Content area
Full Text
"All objects are born things, all matters of fact require, in order to exist, a bewildering variety of matters of concern."
-Bruno Latour1
Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. by Adam G. Hooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
What do early modern books-and Shakespeare's books in particular -mean? How should we think of them, refer to them, and edit them? Where do these books, which boast enormous symbolic value, fit into narratives about Shakespeare, his writings, early modern England, and the emergence of modernity itself? What values and intellectual impulses should the scholarship concerning these books demonstrate?
When scholars concern themselves with Shakespeare's books- as all the writers reviewed here do-they implicitly carry answers to these questions. While the long predominance of the New Bibliography was marked by a distinctly modern set of answers, the sub- sequent school, sometimes known as the New Textualism, took its animus from postmodern critical theory. We inherit this recent history as so many stations of the textual crux.2 In 2018, we may well have arrived at a "postcritical" station, in which the hard-won insights of symptomatic, poststructuralist critique have diminished attraction and "surface," "compositionist," and network-oriented approaches have come to the fore. Maybe it is just the books and journals I read, but I have noted fewer and fewer instances of the critical maneuvers whereby a given apparently naturalized fact- Newton's second law, let us say, or Shakespeare's status as English Literature's greatest author, or English Literature as a thing worth capitalizing-is exposed as a function of social factors.
Among the proponents of this resistance/indifference to critique, few voices have been heard as loudly as Bruno Latour's. Few writers manage to entertain and provoke so vividly as Latour. Few living intellectuals have influenced as broad a disciplinary range as Latour. In one particularly well-known essay, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" Latour argues that it is time to move past the critical maneuvers like the ones I sketched in the paragraph above. Latour, as is his wont, suggests that critical theory's mistake was "to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact"-by which he means...