Abstract
In Impressive Shakespeare, Harry Newman outlines how ‘Shakespearean drama engages with the language and material culture of three interrelated “impressing technologies” – sealing, coining and printing – in order to interrogate the formation and destabilisation of identity and authority’ (5). Newman places significant emphasis on the two-way traffic between the technical and the figurative associations of each impressing technology: a key premise of the study is that, for Shakespeare, ‘impression’ could function as a metaphor, and that metaphor could itself function as a kind of impression. According to early modern physiology, an individual’s identity was shaped by the mental, spiritual, and corporeal ‘imprints’ he or she received from external sources, both physical and metaphysical, which, Newman argues, engendered a widespread ‘material culture of metaphor’ (9). An introductory chapter focuses on the connections between sealing, coining, and printing, and is followed by a chapter on the influence of impressing technologies on the discourse of characterology in Coriolanus and its recent critical reception. Each of the individual technologies is then considered in turn and in relation to a specific play: sealing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, coining in Measure for Measure, and printing in The Winter’s Tale. In The Winter’s Tale chapter, Newman also acknowledges the overlapping discourse between the individual technologies and their related metaphors, to reflect how the metaphors of printing emerged from those that originated in the much older technologies of sealing and coining.
The chapters dedicated to Coriolanus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream respond to Shakespeare’s general interest in the metaphors of pressing and sealing. Those on Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, by contrast, argue that their engagement with the technologies and metaphors of coining and printing is the result of Shakespeare, his adaptors, and his first editors responding to specific historical circumstances. Newman convincingly relates the numismatic elements of Measure for Measure to how the play’s composition coincided with the re-valuation of the English coinage by the newly crowned James I and discusses the way Middleton’s reworking of the play in the 1620s extended its coining metaphors in order to reflect on adaptation as a form of recoining and on the potential parallels between adaptation and counterfeiting. Newman then draws on the fact that many of the key individuals who were responsible for the First Folio’s paratexts had been involved with a 1622 court performance of The Winter’s Tale, and that the connections the play explores between books and children influenced the Folio’s account of Shakespeare’s texts as his literary offspring and Shakespeare’s broader status as a literary father figure.
This shift in focus for the chapter on The Winter’s Tale also allows Newman to outline how later commentators on Shakespeare used ‘the language of impression to capture the value of Shakespearean drama in relation to ideas of character, poetry, genre and literary authorship’ (158) and that ‘Shakespeare shapes the language by which he is shaped’ (165). Such a reading extends and capitalises upon the high degree of self-reflexivity in the language of impression that Newman finds in The Winter’s Tale and the other plays under consideration. For Newman, the notion of the ‘imprint’ is connected to generation (material, textual, sexual, or a combination of the three), and subsequently to questions of literary value, authenticity, and legitimacy.
The significance that Impressive Shakespeare attributes to contextualising the associations of ‘impressing’ and its cognates in the early modern period indicates that it may have been helpful for the study to address an additional contemporary definition of the term. In addition to the meanings that Newman considers, ‘impressing’ can also denote the practice of forcing individuals into service. The earliest examples that the Oxford English Dictionary gives for this particular definition relate to press-ganging and are, as it happens, Shakespearean: in Hamlet, Marcellus refers to Claudius’s ‘impress of shipwrights’ (1.1.74), and in Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus warns Antony the fleet he has amassed for the Battle of Actium is not ‘well manned’ because the mariners are ‘people / Engrossed by swift impress’ (3.7.34–6). What is more pertinent for the study is that, shorn of its naval associations, this type of ‘impression’ makes its mark on the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That play features a form of impressment thanks to Oberon’s desire that the Indian boy leave Titania’s retinue to enter his service. In an article published in a 2018 volume of Renaissance Studies (which would, admittedly, have appeared after Impressive Shakespeare went to press), Bart van Es considers this part of the plot within the context of the forced ‘impressment’ of boys for the children’s playing companies; the triangulated relationship between Oberon, Titania, and the Indian boy also relates to Newman’s account of how ‘impressing’ links to the dynamics between parents (or parent-figures) and their children.
While Impressive Shakespeare identifies telling continuities between the four plays that form the volume’s core literary material, at times certain points of departure between them that relate to the study’s overall concerns are not always fully pursued. The chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with a discussion of the influence the patriarchal myth of male parthenogenesis has on Theseus calling Hermia a ‘form in wax’ (1.1.49) that is stamped with her father’s image. This discussion, coming as it does immediately after a chapter on Coriolanus, serves as a reminder (for this reader at least) of how Coriolanus contains the most insistent Shakespearean refutation of the male parthenogenetic myth. Volumnia’s actions in Coriolanus frustrate, and even make a mockery of, her son’s attempts to present himself as a parthenogenetic being, an ‘author of himself’ (5.3.36). Newman cites this line, but only in passing. Since it equates textual and sexual reproduction with authorial agency, it would have been useful for Newman to relate it to his argument about the representation of patriarchal authority in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It might also impact the account in The Winter’s Tale chapter of how the Folio’s paratextual material presents Shakespeare as a parthenogenetic author of his texts.
Impressive Shakespeare is, nonetheless, an insightful work that provides an innovative approach to thinking about Shakespeare and the early modern period. Newman’s lucid and engaging account shows an impressive ability to foster connections between the areas of his study. The information that is provided on the origins of the impressing technologies of sealing, coining, and printing never feels gratuitous or of simply historical interest. Instead, it is linked to the study’s interests in, among other areas, the role of metaphor in early modern thought, ideas regarding human reproduction, development and psychophysiology, as well as Shakespearean drama. This distinctive combination of interests means Newman offers new readings for some much-discussed material, including Theseus’ speech on the imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the First Folio’s paratexts. The attention to the interplay between the figurative and the material in the metaphorics of impression ensures that the study is a valuable addition to the Routledge Material Readings in Early Modern Culture series in which it appears. Print culture has become a mainstay of scholarly enquiry. Newman’s study suggests that imprint culture is equally worthy of attention.