The Challenges of Orpheus by Heather Dubrow

CITATION: Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can the general category of lyric be examined with the necessary respect for historical context?
• Answer: Even in a limited historical period, the best exploration of lyric reveals the variety of lyrical characteristics, rather than a single, central concept.
• Method: Basically, responding to broad trends in secondary sources. The chapters are very loosely organized in the following: the definition of lyric, lyric audience, lyrical immediacy, structure, lyric and narrative, and conclusions.
• Assumptions: First, the move to the "singular" era of Elizabethan and early Stuart lyric is unexplained. Second, Dubrow implicitly relies on a Romantic vision of lyric in relation to narrative: that is, Dubrow sees lyric as intensely personal and evocative. 
• Sententiae: "The range of historical periods and of putatively lyric creations [above]... gestures towards three of the principal questions, interrelated but separable, confronting the author of a study of lyric. Should it be defined transhistorically? What other problems complicate defining and describing it? And, however that first query is resolved, should a study of this mode focus primarily on a given historical period? ... [First, w]hat might be categorized as the same characteristic may serve different functions and elicit different responses in different eras... [Second,] the history of the criticism of lyric offers all too many examples of the perils of positing as normative a characteristic that dominates in a given period or author. ... [Third,] In part because I am particularly interested in tracing in some detail the influences on lyric distinctive of or even unique to a given period and country, such an interaction among writer, printer, and publisher in English early modern print culture, I have chosen to concentrate on a single--and singular--era, the one extending roughly between 1500 and 1660..." (3-7)
  "The student of historical shifts within an era, or between eras, also needs to be alert to the risks involved in drafting predicaton into the service of narration, especially teleological storytelling--in other words, using a statement like 'lyric is x and y' to establish its superiority over preceding forms or its prefigurement of later ones." (10)
  "[D]oes the book require or profit from a single overarching thesis? I maintain that in the instance of early modern lyric, the search for a single claim that would unite the issues explored below, like the cognate search for a single defining characteristic, would be compromised by how variously that mode was written, read, and represented in the early modern period." (12-13)
  "Herrick's 'Vision,' then, supports methodological premises central to this chapter in particular and to the larger study in which it appears: close attention to language, whether of an individual text or of a recurrent trope for lyric, is one of the best methods of understanding the cultural history that informs the mode, and vice versa... Gender, 'The Vision' reminds us, variously intensifies and suppresses the guilt and other tensions associated with that mode." (53)
  "A textbook example of the interrelated questions I have been tracing--the variety and mobility of the positions the audience of lyric may assume, the imbrication of the roles of audience and speaker, the variations on and alternatives to voiceability, and the relationship of all these patterns to the central issues in the text--Shakespeare's thirty-fifth sonnet thus encapsulates the problems and theses pursued throughout this chapter. Above all, it again demonstrates that changes in direction of address often enact and thematize issues at the core of an early modern lyric." (102-103)
  "[I]f texts disintegrate, they are also stabilized, and students of early modern literature should not privilege one part of that process at the expense of others... For example, the interaction of scattering and gathering expands our interpretation of the consequences of the malleability of texts, notably teh implications for authorial agency." (187)
  "My purpose... is certainly not to suggest that a monolithic paradigm of hybridity should replace the equally rigid contrasts between lyric and narrative that are currently in use: their relationship assumes a wide range of forms that no single pattern should be privileged as normative... hybridity, a concept used too readily and loosely in contemporary parlance, is sometimes but certainly not always the most apt description." (194)
  "[S]tudents of narrative often repeat the commonplace that lyric is rooted in, and rootbound by, a static temporality. Conversely, critics whose primary work is in lyric risk associating narrative only with clear-cut events and unambiguous closure, ignoring the poststructuralist--and earlier--emphasis on the edginess of what may or may not be happening." (195)
  "One reason lyric enables narrative is that... it often functions not as an icon of instability but rather as source and symbol of an intensification, a wind-up that must be released in action." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: The work needs significant reconsideration to set these discursive comments into an actionable system of thought. Dubrow's scholarly positioning is expert and--I believe--a widely sought golden mean between formalism and history. However, her intervention is unclear and her prose is difficult.
• Synthesis: In her formal concerns, Dubrow resembles Fowler. However, Fowler is much more willing to explain an alternative to realism in the renaissance than Dubrow is willing to articulate a definition of lyric in early modernity.
• Application: The most applicable element of this is Dubrow's scholarly positioning: the general project to find the structuring capabilities of language and genre to counterbalance deconstructive research.