An historical style: the house of mirrors

Abstract

Seeing the literature of the past through the eyes of post-modernist literature and recent critical theory, most criticism appears to be a fiction, fictions which seldom seem solidly grounded in much textual evidence. The older critics may have misread or interpreted with naïve assumptions about the unity of the text but the textual evidence was in itself of interest. Increasingly interpretations, contexts, theories seem words, words, words. How to get out of the labyrinth in which one fiction leads to another? Beckerman’s analysis of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe Theatre offers a way out. It may be scholarly fiction but the analysis is testable. The notion of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play as a house of mirrors with no clearly articulated central theme and the idea of the equality of the plot, character and imagery corresponds to my experience of Coriolanus. It is not a new idea. It is generally accepted that the late Renaissance thought by analogies and constructed works of art with double plots, reflectors, multiple symbols and perspectives. There is a recognisable historical style by which to read Coriolanus which corresponds to our notion of openness, decentredness, and post-modernism. It is not a matter of Beckerman being right or wrong. He offers a way to discuss Coriolanus which still corresponds to the text and to ways of studying Renaissance art and literature that have in the past proved valuable.