Timothy Bolton . Cnut the Great. Yale English Monarchs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $40.00 (cloth).

Abstract

c. 1588) stages a sotto voce critique of centuries' worth of training in reading the classics in moralizing fashion: the play parodies and ironizes reading the Metamorphoses as a spur to action. Cymbeline (c. 1611), in contrast, draws not from classical texts but from English's peculiar grammar to invent a narrative time that is "future perfect" (163): characters anticipate a future valuable for the stories that, in that prospective time, they will have been able to tell. Cleopatra, however, dreads seeing herself portrayed at Caesar's triumph by "saucy lictors" and "scald rhymers" because those comedians' extemporaneous performances, like the couplets of the ballads they sing, are all too predictable and reproducible (Antony and Cleopatra, c. 1607). Shakespeare associates the untrammeled future not with extemporaneous performance but with the kind of ekphrastic scripting that only Shakespeare himself can produce: Enobarbus's depiction of Cleopatra on her barge, or Iachimo's of the tapestry in Imogen's bedroom. The days of future past in which Shakespeare invests his theater require what John Keats would call a state of mind "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" (letter to George and Thomas Keats, 1817). In an epilogue, Barret contrasts Adam's initial postlapsarian hope to remain in Eden in a static eternity of mournful nostalgia with the wandering, inconclusive mode of romance with which Paradise Lost (1667) ends. I wished to hear more about how John Milton's epic crafts open-ended futurity. (One thinks of the multiple alternative worlds Satan bypasses, not stopping to ask who inhabits them.) Barret tends to focus intently on a few moments in each work rather than on larger structures and multiple incidents. But this is perhaps the point. A malleable future cannot be found everywhere in a literary work, for then we would know to expect it. And then we would have a narrative that imprisons itself rather than seeks Paradise Lost's exit into a world of limitless, untold futures.