Milton's Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (review)
(32). While I am convinced that it was wise not to organize it more schematically, as a kind of quasi-reference work — in the tradition of Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935) or Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947) — at times I still wondered whether the expectations of a monograph led me to anticipate more of an argument than McDonald usually seems willing to deliver. He readily admits a hesitancy along these lines: “As with most of the other poetic strategies, I normally decline to assign specific semantic functions” to any particular aspect of Shakespeare’s style (206). In part, this arises (once more) from the apparent superabundance of the late style, thereby making the “urge to formulate some general statements about the mature Shakespeare’s syntactical practice . . . frustrated by its immense variety, the idiosyncratic mixture of contradictory effects”: as a result, “almost any generalization about an important syntactic trait must be qualified immediately by acknowledgement of a complementary feature” (134). While McDonald favorably cites the work of Patricia Parker, he remains far more reluctant than she to press suppositional claims much beyond the scope of the plays themselves. (Parker, in contrast, explores rhetorical tropes and etymological traces in service of broader conjectures about early modern culture: scholarship by Joel Fineman, Jeffrey Masten, and Madhavi Menon would also fit this model.) One core contention that McDonald does feel comfortable asserting is that microformal patterns replicate — or echo, mirror, reinforce, mimic, correspond to — macroformal patterns. The Blakean “world in a grain of sand” comes to mind when McDonald argues for this “fractal” or “synecdochic” aspect to the plays (37), a “correspondence between minute grammatical particulars and broad organizational principles” (40). Generally a sophisticated way in which to convey a “mutual reinforcement” of style and genre (29), it becomes a somewhat repetitive observation in the final chapters, even verging on allegorization, culminating in: “The verse is new because the way of thinking is new” (220). But in these last sections, McDonald also begins to elaborate a provisional theory of audience complicity and response, a theory reliant on pleasure as a motivating factor in how the late style functions: we get pleasure from the artifice of elision, divagation, suspension, and various types of repetition and recognition; and we get pleasure from sensing that local (stylistic) effects are reinforced on a more global (plot-driven) scale as well. In this respect, McDonald’s book might be partaking in the turn, of sorts, that Jeff Dolven has tentatively termed a “New Aestheticism” in Shakespeare studies. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK Rhodes College