Blank: Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man
We are happy to report that Paula Blank's latest book, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man, has just been published (8/06) by Cornell University Press. From the Publisher Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to “measure,
number, and weight,” which were the key terms of an early modern
empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of
Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying
principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is
especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or
equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure
for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula
Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement,
demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of
quantification with human experience. Reviews "Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man succeeds in
combining wide-ranging interdisciplinary comment with minute scrutiny
of language and verse. It is a satisfying read and one that will yield
a wealth of interesting observations to scholars of Shakespeare and of
early modern culture." -Héloïse Sénéchal, Times Literary Supplement,
June 22 2007 "The framing idea for this book--the way that the concept of
measurement quantifies social and political aspects of human
experience--is brilliant. Paula Blank relates measurement to ideas of
justice in ways that are likely to be groundbreaking for early modern
studies in general and for Shakespeare studies in particular."
-Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Toronto
From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules,
Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which
language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of
alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore
attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and
inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic
merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as
“mismeasures”-equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and
women they are designed to assess.
"Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man is a smart, subtly
argued, and consistently interesting contribution to our understanding
not just of Shakespeare but of Renaissance culture itself in England
and elsewhere throughout Europe. Paula Blank asserts that the
Renaissance concern with measurement and quantification, when applied
to the human realm, created more problems than it solved." -Wayne
Rebhorn, University of Texas at Austin, author of Renaissance Debates
on Rhetoric
"In this beautifully nuanced and trenchant account, Paula Blank
demonstrates how troubled Shakespeare's works are by the inadequacy yet
necessity of measurement to all forms of knowledge, feeling, and
value—indeed to poetic language itself." -Margreta de Grazia,
University of Pennsylvania
