Talking Books Update

Before telling you about new books by past “Talking Books” guests, I need to get something off my chest that the introduction to Reconceiving the Renaissance put on my chest. The introduction was not written by Mark Burnett but by two of his co-authors, Ewan Fernie and Clare McManus. It would be wrong to ask Burnett to defend something he did not write and just as wrong for me to complain about the book in the interview and put Burnett in the awkward position of commenting. Mark and I privately discussed how I might best express reservations about Reconceiving the Renaissance and decided I should make my comments here. Fernie and McManus state on p. 1 that “theory is everywhere,” then credit Theory too much for destabilizing texts.

Theory may have given destabilization a nudge, but it was really scholars looking with fresh eyes at manuscripts and printed texts that made the difference. In other words, it was a hard slog through the archives that would have happened without Theory.

Is Theory behind the manuscript studies by Paul Werstine or the wide reading by Tiffany Stern, who destabilizes nearly everything she touches without being notably driven by Theory? In my own small way, I find Shakespeare performance sites that have never been studied and, archaeologist-like, turn over the stones and report what I find. When I wrote my first article about radio Shakespeare for Shakespeare Survey,[1] I told then editor Peter Holland that I will not theorize what…