Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Nicholas Jagger

Mary E. Hazard. 2000. Elizabethan Silent Language. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 345 pp. ISBN 0-8032-2397-8. Ł35.

Mary E. Hazard's book takes as its subject, what she terms 'silent language'. What this amounts to is hard to define in precise terms, but in practice can be described as potentially everything in Elizabethan court culture that is not writing per se. This may sound impossibly vague or broad, and as a reader strongly drawn to clarity, especially terminological clarity, I must say I was puzzled by the book in several places. Before I focus on examples, there are a number of larger points to be made. The first is that the book is not a broad cultural history, but one that deals with the mechanics and semantics of court life. One can learn little about life beyond the upper echelons of society, which is a potential loss. Since written language was beyond the scope of most ordinary people, silent language, that is, everything outside writing, was the chief means of communication beyond direct speech. One understands the non-verbal significance of the Great Seal, a subject in passing, but such a history of monarchy leaves out the socially silent from the arena of silent language. Yet throughout the book plenty is said of genuine interest about how objects function as repositories of meaning and power in relation to the court.
Another problem is Barthesian in essence. It is written language which Hazard uses to delineate the meaning of silent language; what operated without overt gesture in the period demands the noisy work of Hazard's pen in order to recover it for the contemporary reader. The effect of this is often garrulous and lacking in clear argument. In a book which includes material on drawing and painting, typography, cartography, dining, tapestries, costume, jewellery, coins, gifts, procession, travel, the prospect, funeral monuments, architecture, architectural positioning, and decorum (spatial demarcation), to name most, but not all, of her topics, a strong theoretical underpinning is essential. I am afraid that quite a few of the chapters are basically descriptive rather than offering a clear explanation of the value of Hazard's examples. Too frequently their significance in the argument is assumed to be self-explanatory. When I reached page 148 I breathed a sigh of relief because a quotation from Henri Lefebvre could be tested in a way in which much of the foregoing material could not. It was not that the Lefebvre quotation was complex; it simply made the point that pre-existing architecture conditions, in all kinds of ways, what follows it. This I found refreshing because a good deal of Hazard's own thinking is not similarly rooted, or contained textually, as can be ascertained from her proposal for chapter 6:
The subject of the last chapter – place, position, and liminality – often spilled over its own bounds and onto the subjects of this one and the next to follow, which are concerned with two of the main ways by which Elizabethans limited, controlled, and styled non-verbal communication. This chapter [chapter 6] will be concerned with the shaping of motion and the control of time; the next will be more particularly dedicated to the uses of decorum and protocol, but both will necessarily consider expression through ritual, ceremony, and public performance. (173)

Rather like a conference paper badly over-time, the reader's patience is likely to be tested by such indulgence. On the following page, 174, Hazard declares
It has long been a truism among historians, including specialists in the history of art and technology, that a primary distinction between the Renaissance and earlier history was a new interest in the nature of time and especially in its more accurate scientific measurement. A corollary development was observation of relational position, motion, and consequent change, as manifested, for example, in Leonardo's notebooks and Vesalian anatomy.

As an historian of art and technology, I wondered after reading this whether it would be more beneficial for readers wishing to explore these kinds of issues to read Paradise Lost than become entangled in dubious generality. I might have used the word 'knot' but that too is a subject, in passing, featured in this book.
One might have enjoyed such a breathtaking sweep in Foucault, but scholars have since pointed out that many of his daring leaps are, cartoon-like, unsupportable sprints from scholarly peak to a nothingness below. His books are perhaps best enjoyed as fables. Hazard has the luxury of following Foucault, yet seems to be unconcerned with the well-discussed issues raised by very broad-brush approaches. In terms of local detail, there is much to enjoy, but I wonder how much, as an anthology, this book contributes to knowledge. It seems to be aiming to topple D. J. Gordon's The Renaissance Imagination, but that work is both partial and localised, achieving its command by detail and avoiding gesture and vacuity. It is also a series of sharply focussed essays.
In chapter 8 'Absent/Presence, Present/Absence, Gesture, Silence, and the uses of Indeterminacy', Hazard notes that journeys were often lengthy and difficult. In contrast to the court of Elizabeth's stately progress of ten miles a day was the startling figure of William Kemp who
danced the morris from London to Norwich in only nine days, and his account of this performance describes nearly impenetrable roadways, overgrown and full of waist-deep holes. His marathon was indeed a feat, as his title indicates and his account testifies (Kemps Nine Daies Wonder). (232)

This is mentioned only in passing, and is not subject to scholarly inquiry. Kemp's famous feat seems a curious yardstick by which to measure the progress of the court. Hazard's is a style difficult to paraphrase, which I submit does not bode well for understanding but the concept of silent language is of great significance, and there remains a great deal of potential in this idea.

NICHOLAS JAGGER