructions of intention, interests, and the passions.’ From this perspective, the obsessive interest in contracts and bonds in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice—in the way they forge communities and also in the recurring and disturbing ways in which they fail to do so— can be read as Shakespeare’s response to the felt need for a post-Reformation theory of the social contract capable of handling questions of intention and the efficacy of language previously associated with sacramental theology.
Finally, John Watkins’s study of historiography and nationalism challenges the Anglocentricism dominating prior accounts of Shakespeare and historical transition by situating his King John at the dawn of an international system based on abstract notions of the state rather than dynastic right. That is, the play was composed from within the transition from one conception of the state to another, and so, Watkins argues, we miss the point if we try to read its political story in terms of long-settled modern ideas concerning nation and state. Instead of seeing Shakespeare’s play as part of either a modern, nationbased political mentality or a pre-modern, dynastic one, Watkins reads King John as a document in transition, a fiction whose ideological fissures and slippages themselves provide us with a kind of snapshot of how an emergent idea of the state could and could not be conceptualized by those experiencing conceptual change from within.
Our second section focuses on self-conscious ‘Medievalism in Shakespearean England’. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the Middle Ages had a present, binding reality that is hard for us to imagine four centuries later. Most of the laws that governed the country were instituted in prior centuries, and even the new ones were based on medieval precedents. Protestantism offered a vernacular liturgy, but as the more radical reformers continually complained, its outlines were essentially those of the Latin mass. Even the churches in which they worshiped and many of the buildings in which they lived and worked dated from the Middle Ages. When poets looked for English models to inspire their work, they turned to Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, and Hoccleve. The country was profoundly conservative in the sense that authority was typically derived from and anchored in the exemplarity of the past.
But as tangible and powerful as that past might have seemed, it was also subject to continual revision and ultimately reinvention. Politicians and ecclesiastics were quick to claim medieval precedents where none actually existed, at least in a sense that would satisfy the canons of modern historical inquiry. The Chaucer hailed as the father of English literature by writers like Spenser was in part a Renaissance creation. In investigating Shakespeare’s role in the simultaneous reception and invention of the Middle Ages, the essays in this section steer a delicate course between historiographic realism and nominalism. As modern scholars, they eschew an older, almost fundamentalist belief in a medieval past that had such an absolute and immutable character that it could always be distinguished from Shakespeare’s fictions. At the same time, they also nuance a more recent nominalism that reduces the past to nothing but a fiction. The Shakespeare that each posits engages the Middle Ages in a complex, dialectic and dialogic fashion. He simultaneously fashions and inherits a past that exists both outside and within his fiction.
Like Christopher Warley, Patrick Cheney finds some of the strongest traces connecting Shakespeare to the medieval past in the love poetry rather than the plays. Cheney’s essay on ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ explores Shakespeare’s creation of a new model for the literary career on the basis of heuristic recollections both of Chaucer and of Spenser’s prior medievalizing gestures in The Shepheardes Calender. Shakespeare’s conception of authorial career is novel, ambitious, and in some ways epoch-making. Nevertheless, Cheney’s intertexual analysis reminds us how our understanding of Shakespeare’s career is impoverished if we allow rigid period distinctions to distance him from the well-springs of an English poetic tradition whose contours run counter to our own customary disciplinary categories.
William Kuskin also addresses questions of authorship and literary authority in his essay on ‘recursive origins’ in 2 Henry VI. But whereas Cheney’s emphases fall on Shakespeare’s departures from his medieval models, Kuskin stresses continuities by examining how Shakespearean drama engages with conceptions of textual authority inherited from the literary culture of the fifteenth century. Literary history often erases the fifteenth century, Kuskin argues, focusing instead on earlier Chaucerian innovations and on the innovations of the sixteenth- century Renaissance. But for Kuskin, sixteenth-century literary culture has a profound, if ambivalent, relationship to an interest in the problematics of literary reproduction that is in fact characteristic of the previous century. Kuskin’s essay focuses upon the way that Shakespeare’s The First Part of the Contention preserves, thematizes, and in some ways resists complicated ideas of literary and cultural authority derived from fifteenth-century texts. More generally, with its fifteenth-century focus, Kuskin’s essay marks a powerful intervention in a literary historical discourse that has tended to reduce the assessment of modernity’s relationship to the Middle Ages to the question of major sixteenth-century writers’ relationships to Chaucer.
Brian Walsh’s ‘Chantry, Chronicle, and Cockpit: Henry V and the Forms of History’ also discusses Shakespeare’s self-positioning vis-à-vis earlier forms of knowledge and authority. Here, though, the focus is on Shakespeare’s relation to antecedent forms of historical memorialization: for Walsh, Henry V is a kind of historiographical tour de force, a play that depicts and so thematizes medieval forms of history and compares them implicitly to the performed history practiced in the play’s own wooden O. Walsh’s essay emphatically rejects the Whiggish implication that Shakespeare’s historical imagination was more sophisticated than medieval forms of historical memory, but argues nevertheless that by differentiating the historical representations produced in commercial theater with the forms of history staged as medieval within the play, Henry V creates something like the disciplinary distinction that the present volume aims to interrogate. In this way, Walsh’s reading of Shakespeare as a historiographical thinker resonates with Cheney’s argument about the way Shakespeare creates a new model of authorship out of a medieval tradition.
Curtis Perry’s essay provides a kind of postscript to this section on Shakespeare’s medievalism, supplementing its focus upon Shakespeare’s self-conscious and interrogatory uses of the past by reminding us of the sheer heterogeneity of Renaissance medievalism. Where scholars interested in the Elizabethan emergence of nationalist ideas have focused extensively upon Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, Perry examines instead a series of non-Shakespearean history plays that contribute to early modern conceptions of Englishness by returning to stories of Norman and Danish conquest in the eleventh century. As in Watkins’s essay, what is at stake here are narratives about the emergence of the modern nation-state, and Perry’s essay serves as a reminder that a too-exclusive focus on Shakespearean dramas of national identity produces a reductive and potentially teleological story of emergent nationalism in Tudor and early Stuart England.
Our final section, ‘Shakespeare and the Resources of Medieval Culture’, challenges prevailing ideas of Shakespeare—as inventor of the modern subject or as Renaissance man—by resituating his plays in relation to native artistic, theatrical, narrative, and ethical traditions inherited from the Middle Ages. In doing so, essays in this section also interrogate notions of modernity that have been facilitated by the idea of Shakespeare’s unique genius and the supposed crudeness of putatively pre-modern art and culture. Michael O’Connell’s essay on King Lear and the morality theater, for example, counters a critical tradition dating back to Chambers and Spivack that credited Shakespeare with transforming medieval allegories into the basis for the mimetic theater characteristic not only of modernity but of literary greatness itself. Where his precursors found disjunction and discontinuity, O’Connell sees eerie points of continuity. O’Connell’s King Lear is an Everyman continually advertising his indebtedness to modes of thought that twenty-first-century audiences have been too quick to see as inherently medieval.
Whereas O’Connell focuses on Shakespeare’s relationship to the fifteenth-century moralities, Karen Marsalek discovers an important resource for Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the mystery cycles. In particular, Marsalek focuses on true and false Resurrection in mystery plays and on the re-use of these motifs in early modern drama. Originally associated with Antichrist figures, images of false Resurrection operate in early modern professional theater both to signal kinds of political tyranny associated with the Antichrist and as a metatheatrical trope commenting upon the unreliability of theatrical representation itself. Far from seeing the medieval cycle plays as amateurish productions redeemed by the greater artistry of Shakespeare’s professional theater, Marsalek upholds them as sites of profound reflection on the relationship between truth and artifice to which Shakespeare returns at critical stages throughout his career.
Our final essay, by Rebecca Krug, focuses on the medieval roots of The Merchant of Venice, a topic that is in itself striking, since it is so easy to see the play’s mercantile or proto-capitalist concerns as utterly modern. Krug’s essay argues that both medieval and early modern readers of stories from the Gesta Romanorum were as likely to read them as narrative thought experiments exploring moral issues as they were to read them as spiritual allegories, and that they cast light on Shakespeare’s play if we imagine him reading them in this way as well. Students of Shakespeare’s play will know the Gesta as a source for the casket test episode, of course, but Krug demonstrates that Shakespeare’s indebtedness to this collection goes well beyond that. We have been prevented from seeing the Gesta stories as a rich resource for Shakespeare’s moral imagination, Krug suggests, by a critical tradition that treats them as merely allegorical and that thus separates them from the more worldly (read: more modern) moral concerns of Shakespeare’s play. Thus, her essay suggests, thinking about Shakespeare’s use of stories from the Gesta Romanarum can cast light simultaneously on The Merchant of Venice (whose ethical concerns will look more medieval) and on the Gesta stories themselves (which themselves look richer once they are liberated from an exclusively allegorical mode of reading).
The essays collected here do not subscribe to a single interpretation of modernity’s emergence from its antecedents. But they all remind us, in powerful ways, of modernity’s contingency. Shakespeare’s recreation of the Middle Ages is both foundational to our historical point of view—he asked the right questions—and something so alien to us that our instinct is to dismiss it: he got it wrong. In the interplay between what he gets right and what he gets wrong, the sensitive reader can find the traces of divergent trajectories into the future we now call the modern.