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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0506  Monday, 22 March 1999.

From:           Robert Miola <RMiola@loyola.edu>
Date:           Friday, 19 Mar 1999 11:54:09 -0500
Subject:        Minola's Shakespeare's Rome

16 March 1999

Dear Editors,

I was surprised to discover that Professors Graham Holderness, Bryan
Loughrey and Andrew Murphy have reprinted as the last chapter in their
collection, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (London and New York: Addison,
Wesley Longman Ltd., 1996), 169-84, the last chapter  (with some
omissions) of my book Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983),
206-35.  They attribute this piece, "Cymbeline: Beyond Rome," to Paul A.
Cantor, author of Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire  (1976) in the
table of contents, acknowledgements of permission to reprint,
introduction, headnote and ascription under the title, and the notes on
authors.

Professors Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy add insult to injury.  They
chop paragraphs and accompanying footnotes out of the argument, usually
but not always marking the omissions (the last sentence is patched on
without ellipses to the preceding paragraph).  They inaccurately
transcribe one footnote (my 16 their 10).  What makes all this
particularly galling or amusing is the use to which they put my essay in
their volume.  The editors want to illustrate all the recent
"exceptionally fruitful" (2) shifts in critical emphasis; they want to
reread texts in "new and challenging ways"; they want to feature critics
who "fall within the New Historicist/Culturalist Materialist critical
spectrum" (3).  My essay (under Cantor's name) is offered as a contrast,
as "a very traditional piece of criticism which leaves unexamined its
own political foundations and assumptions" (13).  Though the headnote
seems to endorse my consideration of Cymbeline as a Roman play, the
editors elsewhere dismiss its author "almost as a kind of naïve
Christian" who "fails to attend the imperial politics which provides the
true link between Rome and Britain" (14).

Readers may draw their own conclusions about the quality of scholarly
research and civility represented by such work.  I am left with some
melancholy observations on current literary practices: 1) New
Historicists/Cultural Materialists apparently need not know much about
old perspectives to purport to offer new ones. One of the contributors
to their volume, Annabel Patterson, reprinted my essay (under my name)
in Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982
(obviously unseen by the editors); except for one passing comment,
Professor Cantor's fine book does not treat Cymbeline at all.  The
introductory essay to this volume and concluding bibliography omit
mention of many significant studies, including works by Stapfer, Platt,
Simmons, Velz, and astonishingly, the seminal work of MacCallum, which
set the trends in criticism of the Roman plays for most of this century.
2) Such writers as these editors routinely celebrate the bright future
of literary criticism (as represented by their own work) by taking
essays written before recent developments and pillorying them for not
forseeing the new dispensation.  Exactly what is that supposed to
prove?  Is there anyone left out there who can be persuaded by such a
tiresome gambit or who can confuse it with real dialogue and persuasive
argument?  3) Yes, we have all learned in the last decades to be more
attuned to politics and to inscribed political agendas.  But to say that
there can be only one "true link" between Rome and Britain in
Shakespeare's play, and that a political one, smacks of the dogmatic
essentialism that the editors everywhere in everyone else deplore.  Pace
Professors Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy, readers have always
discussed theological and spiritual issues in literature and may
continue to do so even at the close of the millennium.  4) I have never
had the pleasure of meeting Professors Holderness, Loughrey, or Murphy
so wonder what they mean by referring to me "almost as a kind of naïve
Christian"; I wonder too what conceivable critical use that label can
hold for anyone else.

Sincerely,
Robert S. Miola
Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor
Loyola College, Baltimore

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