Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic
Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. ISBN: 0521641918, £50
(US$70, AU$170)
Magnusson’s book presents a new approach to language in early
modern texts. Its aim is to explore the rhetoric of verbal interaction in
Shakespeare’s works and in epistles by his contemporaries. It is
inappropriate to categorise her study as nostalgia for the formalist era;
while formalists and new critics emphasised Shakespeare’s
craftsmanship as a poet even when they were writing on his plays,
Magnusson focuses on the shaping of ideology and the rhetoric of
social exchange through language rather than the speech independent of
cultural aspects of the age. In early modern England, Magnusson
argues, language, whether spoken or written, coordinated the rhetorical
construction of social relationship. Her theory is clearly stated:
‘language demarcated class, social position, and relative power in
Elizabethan England’ (p. 1).
Although her interest in early modern ideology follows the
conventions of new historicism, Magnusson is a revisionist. What
distinguishes her study from previous studies by new historicists is the
blend of her language-oriented close reading of early modern texts (an
area often neglected by new historicists) with a methodological use of
postmodernist discourse theories developed by — instead of Michel
Foucault or Clifford Geertz — Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu
and of the socio-linguistic theory of anthropologists Penelope Brown
and Stephen C. Levinson. Magnusson’s departure from Foucault and
Geertz should not be surprising, for their discourse theories are not
primarily linguistic concepts. Theories of Bakhtin and Bourdieu have
been adopted in the study of early modern literature for a long time.
Magnusson’s application of Brown and Levinson’s ‘politeness theory’,
on the other hand, presents fresh perspectives. According to the
theory, politeness in conversation is an activity to minimise ‘face-risk’,
the threats to what Erving Goffman calls ‘face’, one’s publicly projected
self-image (p. 20). Utterance constructs the social status of the
speaker/letter-writer and the listener/addressee. The speaker/letterwriter’s goal is to establish identity and maintain its stability. Politeness,
therefore, is a discursive strategy or rhetoric to maintain and repair the
identity of both parties.
Magnusson’s book is divided into three parts. Part 1 summarises
Browne and Levinson’s politeness theory and applies it to early modern
texts. Chapter 1 examines the discursive operations of this ‘face-risk
minimization’ in Henry VIII (p. 20). In chapter 2 she extends her survey
to the relationship between the speaker and the young man in a handful
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of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that the social status between the two
is maintained through the rhetoric of politeness. She also examines the
rhetoric of negotiations in six Sidney family letters. Part 2 analyses
Elizabethan epistolary theory and practice. In chapter 3 Magnusson
scrutinises the epistolary manuals of Erasmus (De conscribendis epistolis)
and Angel Day (The English Secretary, or Methods of Writing Epistles and
Letters).
Chapter 4 presents an examination of courtly and
administrative letters. Magnusson suggests that the ‘stylistic complexity’
of these letters ‘depends both on social relation and on discourse task,
opening up a space of interpretive ambiguity that the skilled rhetorician
can exploit to his or her own advantage to re-rank either relationships
or discursive undertakings’ (p. 112). In these two chapters Magnusson
argues that both teaching and practice of Elizabethan letter-writing
promoted particular hierarchies of social relationship. Chapter 5
investigates the merchant epistolary handbooks of William Fulwood
(The Enimie of Idlenesse) and John Browne (The Marchants Avizo). In her
reading of The Merchant of Venice, Magnusson, drawing on Day’s concept
of the ‘pleasures’ style (an interaction script for friends or families),
argues for Shakespeare’s awareness of the interanimation of ‘aristocratic
and mercantile worldviews […] in the new uses merchant traders made
of the “pleasures” style’ (p. 134). Part 3 examines the pragmatics of
conversation in Shakespeare’s plays. In chapter 6 Magnusson returns to
the issues of verbal interaction and identity formation — this time with
a particular focus on various forms of ‘maintenance’ and ‘repair’ as
social activities in King Lear and Much Ado about Nothing. Identity, she
argues, ‘always undergo[es] maintenance and repair’ (p. 144). Her view
of Renaissance self-fashioning, then, is that of ‘a leakier vessel’ than
Greenblatt’s (p. 144). Chapter 7, drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the
linguistic market, pays close attention to Iago’s rhetorical performance
as manipulations of the ‘symbolic capital’ of the discursive ‘linguistic
market’ in Othello (pp. 163-4, 175 and 179). Magnusson argues that Iago
manipulates the conditions for speech profit to obtain more linguistic
power than his social status permits.
Magnusson’s Shakespeare is not such an inventor of the new
language of individuated subjectivity as Harold Bloom has suggested —
in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999) — but an offspring of
the historically specific social discourse of early modern England. In
Magnusson’s view, it was this social discourse that shaped Shakespeare’s
characters — this, of course, is a familiar postmodernist perspective;
see, for example, Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968) — and
both these characters’ and letter-writers’ use of socially-shaped language
or ‘pragmatics’ disclose their power status and social hierarchies. Not
only does she argue that the plays, sonnets and epistles examined in her
book are microstructures of early modern English society, but she also
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suggests that the spectators of Shakespeare’s plays must have been able
to understand the characters’ social status through the pragmatics they
employed.
Although Magnusson presents remarkable readings of various
texts throughout the book, her study is by no means free from
problems. Firstly, her examination of dramatic dialogues rests on the
assumption that they can be analysed in the same way as real-life
dialogues. Some readers may find this presumption questionable, as I
do. This assumption, I believe, should be carefully tested and
scrutinised rather than simply assumed. Secondly, Magnusson, despite
her portrayal of Shakespeare as a product of his own age, does not take
full account of the fact that collaboration was a common practice in
early modern theatre. Henry VIII, which Magnusson discusses in
chapter 1, has been generally, if not universally, regarded as a
collaborative play between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. James
Spedding first advanced the collaboration theory in 1850, and a number
of other studies have reaffirmed Fletcher’s hand in the play (Brian
Vickers summarises these studies in Shakespeare, Co-author: A Historical
Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002), pp. 333-402). Magnusson, though
aware of the collaboration issue (p. 185, n. 1), does not attempt to
distinguish between respective scenes. As to Magnusson’s study of
early modern epistles, I find it disappointing that she does not examine
quotidian letters (as opposed to dedicatory epistles in printed works)
relating to Shakespeare’s own life. Richard Quiney’s letter to
Shakespeare (dated 25 October 1598), for example, asks for help with a
loan of £30. (This letter was found among other Quiney papers in the
corporation archives, which suggests that the letter never reached
Shakespeare.) In addition, Magnusson’s suggestion that Shakespeare
must have used epistolary manuals is intriguing, but she pays too little
attention to the influence of classical writers’ epistolary works on
Shakespeare. T. W. Baldwin, for example, argued for Shakespeare’s
familiarity not only with Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis but also with
epistolary works by Cicero and Ovid (William Shakspere’s Small Latine and
Lesse Greeke (1944); see also Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid (1993)).
Finally, our readers should be alerted to the fact that Magnusson
attributes to Anne Boleyn a letter that Retha M. Warnicke judged to be
a forgery (Magnusson, pp. 29 and 189, n. 28; Warnicke, ‘Three Forged
Letters of Anne Boleyn: Their Implications for Reformation Politics
and Women’s Studies’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and
Renaissance Association, 11 (1990), 33-48). Magnusson cautiously writes
that Anne ‘is said to have written’ this letter (p. 189), but I cannot help
wondering if she is aware of Warnicke’s study. As Vickers warns us,
‘[i]f scholars base theories and interpretations on texts which turn out to
be forgeries, or erroneously attributed, their work loses all validity’
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(‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall
Elegye (2002), p. xi).
Nevertheless, these problems should not prevent us from
acknowledging the great achievement of this book: Magnusson has
called attention to neglected areas of the English Renaissance culture.
She is currently engaged in a study of early modern women’s epistles, as
is James Daybell, who edited the landmark collection of essays, Early
Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450-1700 (2001). Early modern letterwriting is a cultural element that has been gradually receiving scholarly
attention. Let us hope that Magnusson’s new monograph as well as
Daybell’s will appear in the very near future.
Dr Takashi Kozuka, University of Warwick
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