Comparative Drama

Steven Mullaney's The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare opens with a striking image: the charnel house of old St. Paul's cathedral being emptied into a swamp on the Thames, forming the very land over which theatregoers passed to reach Shoreditch and the first Elizabethan theatre. As he immediately admits, however, "few, if any, would have been aware of what lay beneath their feet" (5). He nevertheless claims that this image, the move from the charnel house to the theatre, can serve as an emblem "more structured and less easily understood than an anecdote" of shifts in what he calls "the Elizabethan social imaginary" (4–5). This seems to mean that the position of the bones remained significant, even if nobody knew about them, as a sort of repressed memory.

The book as a whole is driven by what Paul Ricoeur calls a hermeneutic of suspicion, which Mullaney distinguishes from skepticism. Indeed, Mullaney seems anxious to put "hermeneutic skepticism" in its place, declaring that it is "not an end in itself but the beginning of further inquiry" (119). He stresses the continued importance of the repressed, the suppressed, the erased, and even the forgotten to the Elizabethan mind. He explicitly refuses "to limit evidence to the explicitly articulated, reported, or theorized." He asks, indeed, "how can we know what an Elizabethan audience thought or felt as they watched, heard, and responded to any given performance?" and responds to his own question with "the blunt answer would be 'we can't'" (61). Nevertheless, he argues that theatre "could probe and feel and even touch some of the crucial integuments and sinews of the social body that had become disarticulated" (93). If we can't tell what the Elizabethans thought, however, we certainly can't tell where "the crucial integuments and sinews of the social body" would lie. An earlier generation of critics liked to talk about an Elizabethan mind or world picture which could only be avoided, E. M. W. Tillyard once remarked, by not thinking at all. Mullaney sees the early modern mind as still open to study, but under the name of "social imaginary," and only in its disjunctions and disarticulations. The object of his [End Page 107] study is not the ideas that drove Elizabethan thoughts, but the anxieties that drove Elizabethan emotions. He finds these anxieties ubiquitous, even when forgotten.

Having abandoned the usual criteria for historical judgement, Mullaney may simply be finding what isn't there. He admits that few theatregoers would know that they were passing over bones from the charnel house, for instance. He fails to note in addition that, since London drew a steady stream of immigrants, many Londoners would have no relation to the dead of hundreds of years earlier. Rather than an active forgetting in "quite extreme and explicit pogroms against the past" (105), one might simply find that the past had already been forgotten, or was never much remembered to begin with, and hence its plastic representation in the charnel-house bones could become mere swamp-fill. Somebody in early modern England had to have demystified the representations of the past, or else they would be unable to undertake the work of destruction at all. Indeed, on page 10 Mullaney admits that "the campaign against charnel houses was limited in scope," though on the facing page he reverts to describing a "rage against the dead," which we are assured "was pervasive in unofficial as well as official forms." He borrows the phrase "rage against the dead" from one John Weever, who is now principally remembered for documenting funeral monuments eventually destroyed after his own death, as was his own: the rage against the dead that Weever polemically describes in order to justify his own practice seems to have had more effect after him than before him. Like Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World and, even more, Hamlet in Purgatory, Mullaney accepts the views of Catholic polemicists that the stripping of the altars—Mullaney cites Eamon Duffy, but only briefly and near the beginning of his work—constituted an attack on the dead, rather than a collective recognition that the dead are not liable to physical attack. More generally, he rejects without consideration the possibility that the reformation might show considerable continuity, as generations of Anglo-Catholics have argued.

His emphasis on disjunction between pre- and post-Reformation religion leads Mullaney to some odd arguments. He ends a discussion of Richard III, for instance, by dismissing Richmond's desire to celebrate victory by taking communion: "Eucharistic communion had become a ritual passage into hell rather than an access to grace. The Elizabeth on the throne…has herself renounced this god and this religion" (134). This is faulty in both its reading of the scene and of Reformation theology. Richmond produces no sacramental theology, never mind a specifically pre-Reformation one; he merely refers to what he will do after he has "ta'en the sacrament," and the Lord's Supper continued to be defined as a sacrament by the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Elizabeth was noted for her particular attachment to pre-reformation rites and imagery, and only the most spiteful of polemicists would say that Catholics and [End Page 108] Protestants worshipped different gods. Indeed, Mullaney goes on to say that "by fiat of the church invoked above, she is a heretic" (134). Only one church held this view, and a heretic worships the same god as his or her accuser, by definition. Indeed, Mullaney seems theologically ill-informed in general. He talks about the objects of communion "being substantial or transubstantial in the pre-Lutheran understanding of the word" (125). Surely he means "pre-Zwinglian," as Martin Luther defended the Real Presence at length and to Zwingli's face at the Marburg Colloquy. Mullaney claims later that "in the larger disenchantment of the world, Protestantism attempted to demystify the old religion by 'unmasking' the sacramental as the merely theatrical, the miraculous as simply a fake: hoc est corpus meum, the words of the priest that announce the 'real presence' of Christ in the communion host—this is my body—was reduced to 'hocus pocus,' a charlatan's trick" (139). In fact, these words were simply translated into the Book of Common Prayer and remain in most versions of the Anglican liturgy to this day. The Oxford English Dictionary lists its first use of "hocus pocus" as occurring a year after Shakespeare's folio was published, or too late to have relevance to Mullaney's argument, and it rejects the etymology that he retails.

Mullaney's overall approach leads him into odd readings even when he isn't specifically concerning himself with theology. He argues, for instance, that the absence of Talbot, even by reference, in the second and third parts of Henry VI betrays a conscious effort of forgetting, "with a thoroughness that borders on the pathological" (116). One might as well ask what is being repressed by refusal to reference Joan la Pucelle in subsequent plays. Such readings border on the paranoid. Talbot is remembered, in any case, not in the further parts of the tetralogy, but in future productions. Moreover, there's a perfectly good bibliographical explanation for why Talbot might be so strikingly present in the first part of Henry VI, but absent from subsequent parts: the first part might have been the last part written. It was certainly the last part printed.

Similarly, the scene in which the title character of the third part of Henry VI witnesses a father mourning for the son he has just killed and a son mourning for a father he has just killed becomes, in Mullaney's reading, an instance of "not only embodied but also felt figures for the loss of history and the trauma of reform" (128). Henry engages in "abject narcissism" in the pastoral soliloquy with which he opens the scene, though it could be argued against this that all pastoral is concerned with the self and the mourners interrupt Henry's introspective rumination. Mullaney proceeds to argue that Henry "treats a 'real' set of tragedies as if they were 'only' allegories of the reductive kind, things to look past, signs to moralize, transcendent truths in personified allegorical disguise" (128). This is clearly false. Henry acknowledges both the misery of the situation and his own responsibility for it, even wishing "that my death would stay these ruthful [End Page 109] deeds." He also offers to weep along with the father, in a striking display of sympathy. Henry does talk about his own feelings but so do the father and son, and Mullaney accuses neither of them of indifference. If Mullaney is so quick to dismiss mourning, one wonders why he even cares about what Elizabethans would feel as their chantries were destroyed and their charnel-houses emptied.

The last section of The Reformation of Emotions consists in a patronizing reading of Jürgen Habermas, in which Mullaney explains what Habermas "thought he thought about theatre" (emphasis original). Habermas, we are told, argued that "before the theatrical audience could become audience-oriented, complexly self-conscious of its private and public dimensions, theater had to be taken to school by the novel" (157). Nevertheless, Mullaney explains that "theatre operates as the ghost in Habermas's literary machine, despite his efforts to exorcise it" (159). His major piece of evidence is Habermas's use of theatrical expressions to describe novels, noting how Habermas calls characters "actors" or has Laurence Stern control his characters "'almost by stage directions'" (158). Mullaney fails to cite the original German. For aught I know, Habermas may indeed have used similar expressions, but Mullaney hasn't shown it. This is important since, as he specifies, "it's the language—and a lot more" (158). Discovering a subconscious idea buried in a thinker's language only works if referring to his actual language. In any case, it seems considerably more polite boldly to disagree with Habermas than to tell him what he really thinks.

It is in this same, last section that Mullaney accuses another critic of "more than a whiff of magical thinking" (161). I found this a difficult review to write; the book boasts on its dust-jacket favourable reviews from many critics I admire and even personally like. Given his treatment of his interlocutors, however, I need entertain no fear of being impolite towards Mullaney, and I should be dishonest to say that I found this a strong monograph.