The interest in materiality that has surfaced among early modernists in recent years comes under sharp scrutiny in this study by Jonathan Gil Harris, and the result is an engaging, smart, and skillful way of seeing and handling all sorts of things. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare forces critics to confront the restrictive temporality we have imposed upon the stuff currently being read “as closely as literature used to be” (1). According to Harris, our understanding of material culture has been limited because of traditional historicism's investment in temporal disparity. But “what,” the author asks, “is the time of the thing?” (2). The question prompts a sorting out of relations between matter and temporality and a sorting of just what constitutes matter. Influenced by the contemplative gifts of French philosopher Michel Serres, Harris directs critics to the polytemporal nature of objects and explores the convergence of past, present, and future in effects as varied as the violated marker of a medieval Reb's grave or the stench of “squibs” in London playhouses.

Harris divides his book into three parts: “Supersessions,” “Explosions,” and “Conjunctions.” Within each he advances a theoretical pattern for polytemporal understanding by examining a Renaissance writer's conjectures on matter alongside an aspect of Shakespeare's theater. The book's introduction, “Palimpsested Time,” prepares us for these ways of thinking with literal and figurative palimpsests to illustrate the convergence of time in and upon matter. It's an effective model and one that becomes more loaded as the study progresses. By its close we are directed to look at the palimpsest not only as a kind of text upon which various matters appear but also as a collector of material itself. Harris's careful readings can alter our ways of seeing and unlock an admiration for the “untimely.” The word is key and used to describe material that is distinctly unzeitgemässe (from Nietzsche) or “out-of-time”; something that is both of and alien to a specific moment (11).

The practical theory begins with the ways a figure may be displaced intentionally and yet survive its supersession to challenge that which sought to stifle it. This is demonstrated well through a reading of Herbert's The Temple, where Protestant ideas are presented as necessary replacements of a Judaic past. And yet, as “Supersessions” reveals, The Temple insists upon maintaining these Judaic elements even while indicating its aversion to them. There's a clear desire to replace the material goods of the Old Testament with the spiritual goods of the New. But there's tension in the effort: Moses's stone tablets, for example, are routinely resurrected in descriptions of The Temple speaker's too-hardened heart; “The Bunch of Grapes” depicts the Christian replication of the Judaic journey. This repetition or “resurfacing” of matter is linked to performance in Shakespeare's Second Henriad. Here Harris expands notions of materiality to include the actor's voice and body and how they are used to depict a self-conscious theatricality (think of Falstaff announcing his intent to play the King in “Cambyses's vein” or the ways in which Henry V ultimately “out Herods Herod”). Harris refers to Shakespeare's “strategic deployment of the histrionic style,” which utilizes these techniques while rewriting them (83).

These early observations in Harris's argument may feel somewhat familiar, previously sensed as irony or a form of deconstructive play. But Harris assembles much more than he takes apart. Stimulating connections emerge at full force in “Explosions,” where we see the ability of past matter to speak powerfully and unexpectedly in material of the present. A compelling instance appears in a reading of Stow's Survey of London, where the city is an urban palimpsest testing London's post-Reformation identity. Stow's close attention to Hebrew characters on a stone in Ludgate Wall is used to demonstrate how Stow “savors his encounter” (103) and by so doing resurrects the Old Jewry that had been banished from the realm. His engagement explodes the notion of Protestant homogeneity and, further, of Protestant concepts of grace in Stow's acknowledgment of denigration in a literal and moral sense (particularly through one building's transformation from synagogue to tavern). The bursts continue in an entirely excellent argument on smell scape and the significance of reeking gunpowder that would hit the nostrils of Macbeth’s earliest audiences. In Harris's material world odor itself is a thing: the stench caused by the detonation of low-tech fireworks in the play's opening moments are linked to both the Gunpowder Plot and medieval morality plays where the devil is tied to sulfurous stink. Scent materializes as a palimpsest “superimpos[ing] current political events upon archaic theatrical practice” (128).

The final section, “Conjunctions,” is the most theoretical of the three. Here, Cavendish and Cixous's references to Cleopatra and the female body are read as “touch”—the authors meet in “a body that is not one but multiple, palimpsested, polychronic” (152). The ways these women locate writing in the feminine body is associated with a queer historiography marked by a “slantwise” (151) touch that makes conversation and collaboration between past and present possible. The rejection of linear time in such a relationship is likened to Othello’s “Double Time.” In “Crumpled Handkerchiefs,” the book's final chapter, the theoretical shifts are particularly grand. The play's “refusal of linear temporality” (169) is grounded in the handkerchief as central object that is a palimpsest responsible for an abundance of relationships between the play's pasts, presents, and futures. It is as vital a character as any on the stage and demonstrates the loaded and multiple ways objects contain and redirect time and narrative, and, moreover, the ways readers interpret and respond to the information conveyed.

Untimely Matter is rich in critical impulses (which range from mathematical philosophy to a New Yorker cartoon) and their application. It offers a refreshing shift in current approach and is altogether eye (and nose and body) opening in its regard of material culture. If time is “out of joint,” this text bodes well for the discerning readings to come of it.