It takes a healthy amount of chutzpah to introduce a new brand of literary theory to the critical market, designed, packaged, and ready for use. Along with an introduction by the author (“Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations”) and an Afterword by Bruce Smith, Bryan Reynolds's Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries comprises nine essays, each one cowritten by Reynolds and a collaborator. They discuss a range of subjects but are united by a common concern with the concept of the “transversal.” Reynolds is also the founder of the Transversal Theater Company, dedicated to exploring the notion of “transversality” on stage, and he is enthusiastically engaged in advancing the idea of “transversality” across an impressively broad range of critical and aesthetic contexts.

The concept of the “transversal” has drawn a great deal of critical flak; it has been called a superfluous neologism, more of a brand than a serious idea, and dismissed as a gimmicky tool for self-promotion. Such criticisms are seriously misguided. The “transversal” is an important concept because it represents the logical conclusion of a number of intellectual tendencies that have been gathering weight for several decades. The most prominent of these is materialism, and more specifically, materialist theories of subjectivity. In the humanities, but also in the natural sciences, the radical mode of thought known as “eliminative materialism” has recently gained great popularity. Entire scientific disciplines, such as evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and cognitive neuroscience are founded on eliminative materialist assumptions. “Transversality” is the application of eliminative materialism to literature. The theatre, argues Reynolds, presents “[c]onsciousness performed, and therefore measurable” (21) and provides an ideal medium for the representation and analysis of material subjectivity.

The basic proposition of eliminative materialism is that human beings are purely material bodies. There is no ghost in the machine, and the mind does not exist. What we have instead is the brain, an immensely complex and subtle organ, but nothing more than an organ. What eliminative materialism eliminates is folk psychology. By this term the materialists intend, roughly speaking, the entire history of ideas. Ideas, in this perspective, simply do not exist. They are myths, illusions, and to discuss them in isolation from their material manifestations as processes in the brain is to engage in a discourse as nebulous and futile as alchemy. If the folk chemistry of alchemists and the folk astronomy of astrologers have been abandoned by serious thinkers, the folk psychology of philosophers and poets ought to be discarded too. The public intellectual face of eliminative materialism is Richard Dawkins, who has proposed that the history of ideas be studied in a manner precisely analogous to the natural sciences, with ideological “memes” competing and struggling for evolutionary survival in the same way as biological genes. Of course, the struggle for evolutionary advantage is also a popular way of conceiving the market economy, and such science has gone a long way toward making the market appear as the natural, inevitable expression of instinctive human behavior. It has often, and in my view rightly, been condemned as the latest expression of social Darwinism.

In pleasing contrast to many other theorists, Bryan Reynolds's lucid introduction fluently states what is intended by his terminology and clearly acknowledges his theoretical influences. “Transversality” describes the process by which people change their identities, and it “requires observation, imitation and emulation, and therefore the infusion of certain units of information, cultural substances, or, perhaps, what zoologist Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, calls ‘memes’” (3). Reynolds correctly notes that “Dawkins's theory of memes as replicators residing in people's brains that are able to replicate themselves as a consequence of socialization during information transmission through any media between individuals offers an explanation for cultural evolution” (3–4).

It certainly does offer an explanation, but is it a convincing one? Do ideas really function like genes? Can the history of religion and philosophy really be studied after the model of neo-Darwinian evolution? I am highly skeptical. I am also concerned to note the ideological convergence of such theory with rationalizations of the market economy, and with the general tendency of capitalism toward the objectification of the human subject. Transversality seems to make a virtue of reification, to endorse the most heinous ideological effects of postmodern society. The fact that, as Reynolds puts it, “transversal poetics makes no overarching or definitive claims with regard to its specific political investments” (8) is regrettable. A sustained examination of its political implications and cultural context always bestows power and rigor on a critical theory.

There is some evidence that one or two of the contributors to this volume share such concerns. Each of the essays discusses transversality at length, but it is not clear how much of that discussion springs from the pen of Reynolds, who (as noted) is coauthor of them all. The criticism practiced in some of the pieces sits uneasily with their theoretical rationales. Ayanna Thompson's superb essay on Marlowe's co-option of antitheatricalism, and Courtney Lehmann's perspicacious demonstration of John Webster's treatment of ‘self-help’ would have been brilliant essays even without the opening sections that weld them to Reynolds's overarching thematic concerns. On the other hand, Bruce Smith's Afterword, which opens with the phrase “Reader, you've been conned” (251), fits perfectly with the volume's ludic tone, and ends with the hyperbolic claim that “in … specifically dramatic consciousness, lies the possibility of liberation from the strictures of religion, law, nation, and the dogma of poststructuralist theory” (256).

The other essays occupy a continuum between wary endorsement and rapturous enthusiasm with regard to transversal theory. Two pieces focus closely on the currently topical issue of magic: Amy Cook's illuminating discussion of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe fits nicely alongside Henry Turner's fascinating piece on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Janna Segal contributes two essays, demonstrating how transversal approaches to Romeo and Juliet and The Roaring Girl can be used to displace unitary and ahistorical understandings of subjectivity from a gendered perspective, while Glenn Odom uses the category of race to disrupt traditional readings of Titus Andronicus. Anthony Kubiak explores the idea of “subjunctive space,” which Reynolds has previously analyzed in conjunction with Donald Hedrick (2003), while Hedrick and Reynolds themselves provide an instance of the concept in critical practice in their intriguing piece on The Changeling.

All of these essays are important in their own right, and this book is surely destined to become one of the canonical works of early modern literary criticism. For deep-seated ideological reasons, I have fundamental differences with the most basic assumptions and presuppositions of transversal theory. Despite that caveat, though, this is a highly significant book. Some reviewers of Reynolds's earlier work have accused him of reveling in jargon, and it is true that he takes delight in neologism; but Reynolds's work makes explicit certain tendencies long latent within cultural materialism, and draws out the hidden implications of materialist theories of subjectivity. It should be required, salutary reading for aspiring critics of the humanities.