Timothy Duffy
Book Review
Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations
in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. University of Pennsylvania
Press (Philadelphia, 2014), 342 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4623-0
1>
Critical and historical narratives of English national and cultural identity
tend to focus on opposition and contamination. Sir Philip Sidney famously
called France his “sweet enemy” and in so doing highlighted an intimacy with
Europe founded on opposition. Marjorie Rubright’s Doppelgänger Dilemmas attempts to turn the tide a bit, to focus on
likeness and proximity rather than on difference and alterity. This is a bold
and needed move in the theorization and exploration of ethnic, national, and
linguistic identity. Rubright’s work takes on an often-neglected topic: the
profound influence of the Low Countries on English thought and culture and
offers her readers a useful and illuminating (if not comprehensive) study.
2>
The work as a whole, as the introduction makes clear, argues for the
pervasiveness of a cultural and intellectual “double-vision,” a vision that “holds
similitude and difference together within its scope,” as Rubright writes
(3). In the book that follows, the
author attempts to maintain this double vision as means of illustrating the
unique and interwoven identities that were created between and among the people
of England and the Low Countries. The introduction provides useful and
illuminating readings of the origin narratives of the English and Dutch people
as well as a discussion of the origins of the word Dutch itself.
3>
In a treatment of city comedy in the first chapter, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605) serves as a
launching point for an exploration of word play in the handling of the Dutch
language as well as the massive Dutch immigrant population in London at the
time. Arguing that the mocking depictions of Dutch characters in plays is not
solely rooted in a fear of Dutch contamination, Rubright notes early on that
“porosity, rather than the imperviousness, of geographic borders […] was
everywhere evidenced in Londoner’s daily lives” (41). Explorations of puns, a consideration of the
Familists, and an exploration of Mistress Mulligrub that shows the links
between ethnic identity, religion, and economics in Anglo-Dutch perceptions all
help build a useful and necessary reading of Dutch-featuring city comedies for
anyone interested in the representation of Dutch culture on stage.
4>
The second chapter explores antiquarian arguments about the linked histories of
the English and Dutch languages. As Dutch was often perceived as being a more
fully preserved language than its hybrid English cousin, it was often perceived
as being a sort of living distant ancestor, with the land itself implicated. As
Rubright notes, “In tracing the route by which Verstegan [author of A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence]
ties the English to the Saxons, we discover that the English language,
England’s history, and its people are directly linked to the territory of the
Netherlands” (73). It turns out that just at the moment that the English were
asserting the importance of their Saxon roots, these same roots were reminding
them of the Dutch land from which the Saxon’s emerged.
5>
Some of the most interesting readings in the book come from the consideration
of cartographic representations of England and the Low Countries in which one
country is always poking into the corners of another country’s map. As the
author wisely notes, this is not unique to these two countries but represents a
graphic linkage between countries seen as important to one another’s networks
of identity and exchange. The third chapter explores this proximity in drama in
which English and Dutch are mixed together in a way that at once reveals the difference
between the two languages and their likeness.
6>
The sprawling fourth chapter “Dutch Impressions” is perhaps the least
disciplined chapter but also the most thought provoking. The author has done
impressive research into the use of black-letter type to represent the Dutch
language and through an impressive, if not always entirely convincing, series
of readings shows how though the black-letter type is often a marker of clear
difference between English and Dutch words in polyglot word lists and dictionaries, their specific usage and layout (and the way English is represented in the
absence of Dutch and the presence of black-letter type) can point to their
likeness and proximity. Sentences in the vein of “typographic variation
encourages close attention to the imprinting of Englishness and Otherness, in
no small part because it exposes the fragility of the distinctions it imprints”
(129) abound. To the generous reader interested in these sort of
quasi-deconstructive moves, this reviewer included, this makes for very
interesting reading. Some readers, though, may wish for a bit more evidence. However,
a reading of one of the Anglophone world’s most-treasured expletives (and its
importation into English out of Dutch on the stage) makes a convincing case and
reveals the necessity and usefulness of Rubright’s approach.
7>
Chapter Five considers the “built environment” of London, particularly the
Royal Exchange, itself a copy of Antwerp’s Nieuwe Beurs. Referring to the Royal
Exchange as “a material outgrowth of the shuttling of people, products, and
capital between these two European cities,” the author offers a compelling
reading of the space of London itself, and its immigrant population, as
constantly reminding English audiences and citizens of their interconnectedness
with Dutch culture and Dutch people. Observing that the modern London Eye was
produced by the Dutch company Hollandia, the work notes that this ongoing
architectural partnership, a cultural “palimpsest” in the chapter’s lexicon,
highlights still the linked identities of these cultures.
8>
Chapter Six, on Dryden’s Amboyna
(1673), offers a reading of the character of Ysabinda and of the
less-considered character Julia in the play. Though all of the chapters in this
study are illuminating, this chapter’s work is particularly impressive and
highlights that just as England and the Netherlands are taking their sense of
familial competition to the world stage (where it will become a force for the
brutalities of colonialism and slavery), their proximity and likeness is still
preserved. The English and Dutch within the wider competition of the world are
like each other even as they fight each other brutally. It as if their linked
destiny is always more resilient than the particular politics in which they
find themselves.
9>
This work is a necessary and important addition to the study of England’s
relationship with the continent. It belongs on every shelf alongside J.A. van
Dorsten’s Radical Arts. There are
some limitations, however. The title does not quite betray the outsized focus
drama will receive. Jan van der Noot, for instance, one of the most famous
London refugees from the Netherlands receives no mention and very little
imaginative non-dramatic literature is referenced. Also, though some excellent
readings of Dutch materials are offered, the archive is very much skewed to the
English side of things which can keep our reading a bit more focused on the
production of Dutch identity by the English and less on the Dutch understanding
of “Dutchness” itself. These choices are understandable but they keep the work
from being as comprehensive as the title might imply. Still, this is an
excellent contribution to the scholarship of ethnic identity and perception and
a much-needed and well-executed consideration of the great and underappreciated
influence of Dutch immigrants and culture on the thinking and writing of the
English Renaissance.
_____
Timothy Duffy is Assistant Professor / Faculty
Fellow of Comparative Literature at New York University. He writes on
Renaissance literature and culture and the philosophy of space and spatiality.
He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled The Renaissance Spatial
Condition.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early
Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
_____
No comments:
Post a Comment