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temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. So while the methodology of this book is defined by historicist readings of the texts with which I work, this book is also a study of untimeliness, an investigation of cultural productions bereft of their original context. The line drawn between the Middle Ages and modernity carries great cultural significance. For some critics it marks the birth of the individual,2 for others the birth of the nation,3 for some the beginning of historical consciousness.4 As Margreta de Grazia writes, there is an
one or other of the Plantagenet kings (it matters little which) and its gothic design may be richly decorated but is decidedly less modern (and therefore less important) than the Monument’s Roman Doric column. To use Margreta de Grazia’s language, Freud’s mistake reveals ‘the exceptional force of that secular divide’ between medieval and modern that ‘determines nothing less than relevance’.3 It reveals Freud’s faith in this divide but also indicates the frequent difficulty of identifying the medieval. For medieval culture has been so variously reused, reappropriated
, art and in particular literature have often been best described as revealing and being powerful ways in which we make sense of the world. But that does not separate them from that world. As Margreta de Grazia notes: ‘language is a material medium to be experienced like the rest of the material world through the senses’. 16 Reading must, then, as she puts it, look at rather than see through early modern
. Stephen Orgel, ‘Gendering the Crown’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture , edited by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 133–165, p. 155. 7. See Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977 ), p. 170. 19 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass examine the heir/hair/air connection in Macbeth in their ‘The Materiality of the Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 ( 1993 ), 255–83. See Parker, Shakespeare from the
early modern studies in recent years, exemplified by critics such as David Kastan, Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia. A critique of the presuppositions of this movement might usefully begin precisely from this moment in de Man. 21 Aristotle, Rhetoric , trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in Complete
. 28 Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Smith and Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts , pp. 1 – 14 (7). 29 Razzall, ‘“Like to a title leafe”’, paragraph 5; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3 (1993), 255 – 83 (280
implicitly balances Spenser’s official duties as Sheriff of Cork against the poetic industry which has produced this poem and volume. We understand that Ralegh has rebuked Spenser for neglecting the former; Spenser’s reply contends that what he has been doing instead 1 Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). MUP_Pugh_SpencerandVIrgil_Printer2.indd 225
: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 3. 4 Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, Peter Stallybrass, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Introduction, p. 5. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 137. 6 Bill Brown, ‘The matter of materialism: literary mediations’, Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, edited by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 60. 7 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), PROB 11/11/213,Will of Elizabeth