Part 4

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama
Barbara Hodgdon
Another opening, another show: the SEL Annual Revue. This year, books received suggest more about where scholarship in the field has been than where it might be going. Although it may be too early to proclaim the deaths of the French theory boys, their stars have waned; yet despite theory's less insistent presence, we are far from inhabiting a post-theoretical age. Having spawned a wealth of significant studies over the last several decades, new historicism and cultural materialism are either being (slightly) reinvented or extended to embrace new territories: plus ça change; plus c'est le même chose. Clearly, studying contexts has become a reigning paradigm, joined by a continuing interest in histories of subjectivity, print studies, and a marked focus on grounding dramatic texts in the religious discourses of the period.
The categories in this review are somewhat arbitrary, and although several books receive only brief mention, I attempt to acknowledge the arrival of most entries on the critical stage. Beginning with studies that situate drama within early modern cultural contexts, I next turn to studies of intellectual history and print culture. Some books considered here overlap with those in the next section, primarily concerned with Shakespearean drama, including editions. I then consider companions, collections, and [End Page 495] annuals before turning to work on other dramatists and, finally, to teaching anthologies and studies that target a general readership.
Early Modern Cultural Histories
Easily the most engaging, most thoroughly enjoyable study this year is Wendy Wall's Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama—a learned, beautifully written "must read" jam-packed (an apt phrase) with fascinating detail. How, Wall asks, did housewives reproduce the world? How did cooking accrue cultural capital, engender social mobility? (If for no other reason, I admire this book for defining housework as the site of fantasy that I have always imagined it was.) Wall sees her study as "bolster[ing] the view of the post-Reformation household as modeling and providing a training ground for political order," throwing into relief the "crucial normalcy and regularity of domesticity" (p. 1). Crediting dramatic scenes as registering how "domesticity signified in the cultural imagination and how it helped to structure social, sexual, gendered, and national identifications" (p. 6) engages her in several critical debates: in particular, by recuperating the erotic and economic relations in the household, her study rescues domesticity from its associations with powerlessness and from 1970s family studies aimed at critiquing the modern division of labor in a capitalist economy (pp. 8-9). Reading noncanonical as well as canonical texts alongside English household guides, cookbooks, and domestic manuals, Wall analyzes "the passions hovering around the banal practices of physic, cookery, confectionery, wet-nursing, distilling, and dairying, . . . [investigating how] subjects took shape from within domestic fantasies" (pp. 15-7).
To sample Wall's flavor, consider "Why Does Puck sweep? Shakespearean Fairies and the Politics of Cleaning," where, linking Puck's broom with good housewifery and that, in turn, with dramatic closure and political authority, she reads fairy lore as a "storehouse of fantasies of recovery—popular 'home' traditions that could never be fully absorbed or renounced" (pp. 94, 106); a section on Merry Wives's ending ("The Buck(ing) Never Stops Here") shows both plays revealing "how class-specific elements of fairy lore could be taken to represent household and national relations . . . [and] expose submission to household tasks as a precarious but formative activity" (pp. 125-6). Or turn to her analyses [End Page 496] of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (a prince's inappropriate desire for a milkmaid) and Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday (the relations between eating and civic desire) as plays presenting different national fantasies built around household labor. In "Tending to Bodies and Boys: Queer Physic in Knight of the Burning Pestle," Wall reads Nell as homeopath and physician, theorizing her investment in managing bodies with the practices of boys' companies and noting that "the child/caregiver relationship is the earliest blueprint on which other social hierarchies are fashioned" (p. 183). Both playgoing and housewifery, Wall argues, are eroticized around the issue of dependency, and "in importing Nell's disruptive erotic fantasies to the stage, the housewife insists that the spectacle of domesticity is no more or less queer than the fantasies the children's theater regularly offered viewers" (pp. 187-8). Finally, "Blood in the Kitchen" examines Thomas Heywood's Woman Killed with Kindness and English Traveller alongside the first printed cookbooks to look at culinary violence and service. Although neither play takes meaning from the sacrificial violence of their final scenes, which eradicate women, community consolidates around a scene of death to trigger two key fantasies: "that the labor of male and female servants produces a fully penetrable household body more complex and negotiable than dominant models suggest; and that even a disorderly household life is compensatorily reassuring, for it fortifies the 'real' bonds shared by English people" (p. 219). As John Heminge and Henry Condell would say, "Buy this book."
Natasha Korda's Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England also mines household terrain, but from a different materialist perspective. Hers is a book about household stuff, a contribution to the history of subjectivity as revealed through the study of moveable property. (To be petulant, a bibliography would have been useful.) Her aim is to "situate the stuff of material culture in relation to broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations that have had profound and lasting effects on the social and economic status of women" (p. 8): in the period, she claims, "relations between subjects within the home increasingly centered around and were mediated by objects"; moreover, Shakespeare "configures female subjectivity effects in relationship to objects" (p. 11). Linking cates with acate/achat (purchase) to read Shrew's Kate as a commodity, she develops the idea of good huswifery to show how Petruchio tames Kate's consumption of cates. Then, framing her reading of Merry Wives through conduct manuals such as [End Page 497] The Ladies Dictionary, Korda argues that the wives prove their diligence and discretion by opposite behaviors. Finally, she puts particular pressure on the public shaming ritual, situating its spectacle within the context of Elizabeth I's economic program and the self-proclaimed shift from her self-image as royal housewife to that of Virgin Queen. Turning to the threat posed by Desdemona's extravagance and Othello's racialized discourse of under- and overvaluation, she reconsiders the handkerchief and its domestic function as an "instrument of civilization" (p.127) and a fetish object (Othello's description of its exotic provenance), neatly interweaving hierarchies of value. Raising the question of Isabella's dowry and why Measure for Measure remains silent about it, Korda contextualizes her analysis of the problem of the placeless single woman through a history of the order of Clares (rich and poor) and through two of Erasmus's colloquies. A concluding chapter on domestic and theatrical properties makes material connections between household and playhouse to write a brief cultural history of stage property.
A contribution to histories of subjectivity and sexuality, Laurie Shannon's Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts views the politics of sovereignty and amity as mutually dependent as well as mutually exclusive. Divided into sections on the sovereign subject and the subjected sovereign, her study sees friendship discourses as crucial not just to theories of the subject but also to distinctions between public and private: friendship, she argues, "marshals whatever there is of a specifically private subject's powers" (p. 12). Tracing the continuation of classical discourses in the early modern period through translations, commonplace books, and emblem collections, Shannon turns to texts by Sir Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, and Michel de Montaigne and then to Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam and John Donne's elegies and verse letters to Lady Bedford to explore the inflections of gender difference, an analysis she extends to Two Noble Kinsmen and Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," where "gendering friendship [as] female links principles of chastity with the (male) Stoic doctrines of integrity" (p. 13). Drawing on the king's-two-bodies theory to argue that friendship discourses raise questions about the monarch's interiority and the regulation of his "private" self, Shannon explores mignonnerie, a friendship paradigm conflicting with classical models in that it entails crossing the boundaries of degree (p. 13). Incorporating materials from law cases, Edward Hall's Chronicles, Elizabeth I's public speeches, and Sir Thomas Smith's [End Page 498] De Republica anglorum to situate her analysis, she then considers friendship's place in reversed processes of kinging and unkinging to read Edward II as exemplifying the clash between discourses of ideal friendship and those of ethical monarchy, and 1 Henry IV as a friendship play. Grounded in Plutarch's "How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend," her final chapter moves from Francis Bacon's essays on counsel to focus on friendship forms and their performative work in Winter's Tale. Shannon's well-written, engaging study presents innovative work on the cultural possibilities of friendship, what it offered for an alternative politics, and its impact on notions of public and private and the relations between the two.
Building on feminist scholarship on women's self-expression, Karen Raber's Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama tracks the boundaries of difference across Mary Sidney's Antonie, Fulke Greville's Mustapha, Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, and Margaret Cavendish's Playes. Her premise, that closet drama not only offered early modern writers of both sexes the opportunity to interrogate their culture's investment in drama and performance but also allowed women writers to reflect on their marginal relationship to theatrical domains (pp. 113-4), mines well-traveled territory; nonetheless, Raber usefully explores how the gendered nature of political subjectivity intersects with questions of genre and, in turn, how genre is implicated in "women's unstable construction as domestic rather than political subjects" (p. 151). Arguing that "drama without theater" constitutes a "powerful abstraction of Reniassance concepts of selfhood, identity, and a reflection on how such concepts produce forms of power" (p. 16), she views closet drama as a sociopolitical tool, notable for its capacity to critique theatrical and institutional practices and for permitting women an avenue for negotiating and transgressing boundaries that theoretically excluded them from dramatic authorship. A final chapter on Restoration stages and closets considers how Katherine Philips's Pompey (which actually was staged) and Milton's Samson Agonistes, texts that employ Senecan themes and style, continue Mary Sidney's emphasis on the interrelationship of gendered subjectivity and domesticity and link marital ties to the problem of tyranny.
Drawing on French feminist theory (Monique Wittig and Luce Irigaray) as well as on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Christina Luckyj's "A Moving Rhetoricke": Gender and Silence in Early Modern England examines both the richness and the instability [End Page 499] of early modern notions of silence. Viewing her study as an act of recuperation, she sets out to complicate the simple binarism of contemporary popular and academic notions of the meanings of silence, as circulated in Suzanne Hull's formula marking women as "chaste, silent, and obedient." To retrieve silence from this impasse and make it "speak" once again, Luckyj explores how silence signified in the period, whether as an ideal of self-containment derived from Stoic and Christian doctrine, as a space of subjective agency, or as a potential threat to male authority. Her investigation concerns constructions of silence in western political thought, its gender politics, and its significance in early modern drama and in the work of women writers who exploit silence to their own ends. Well-argued, Luckyj's study maps the increasing androgyny of silence; significantly, devoting separate chapters to male and female authors avoids collapsing different histories into an encompassing argument.
A related study, Patricia Phillippy's Women, Death, and Literature in Post-Reformation England, explores women's crucial roles, literal and figurative, either in the period's changing lamentational practices or in its highly gendered formulations of nature and the meaning of grief. Impeccably researched and impressively detailed, her chapters reveal how feminized excesses of mourning, often condemned by men, laid the groundwork for women's revitalized approaches to death. Examining the poetics of mourning in Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Phillippy reveals its debt to the Song of Solomon and Thomas Playfere's sermon, The Meane in Mourning. Accounts of Queen Elizabeth I's exploding corpse and embalming's concern with the female corpse inform her reading of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in which she argues that "the history of the Reformation is enacted and recorded through masculine approaches to the female body in death" (p. 52). Turning to such male-authored representations of women's "good deaths" as Phillip Stubbes's A Chrystal Glasse for Christian Women (1591) and Death's Advantage (1602), she examines how male authors' inscription of women's dying discourse re-creates the dead body as an emblem of masculinist political, theological, and cultural agendas; drawing on various texts published in 1603 (the great plague year), she offers a richly contextualized analysis of mourning's cultural politics in Richard III. To understand both women's and men's writings on mourning, Phillippy tracks the gendering of parental grief, challenging the assumption that the authority of female-authored texts rests exclusively on maternity. That analysis leads to considering Elizabeth [End Page 500] Russell's memorial program, to mapping ideas about the public performance of mourning, and to Russell's crafting of a legacy and her manipulation of ceremonial and cultural forms. A final chapter reads female-authored artes moriendi against that genre's development. By demonstrating how gendered styles of grief enabled constructions of male and female subjects in and through textual and cultural lamentational forms and by revealing their complex performative aspects, Phillippy makes a rewarding contribution to intellectual history.
Bryan Reynolds's Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England takes issues of subjectivity in a different direction to investigate the representation of rogues, vagabonds, and gypsies in plays, pamphlets, poems, state documents, and personal letters. He frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of "transversal theory," which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience. Such "transversal movement," he claims, happened when early modern subjects entered the otherworldliness of the public theater, when they encountered traveling bands of gypsies (a performed identity), and when they engaged in certain forms of criminality. Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an "official" language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520s, continued beyond the Puritans' rise to power in the early 1640s, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture (p. 22). Drawing on early modern analyses as well as on sociolinguistics, Reynolds views cant as an invented language, both natural and artificial, one "associated with resistance and rebellion" (p. 85) and thus a means of ensuring members' loyalty within a criminal culture comprised of gypsies, rogues, vagabonds, beggars, cony catchers, cutpurses, and prostitutes. Also intriguing is his analysis of how criminal culture's nomadism produced "differential spaces," "wilderness effects," and "discursive ruptures" within what he calls the official fields of spatialization (p. 96). Drawing comparisons between "the elaborate forms of artistic expression used by members of the criminal culture and their similarity to theatrical practices" (p. 136), he figures theater as the greatest con game of all and views antitheatricalist arguments as offering evidence of the possibility of "identity becomings" that counter, if not negate, the very notions of fixed identity they desire to see [End Page 501] imposed (p. 140). Given Reynolds's suggestion that criminal culture, premised on freedom of religion, inspired multiple alternatives to conventional behaviors and to the Christian grounding of official culture, his book initiates a conversation with studies by Debora Kuller Shuger and Jeffrey Knapp (see section on Shakespeare).
Marking accidental events as a source of wonder, Michael Witmore's Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England writes a history of the accident, an overview of how early moderns viewed contingency, and how profound were cultural, religious, and dramatic shifts of thinking about such events during the period. Arguing that accidents exist halfway between fact and fiction, Witmore sees them as suggestive of theater as a "model for an accident-prone world" (p. 7); he views "categorical instability" and "rhetoricity" as motifs characterizing accidents, whether as objects of knowledge or as narrative devices. Heavily reliant on anecdote, his study details modes of interpreting accidents, the various knowledges they provide, and how they pose a philosophical problem. For early moderns, Witmore claims, an accident raised profound questions about how order operated (if at all) in the world and how they might apprehend and account for what seemed to be patterns of causes and effects. Although Witmore treats accidents as artifacts, he also borrows interpretative frameworks from various writers to theorize accidents across a number of discursive frames. Taking a horizontal view, he attempts to find patterns but does not insist on them; although he offers no causal explanation for the turn toward accidents in the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century cultural imagination, he suggests several potential influences: "new theological ideas about God's providential action, the prominence of the stage as a metaphor for experience, and the rise of a philosophy of nature that valued the particular as a means of arriving at the universal" (p. 155), as well as the rise of urban commercial culture and the diffusion of religious ideas into popular print.
In Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World, Kenneth Robert Olwig explores the interlinked meanings of landscape and nature as they have been used to define the body politic. Drawing upon a wide variety of texts, Olwig constructs a narrative that moves from the story of England's and Scotland's "rebirth" in the early modern period as Britain to the "birth" of America in order to investigate the "relationships between place, space, and body in the making [End Page 502] of the political landscape" (p. xxiii). Following chapters outlining the meanings of landscape as a human activity, Olwig explores the relationships between landscape as the subject of artistic genres and the development of the idea that the body politic, rather than being the historical outcome of custom, is instead "an expression of the natural geographical body within which it grows" (p. 62). Tracking this idea through discourses of county, country, and nationality, he details the relations among landscape, nature, sexuality, and power as well as those among landscape, nature, and race. In this "deep" historical geography, landscape takes on considerable cultural power to become an organizing principle for linking discourses of theater, history, law, and environmental studies.
Co-authored by Andrew Barnaby and Lisa J. Schnell, Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century English Writing is concerned primarily with positioning Baconian inquiry as a paradigmatic framework for the period's political discourse. Barnaby and Schnell view Bacon's project as a way of describing how "patterns of linguistic allusion, intellectual association, and representational and persuasive methodologies" shape the understanding of a culture to its participants (p. 8). Heavily dependent on theory and densely written, their book nonetheless sets up a conversation among Shakespeare (Measure for Measure), Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, and Aphra Behn—writers for whom the work of knowing simultaneously recorded and created "the conditions by which the human state could be understood as inseparable from, if it could never finally be reduced to, a state of mind" (p. 201).
Several paperback re-issues need brief mention. A. D. Nuttall's Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996), comprising the 1992 Northcliffe Lectures at University College, London, conveys immense learning with clarity and ease to trace the genre's intellectual history from Aristotle through Sigmund Freud to Friedrich Nietzsche, moving toward an "intellectualist theory" that views tragedy as "an exercise in understanding in advance the real horrors we may meet and the psychic violence they may cause" (p. 104). Michael Neill's Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (2000)makes fifteen essays by a major historicist critic available in paperback. That Neill has not revised his essays but instead permitted them to "bear the marks of their own histories, however local or even parochial these may now seem" (p. 9) enables readers to trace a shifting politics of reading from arguments shaped by older historical [End Page 503] scholarship, such as "Servant Obedience and Master Sins," to his influential essays on Othello and "Putting History to the Question," where he deconstructs (and partially deflates) new historicism's signature practice of anecdotal citation. Stephen Orgel's The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage prints fifteen of his best-known, often anthologized essays. From "The Poetics of Spectacle" (1969) to "Tobacco and Boys" (1998), they span an impressively productive scholarly career, representing work that has had and continues to have a major influence on the twists and turns of current intellectual and critical practice.
Print Studies
Leading off this section is a collection that will be welcome to all readers interested in the history of the book. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. bring together, in Making Meaning: "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays, many of D. F. McKenzie's seminal studies. At a time when orthodoxies of bibliography and textual editing are being questioned, reading—or re-reading—the work of a consummate scholar who helped to create the field offers an extremely valuable resource (anyone who has the chutzpah to analyze 13,777 commas in public is a winner in my book). Divided into sections on "Bibliography," "The Book Trade," and "The Sociology of Texts," these eleven essays are not to be missed.
David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book, re-presenting the 1999 Lord Northcliffe Lectures at University College, London, is a thoughtful, elegantly conceived and elegantly written series of meditations on the traffic of the book trade. Moving from playhouse to printing house, he takes up the marketability of plays in the commercial climate, the theatrical rather than authorial authority of texts, and the publication histories of a number of texts, noting both vagaries of the texts themselves and revisionist accounts of their publication histories. Gathering up stories, Kastan neatly explodes narratives of a steady progress toward (desired) authenticity. Lavishly illustrated with title pages, his book contains incisive observations, as when he notes that "I there's the point" gets denigrated as "deficient" when it appears in Q1 Hamlet but is considered perfectly uncorrupt as it appears in Othello [TLN 1854-5] or when he sets scholarly projects aimed at establishing a "correct" Shakespeare beside Bowdler's Shakespeare to illustrate how decency, not authenticity, prevailed at a particular cultural moment. Finally, he considers electronic [End Page 504] textuality (including hypertext), the problematics of critical editions, and the issue of marketing determinations that produce a plethora of editions to pose several questions: Which are we to choose? And if what we want is "just the play," what do we mean by that?
Douglas A. Brooks's From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, represents a fine addition to Cambridge's Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (unfortunately, however, a number of missing pages in the endnotes marred the review copy). The initial installment of a three-part project, Brooks's book reconsiders the historical evidence in order to show how early-modern dramatic authorship was shaped by emergent modes of textual production. Although this embraces familiar territory, Brooks's strategy of listening to the stories that early modern English books tell and examining the "complex interventions of human agency that acted upon them" (p. xiii) makes a bold argument and offers intriguing reading. An initial chapter traces how the 1570 edition of Ferrex and Porrex, the 1612 edition of The White Devil, and the 1623 Shakespeare Folio reveal an intensifying preoccupation with authorial agency; a second treats the pre-Folio publication history of 1 and 2 Henry IV, putting pressure on material features as well as on chronicle and martyrological accounts of Sir John Oldcastle and editorial accounts of Shakespeare. Suggesting that the Oxford Complete Works's decision to banish Falstaff rehistoricizes the author, Brooks riffs on 2 Henry IV's epilogue, pointing to the curious fact that "the figure who was for a time the 'Godly nation's greatest martyr,' has also played a fundamental role in the construction of that nation's greatest author" (p. 103). Arguing that the hybrid structure of Ben Jonson's 1616 Workes folio preserves the complex struggle of authorship to reconcile the desire for autonomy, he concludes that Jonson (as well as his contemporaries) found themselves in the midst of a merger of professional theater and print publication; Jonson's folio, he argues, can be viewed as "the product of a culture to which it never really belonged" (p. 139). Turning to the 1634 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Brooks reads its appearance as a disruption of the processes he has traced; taking issue with Jeffrey Masten's arguments, he maintains not only that print was devastating to collaborative authorship (especially during the 1630s) but also that neither patriarchalism nor absolutism were operative factors. Rather, "the emergent notion of the individual author, principally generated in the printing house and ultimately ratified in [End Page 505] the bookshop, may have taught fathers and kings about the value of individualization" (p. 181). A final chapter addresses the complicated publishing history surrounding Heywood, who wrote about the perils of publication from a marginal position, filing what Brooks calls "a valuable, if sometimes unreliable, report on the drama of authorship" (p. 189).
Joseph Loewenstein's Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship is a learned, impressively dense study—a specialist's book par excellence. Like Brooks's book and Wall's StagingDomesticity, this is an entry from the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, further testament to an excellent series. Loewenstein's study is the first of a two-part project devoted to exploring a central moment in the early cultural history of English intellectual property: his target here is the emergence of what he calls "the bibliographical ego, a specifically Early Modern form of authorial identification with printed writing" (p. 1). His study describes—the word is important, for the book is filled with trenchant description—the literary, theatrical, and book-producing milieu surrounding Jonson, attempting to recover how Jonson experienced his own writing as it circulated in various forms as well as why he experienced it that way, and to compare his experience to that of Heywood, Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and others. Initial chapters trace the economic and intellectual history of authorial naming as well as the structures of property shaping Tudor and Stuart theatrical practices, the milieu that in turn shaped playwrights' sense of what theatrical work and Dramatic Works were and could be. In explaining the conditions in which "the imprint of the author" grew out of shifting playhouse and printing practices, Loewenstein argues that as the printing of plays accelerated, the norm of authorial anonymity gave way. Using Jean Baudrillard to theorize authentication and value, he traces concepts of the law of property through Greek and Latin authors, especially but not exclusively Martial and Horace; taking up Greene's famous attacks on George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Shakespeare, Lowenstein gives a dazzling analysis of Hamlet's Pyrrhus speech and of the issue of child actors. Establishing Jonson as the possessive author of his title, Loewenstein shows how Sejanus exemplifies various tendencies of Jonson's "ingenious forms of literary possessiveness" (p. 149) before focusing on Cynthia's Revels as a crucial document, especially given how it places a poet figure on stage and dramatizes his control, reducing actors to mediators (p. 165). This, in short, is a stunning study. [End Page 506]
24 November 1985 marked Gary Taylor's excited discovery of "Shall I die" by Shakespeare (formerly known as Anonymous); seventeen years later, the media hype has cooled but, in Brian Vickers's "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "Funerall Elegye," debate continues. A prefatory chapter takes Taylor to task before anatomizing Donald Foster's claim (which he has more or less recanted) that Shakespeare wrote the "Funerall Elegye." Just what is at stake is made clear by the exhaustive length of Vickers's extended argument, detailing how Taylor and Foster failed to obey correct procedures in authorship studies. In making his own case for Ford's authorship, Crow's Law (attributed to John Crow, who taught at King's College, London)—"Do not believe what you wish to believe until you perceive what you ought to have perceived"—is Vickers's mantra (p. 203). Claiming it is necessary to be especially stringent when making additions to the canon, he cites the elegy's lack of thematic unity, faulty rhyme scheme, relatively rare meter, and awkward union of Petrarchan dilemma poem with dream vision and blazon (pp. 8-13). In presenting his case for Ford's authorship, Vickers sets the elegy in biographical context, supplies a diction analysis, and provides a reading that accounts for new features overlooked by Foster in the areas of genre and argument, diction, syntax, and rhetoric; he then cites over eighty passages with close parallels in Ford's work. What emerges from Vickers's study of the elegy suggests a somewhat incompetent author and, at best, a mediocre poem. In an epilogue, Vickers explores the problematic politics of attribution, citing how, in this particular case, media reception usurped scholarly values.
The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England, by Peter Lake with Michael Questier, is a magisterial study that brings religious, social, and cultural histories to life through a fascinating, exhaustively detailed narrative that traces the travels of sensationalist murder pamphlets through print shops, bookstalls, theaters, pulpits, prisons, and public executions. Neither "a social history of religion nor a political history of the reformation," this is a book "about representation and fantasy, performance and polemic; about the form and context of, and market for, cheap print and popular performance" (p. 714). Centered on how exemplary narratives about "archetypes of evil and corruption were framed, enacted and exploited for their particular, linked but distinct, indeed sometimes mutually exclusive, polemical purposes by a number of different ideological groups or factions" (the protestants, papists, and players [End Page 507] of the title; p. xxvii), Lake and Questier propose to supplement "a sometimes over-literal, determinedly univocal, revisionist way of reading evidence" with "a new historicist move towards the explication of texts as cultural artifacts, complex bearers of more than one, indeed sometimes many, often contradictory, 'meanings' or significations" (p. xxxiii). They also view their project as "administer[ing] to new historicist procedures and perspectives a good dose of the revisionist historians' concern with the contingency of events, their obsession with political narrative and their conviction of the absolute centrality of religious and confessional identity formation and conflict to any adequate account of the politics and culture of this period" (p. xxxiii). In a nutshell, this book focuses on what (and how) religious discourse had to do with (nearly) everything, and as such, it represents the triumph of contexts over texts. Although such a bald statement risks reducing what is clearly an impressively researched, complexly argued foray into early-modern intellectual history—as Lake puts it, "a form of cultural history with at least some of the politics left in" (p. 714)—at times his study seems to be rediscovering connections between texts and contexts that new historicists (and cultural materialists) have already explored, if perhaps less thoroughly. (See, for instance, Shuger's Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England or Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe, both considered in the next section.)
As Lake frequently states, he is not interested in reading play texts as literary events but in seeing the drama as a form of historical evidence that can be mobilized to address controversial issues about the implications of Puritanism within the ideological, institutional, social, and political matrices of post-Reformation England. Early sections of his book take up the cheap-print murder pamphlets, as well as sermon and confessional discourses, in relation to a number of plays, among them Yorkshire Tragedy, Arden of Faversham, Witch of Edmonton, Eastward Ho!,Honest Whore, Dutch Courtesan, and Alchemist. Reading the pamphlets first against the plays, Lake then turns to overlaps between them to consider Hamlet and Macbeth, which he sees not only as aligned with the shape and narrative structures of those pamphlets but also as subverting or problematizing their structures. "In the transition from pamphlet to drama," he writes, "there took place a shift in the balance, maintained in most of the pamphlets, between a moralizing providentialism and a titillating appeal to the secret fears, desires, and appetites, the furtive anxieties and pleasures, of the readership or audience" (p. 379). In the study's final [End Page 508] sections, Lake provides extended explications of Bartholomew Fair and Measure for Measure, plays he views as most fully attuned to the issues and concerns he has circulated.
Speaking of how Jonson creates a "reality effect" through "myriad topographical and sociological references," Lake argues that London lies at the center of Jonson's drama, offering a backdrop through which the audience can recognize their city and their social world "being guyed, mimicked, affirmed, and celebrated even as it was being ridiculed" (p. 583); turning to Barthlomew Fair, he reads Jonson's Puritanism against the relationship between the popular, the Puritan, and the stage already outlined in order to discover the relationship between "the nature of Puritanism and its relationship to the hierarchies of church, state, and society in Jacobean England" (p. 583). Noting also that Zeal-of-the-Land Busy is from Banbury, he points out associations with William Whately, a famous Banbury preacher, suggesting that Jonson knowingly parodies and/or satirizes the speech patterns of provincial as well as city preachers and that spectators and readers would recognize this. "Behind Jonson's derision, his seemingly carnivalesque, comic purposes," Lake writes, "there lurked a positively Bancroftian analysis of Puritanism as simply seditious" (p. 606). Measure for Measure, he argues, attaches the tropes and narrative bites familiar from the discourses examined earlier to issues of the reformation of manners (especially sexual manners) and of widespread spiritual and temporal reform. Netting in a wide range of sociological-sexual, theological, and historical evidence to put pressure on particular episodes in the play, especially the problematics of its ending, he concludes that there is no straightforward answer to the issues it raises; the play's value, he finds, is in confronting explosive issues. Nor, ultimately, does he see any point in choosing among various readings—Christian allegory, anti-Puritan tract, royal flattery, or advice to an incoming monarch: rather, the play provides "a surer guide to absolutism and Puritanism than much recent historical writing on the period" (pp. 620, 689-90). In a study that has offered such an extraordinarily "thick description" of historical evidence, this sounds like the highest praise.
Lake and Questier (though it is difficult to discern the latter's precise contribution to the project) have produced a rich, deeply textured investigation of how a political and theological imaginary shaped a particular historical moment, exerting pressure on a number of discursive realms. Their book is not easy reading, but it constitutes, like the phenomena and ephemera it discusses, [End Page 509] a legacy that students of early modern history and culture will want to explore.
Shakespeare
In Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in "Measure for Measure," Shuger proposes a methodology that reinvents contextual studies. This dense, rewarding, little book does not present a reading nor is it "about" the play: rather, her study uses Measure as well as its source, George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, as a basis for rethinking English politics and political thought circa 1600. Intrigued by how the play raises broadly political questions, among them why the state, figured by its ruler, is associated with the sacrament of penance; why the duke-friar spends so much time preparing his subjects for death; and why a play purportedly about secular government associates Puritanism with sexual regulation (pp. 1-2), Shuger uses Measure to "find [a] way round an unfamiliar political landscape," focusing on "what the play makes clear, explicit, and overt" (pp. 1-2, 5-6). Her strategy yields an intriguing study. Claiming that the play's political content travels backward from 1603-04 to reflect on moments in Elizabeth's reign as well as in early Tudor prerogative courts (p. 7), Shuger argues that Angelo and the duke "represent crucially important strains in late Elizabethan political thought, both of which have a complex intellectual and institutional history, and both of which are nearly invisible in current early modern scholarship" (p. 13).
Although Measure seems poised to tell the story of "the supersession of authoritarian Christian society by the modern secular state" (p. 34), the play hinges more precisely on the connection between private and public morality, requiring rethinking what religion has to do with early modern politics (p. 36). Shuger suggests that Measure's plot is not a fairy tale, that the duke is not a theatrical stock character, and Angelo not merely a stage Puritan: rather, the contrast between the two, around which the plot turns, "renders the underlying binary structure of Christian royalist politics" (p. 71): just as the duke embodies the dominant understanding of monarchy circa 1600, Angelo's hypocrisy and his move from unrighteousness into injustice also is politically conceived. Working through the history of Chancery and the Star Chamber courts of equity, Shuger finds resemblances between materials litigated there and tropes circulating in both Promos and Measure—judicial misconduct, official corruption, abuse of [End Page 510] power. Significantly, Measure turns from the problems of corruption and cozenage that occupy Whetstone and the Star Chamber judges (p. 97), but several plot lines added by Shakespeare—Lucio's slanders against the duke as well as the linked episodes involving Mariana and the bed trick, Mistress Overdone's account of Lucio impregnating and abandoning Kate Keepdown, and the notorious final judgment scene—intersect with the jurisdiction of the equity courts. In the end, what matters is not romantic love but Christian social justice, a conception of justice strikingly different from the mid-Tudor Christian ethic informing either Promos or the Star Chamber (pp. 98, 101); in this theater of equity, the notion of a king providing justice for his people, acting in God's stead, is central to Christian polity and to Tudor-Stuart discussions of kingship. In her final chapter, Shuger is concerned with why the duke attends to the moral and spiritual good of individuals. Noting that it seems important that penitential justice is administered by the temporal ruler rather than by a church court, she sees Measure as directing attention, in the mixed figure of the friar-duke, to the unfamiliar crossover between the sacred and the secular (p. 103). Viewing the play as "an attempt to imagine what Christianity might look like as a political praxis" (p. 131), she argues that it proposes Platonic penitential justice as a workable alternative to Augustine's emphasis on law. Turning to Winnie Mandela's 1997 hearing before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to summarize the testimony and Mandela's eventual apology, she wonders about imposing a Christian morality of forgiveness on a political process. Although she admits to having no answer, her point is that, in the case of one real-world Christian community, Measure's version of morality was indeed imposed.
Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England complements Shuger's study in that both rethink historicist methodologies. Claiming that listening only to Puritan discourses invites misreading the theatrical milieu, Knapp sets out to prove that "a surprising number of writers . . . depicted plays as Godly enterprises, and that their views had a major impact on the theater" (p. 2). Knapp delivers a fascinating and compelling account of the trafficking between pulpit and stage, critiquing those such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose who see "theater as the beneficiary of a spiritual crisis in England sparked by the Reformation" (p. 7). Throughout, he argues that English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level, determining the conceptualization of the player [End Page 511] and playwright as professions and of the theater as an institution; in terms of disposing theater people to enact certain confirmatory plots, themes, and characters, religion featured not only in the creation of plays and in their content but, by extension, in their social effects (pp. 9-10). An initial chapter maps the assumptions that encouraged and shaped belief in the religious potentiality of the theater, demonstrating how antitheatrical discourse disposed protheatricalists to align theater with one reformist Christian tradition, the Erasmian tenet of inclusiveness—an accommodative practice tied to a doctrinal minimalism (p. 38).
Sketching out a "rogue" scenario, a "counter-Crusading" scenario, and a "conformist" scenario, each of which expresses "views of English Christianity that theorize in turn the professional circumstances in which the scenarios were produced" (p. 11), Knapp explores these scenarios in plays as diverse as Jonson's Eastward Ho, Magnetic Lady, and Bartholomew Fair, Richard Brome's Jovial Crew, the anonymous Robin Hood plays, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Tempest, Henry V, and Twelfth Night; at several points, his discussion of rogues and theatrical communities intersects productively with Reynolds's Becoming Criminal. Claiming that English Protestants remained uncertain as to whether their collective identity as Christians bound them to a national, parochial, or supranational fellowship, Knapp argues, for instance, that Christendom functioned as a determinative factor for imagining community; taking issue with Richard Helgerson's notions of nationhood, he sees history plays as suggesting that the "plot of Christian history moves in a westward direction—away from Rome and England, on a spiritual Crusade for a new Christian world altogether" (p. 87). Perhaps one of the most important ideas in Knapp's comprehensive study is that the indirection by which theater people professed religion by refusing to profess it outright was "in conformity with the Erasmian spirit of the English religious settlement" (p. 169); also significantly, he gives weight to the notion that frivolity on the Renaissance stage became a vehicle for the aggressive sectarianism it claimed to dissolve (p. 174). Knapp's study argues a bold thesis that counters current understandings of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only espoused religious faith but embodied religious perspectives in their plays. His book's particular strength lies in its challenge to antitheatrical texts and perspectives as the primary means of understanding early-modern theater practice. Based on impeccable scholarship that maps a wide [End Page 512] territory, Knapp writes engagingly; whether or not one agrees with him, his learning will impress.
Wes Folkerth's The Sound of Shakespeare (Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series) takes up Bruce R. Smith's call for a "cultural poetics of listening" (p. 8) to explore interrelations between sound and culture. Acknowledging the conjectural nature of his project, Folkerth draws on early modern discourses as well as on present-day communications theory, attempting to identify what sounds would have meant and how such meanings might have been recognized by early modern ears. Sound, he argues, not only had ethical values but also was considered "a privileged mode of access to deeply subjective thoughts, emotions and intentions of others"; thus "sounding out" worked as surveillance, as a way of representing characters' emotional proximity to one another (p. 33). Religious, philosophical, and anatomical accounts, he claims, suggest that sound and hearing were associated with ideas of obedience, duty, receptivity, penetrability, transformation, and reproduction—values encoded as "feminine." Coriolanus, he argues, most directly exemplifies the notion that hearing opens up the self, entails a willingness to be receptive, vulnerable. Other chapters explore the soundscapes of Antony and Cleopatra (the "public ear"), the use of signature sounds (hautboys in Hamlet), the interrelations among sound, transformation, and the grotesque (Bottom), and what he calls "Shakespearean acoustemologies"—the sensual bodily experience of sound (Othello's "greedy ear"; Measure's "willing ear"). Don't miss this fascinating study or Folkerth's final pages, which draw John Wayne, Harold Bloom, and Shakespeare into a community of acoustic-ologists attuned to listening to characters—a critical process one might call Shakespeare-jazz.
Mark Taylor's Shakespeare's Imitations concerns the echoes, resonances, imitations, and variations in and among four plays—Dream, Henry IV, Hamlet, and Tempest, viewing such features as parts of a deliberate design. Clearly based on knowing these plays inside out, Taylor's study combines exemplary close reading and revitalized source study; he is particularly interested in what he calls "translation"—that is, instances when whatever is being imitated loses its original identity and is transformed into something else. He also studies the problem of producing meaning in texts with sustained wordplay. His chapter on Dream is especially well sustained, as is his reading of Hamlet: asking "Did Hamlet read 'The Murder of Gonzago'?" (p. 123), Taylor productively worries both the idea of imitating an imitation of an action and the "complete" incompleteness of the close. [End Page 513]
Edward Berry's Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study is the first and only study of early modern hunting culture—a brief moment that, according to Berry, did not last long. Berry's use of "culture" encompasses its meanings as a social practice, a symbol, a ritual, a discourse, and an ideology; focusing on hunting as a sport, on handbooks, poems and plays, mythology, theology, politics, and painting, he brings these into productive conversation with one another. After laying out the theory and practice of hunting, he locates Shakespeare on the margins of hunting culture (the deer-poaching incident) and within antihunting discourses (p. 15) in order to identify hunting as a potential site of sociocultural conflict which Shakespeare mobilized as a dramatic resource. Berry touches on nearly every major Shakespearean allusion, from Venus and Adonis and Love's Labour's Lost (the paradox of female hunting and its connections to Elizabeth I) to Prospero's hunting of Caliban and his inept co-conspirators, linking that with James I's own hunting career and the crisis occasioned by his insistence on royal prerogative. Exploring "solemn" hunting in Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, Berry reads Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius as nightmare versions of Elizabethan poachers (pp. 85-6) and argues that both plays "exploit the conventional image of the hunt as a ritual of death and dismemberment, a means of civilizing bloodshed" (p. 94). His analysis of Petruchio's taming speech and the prominence of the hunting lord in Shrew's induction lead him to argue that attending to the culture of the hunt makes it possible "to acknowledge the insidiously oppressive nature of Katherine's taming" and at the same time to "save the play from its own ending" (p. 132). Setting the play with the culture of the hunt in mind, as Berry suggests, might offer a fresh appreciation of its rich comic texture, but that also might require training spectators in the subtleties Berry uncovers.
Bruce Boehrer's Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (Palgrave's Early Modern Cultural Studies series) talks with the animals, so to speak, in a fascinating variety of ways, inviting readers to pay attention to how the early moderns defined animals in a manner connected with the culture's understanding of both the "essence and limits of humanity" (p. xi). In this smart, entertaining study, Boehrer explores a series of interrelated questions, among them how understanding the difference between people and animals affected early moderns' understanding both of themselves and of the resulting formulations of biological and social identity operating [End Page 514] within popular dramatic entertainment (p. 2). It is hard not to be won over by chapter titles such as "How to Do Things with Animals," "Shakespeare's Beastly Buggers" (a witty reading of Dream and the crime of bestiality), "Dead Parrot Sketch" (thinking with parrots or about the sociocultural status of parrots, ranging from still lifes to later colonial literature but also harking back to an earlier mention of Sir Politic and Lady Would-be as talking parrots), and "Animal Fun for Everyone" (the unique onstage use of animals in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Every Man Out of His Humour). Concluding with a survey of work on the status of animals in Western society, Boehrer marks potential connections to ecocriticism. Is this the next book?
Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters, by Geraldo U. de Sousa, concerns the "dynamic interplay of three concepts—gender, text, and habitat—as metaphors for moments of self-definition"; considered together, these mark the extent to which Shakespeare reinterprets and refashions encounters between alien and European values (p. 3). In chapters that treat Dream, Two Noble Kinsmen and the Henry VI trilogy, Merchant, Titus and Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Tempest, de Sousa situates meaning "in" Shakespearean expressiveness to explore authorial ambivalence and intentionality—whether that entails ethnocentric "appropriation" or "ethnic diversity" (p. 179). Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological studies, de Sousa situates these plays in the historical and cultural contexts of early modern literatures on race, ethnicity, gender, and environmental influences on cultural practice as a way to imagine Europe's "Others" (p. 9). Although little here is exactly "new news"—the study was published by St. Martin's in New York in 1999—de Sousa brings together sensitive readings of the concepts he explores to mark Shakespeare's appeal to various cultural groups.
Two books on the histories, Tom McAlindon's Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Nicholas Grene's Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, take somewhat different approaches. Devoted to recuperating the plays from new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and Marxism, McAlindon's study might be titled "In Defense of Prince Hal"; his critical heroes are E. M. W. Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell, and Alice Scoufos. In readings built around three overlapping tropes, Time, Truth, and Grace, he argues that the Wars of the Roses should be viewed through the lens of the sixteenth century rather than as anticipating the class conflicts and bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century. Although reminiscent of what recent criticism [End Page 515] has disavowed, McAlindon's insistence on resituating the plays within the Reformation's political-religious conflicts aligns with recent emphases. Grene also acknowledges a debt to Tillyard as setting the terms of a debate carried in different directions by later critics, but his primary interest is in exploring the perennial question of whether or not the histories were part of a planned design. Bringing together textual and theatrical evidence, he reads the plays in terms of their Elizabethan origins and their latter-day theatrical performances with the aim of revealing the nature of their multiplicity as well as how they have been reproduced serially (p. 3). Initial chapters attempt to reconstruct the theatrical marketplace conditions, examine how their seriality resembles or differs from that of chronicle sources, and survey modern serial productions. Rather than marching (serially) through the plays, Grene organizes the rest of his study around a series of tropes and interpretative issues: one result is the sense of a long essay stretched into book form. Based on his view of their relatively primitive theatricality, Grene argues that the Henry VI-Richard III sequence was serially conceived; the Richard II-Henry V "sequence," however, is not a sequence at all but "a series that is chronologically continuous but formally discontinuous" (p. 247).
James R. Siemon's Word against Word: Shakespearean Utterance explores the usefulness of aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of utterance to read Shakespearean utterance in general. Siemon advocates a reading practice based not on verticality but on "listening around" and "talking back." He sets out those terms in an initial chapter, analyzing interactive utterances as they appear in early-modern English texts, before turning to Shakespeare's sociolinguistic environment. Siemon argues for the usefulness of formalist analysis in examining the heteroglossia of nonaesthetic textual materials, especially documents enlisted as historical evidence. Locating linguistic and dramatic elements from Shakespeare's other histories amid debates over agrarian change in the 1590s to contextualize his discussions, he takes Richard II as his major example, putting it under pressure to reveal its competing voices and to show Richard's figure as a subject (or subjected sovereign) constructed from competing voices. Addressing the tonalities of elegy and lamentation as well as issues of carnival, Siemon's richly detailed analyses situate the play's discourses among a series of other texts, such as Elizabeth I's comments to William Lambarde, Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, and popular ballads, as well as criticism by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hardin Craig, working to detect [End Page 516] "voices within voices themselves" (p. 138). His strategy establishes a reading practice in which, by focusing on particular touchpoints and examining features such as tonality, diction, timing, gesture, and metaphor in the play, Shakespeare converses with others to produce a bicultural, bilingual, multivocal discourse.
In Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture, Michael Keevak considers how Shakespeare's sexual reputation was made. Here, sexy Will is both uncovered and masked (Keevak sees the two as intertwined): taking up flashpoints such as the Southampton connection, the so-called young man sonnets, a group of forgeries by William Henry Ireland, Shakespeare portraits, and Shakespeare in Love, his mini-history argues that the authentic Shakespeare is a sexual one as well. Michael D. Friedman's "The World Must Be Peopled": Shakespeare's Comedies of Forgiveness in Performance is also bent on recuperating a more authentic Shakespeare. Opening with an overview of the practice of performance criticism, Friedman then outlines a structural model for what he terms the comedy of forgiveness, plays in which comic heroes—Proteus, Claudio, Bertram, Angelo, Petruchio—seem deserving of more punishment than they receive for their treatment of women. Arguing that contemporary productions violate essential aspects of his proposed model by settling for a happy ending, he claims that feminism emphasizes how the plays are bent on procreation and pardon the misbehaving hero without regard for the women he has mistreated. Friedman's attempt to negotiate between the plays' scripted demands and the culture is not entirely satisfactory, largely because an oddly skewed sense of what constitutes "feminist production" operates throughout.
Richard Halpern's Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (University of Pennsylvania's New Cultural Studies series) is a beautifully articulated, richly textured reading of the sonnets. For Halpern, as for his readers, writing is jouissance: here, Shakespeare appears "among the moderns" (company he frequently keeps these days) in a most illuminating way. Beginning with the idea that sodomy and the sublime seem to be categories inhabiting different and unrelated discourses, Halpern proceeds to reveal, layer by layer, how they are (hear and see the pun) fundamentally connected to write a cultural history of sublime sublimations. In brilliant readings of the first seventeen sonnets, he views their argument for reproduction as an aesthetic duty, attempting to reconcile the [End Page 517] problem of the sublime with what he calls Shakespeare's poetics of sublimation. Swerving from St. Paul on homosexuality and idolatry to Peter Martyr, Slavoj Zizek, and Neil Jordan's Crying Game, Halpern approaches the Dark Lady sonnets by way of the Marquis de Sade, Emmanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke. In "Theory to Die For," Halpern reads Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H. as a parable about theory, a "hermeneutic romance" (p. 34); calling it a double product, he argues that the aesthetics of the sonnets also performs that aesthetics, segueing easily to Foucault, Derrida's critique, and Foucault's response. Viewing Freud's study as the most extended effort to probe the mysteries of sublimation, he performs a breathtaking analysis of the connections between Freud's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's St. Anne with Two Others and one of Freud's childhood memories, viewing Freud as reworking personal pathologies into the dilemmas of culture as such. Turning to Jacques Lacan's seminar on psychoanalysis and his understanding of art as sublimation, Halpern sheds light on their connections, which lead him to an Arnaut Daniel lyric and, finally, back to Shakespeare and to the perfume-bottle metaphor with which he began. Following Halpern's incisive mind at work makes this not only a wonderful read but an elegant contribution to the cultural history of sexuality.
Editions
David Lindley's New Cambridge edition of The Tempest weaves together stage history, criticism, and literary features, making of the three an intertwined narrative. Opening his introduction by juxtaposing quotes from Anne Barton and Ian McKellen, one on the play's openness, the other on the spectator's participatory act, Lindley aims both to represent and to explain the range of readings given the play in its theatrical and critical afterlives. His edition meets the high standards of the series in an exemplary manner, offering an especially fine introduction that focuses on the elusiveness of Tempest, a feature that has made it central to late-twentieth-century criticism. A touchstone for every reader of a new Tempest edition will, of course, be to check whether Ferdinand says "So rare a wondered father, and a wise" or "So rare a wondered father, and a wife" (IV.i); Lindley chooses the latter option, including a full discussion of the debate in his section on textual analysis, (wisely) commenting that either "wise" or "wife" suggests Ferdinand's hyperbole and is analogous to Miranda's "brave new world" (V.i) and parallel to Gonzalo's Golden [End Page 518] Age musings (II.i). Particularly noteworthy overall is his emphasis on entering into dialogue with the play as well as with its historical situation. For Lindley, there appears to be something "charged" about the material that allows the play, in whatever historical moment it is performed, not only to "answer back" but also to "exceed our critical grasp" (p. 83). Arguing that the old critical certainties no longer pertain or have been displaced, he finds both the formalist claims for a text that stands outside its historical moment—the "universal" Tempest—as well as readings situating it within objective history inadequate as guarantees of meanings. Rather, Lindley's materials attempt to make readers aware of the extent to which their own culturally conditioned assumptions figure as interpretative frameworks (p. 81), and he concludes by labeling Tempest the most "undecidable" of Shakespeare's texts—one by which, to paraphrase Terence Hawkes, we make ourselves mean in an ever wider variety of ways.
Two volumes in the Arden Third Series appeared this year: Charles R. Forker's edition of King Richard II, and King Henry VI, Part 3, co-edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. Forker's edition is an amazingly detailed work of scholarship, prefaced by introductory materials that track every aspect of the play and are especially thorough on mapping out political ambivalences, on acknowledging a wide range of criticism, and on providing much more than the usual potted stage history. Alerting readers that they will find more references to eighteenth-century editors (Lewis Theobald, Alexander Pope, Edward Capell, and others) than is usual in a modern edition, he notes that, in a play exclusively in verse, these imported readings work to repair meter. In addition, he has retained archaisms in a few instances where they serve meter or seem otherwise justified; more unusually, he has capitalized some abstract nouns (Death, Grief, Fortune, and Sorrow, for instance) where they point to personification or quasi-personification, justifying that practice in terms of their occurrence in both Q and F (pp. 166-7). He has also paid particular attention to stage directions, marking those that occur only in F with a superscript F, as in R. A. Foakes's Arden 3 King Lear (1997). Overall, too, Forker's edition has unusually heavy stage directions, many adopted from previous editions, others newly introduced: although he justifies his practice on the grounds that "it seems important in an edition intended to be useful in the theatre to make such movement both prominent and clear without closing off the possibility of alternative stagings and gestures that properly belong to the prerogative of a director" (p. 167), it may [End Page 519] well be the case that theatrical practitioners will find their own ways to move the play in space.
Turning to the commentary, Forker is extremely sensitive to punctuation, to distinctions between Q and F texts, and to echoes of language. Although I might wish that more references to particular stagings appeared in the commentary, close to the text, Forker's introductory section on theatrical performances is unusually full, even though it focuses more on Richard II as a stand-alone play than on its latter-day appearances within theatrical tetralogies. Although performative details do occur in longer commentary notes, most of the commentary in this eminently historical edition has to do with history: long extracts from the Chronicles appear, tying particular moments to "history" and so giving status to those documents less as sources that lie "behind" the play than as complementary texts. However much this tends to overbalance text with commentary, it does prove useful, in this especially complex dramatic retelling, to bring these accounts "up front" rather than bury them, as is usual, at the end of the edition.
Cox and Rasmussen's 3 Henry VI represents a different approach to editing and to editing a history play. Whereas Forker thinks "history," these editors are thinking "theater." The result is a much more "open"—and more accessible—text of a difficult early play. In many ways, this is a "resistant" edition in that it finds ways around some of Arden 3's general editorial protocols. That is strongly signaled in the introduction, which begins with the politics of adaptation, citing Harley Granville-Barker's useful warning against taking historical practice as a criterion for theatrical performance: "We shall not save our souls by being Elizabethan," he writes. "To be Elizabethan one must be strictly, logically or quite ineffectively so. And, even then, it is asking too much of an audience to come to the theatre so historically-sensed as that" (p. 11). Taking their cue from the play's reception history by beginning in the theater, Cox and Rasmussen also argue that the history of authorship is unsolvable. Examining the existing texts in detail, especially the 1595 octavo, The True Tragedy, they question its origins in memorial reconstruction; similarly their analysis of F questions its foul paper status, and by refusing to place labels such as "original" and "revision" on these texts, they conclude on an inconclusive note that both are texts that do not fit into established textual categories and that neither can be considered more authoritative (pp. 175-6). Significantly, too, their edition reprints True Tragedy in reduced facsimile; recognizing that printing O behind a modernized F simultaneously "asserts [End Page 520] and denies its status as a significant Shakespearean play," they argue that it deserves to be considered as complete and internally consistent, calling it "a crookbacked prodigy, unable to stand on its own merits yet impossible to dismiss" (p. 149). Whereas previous editors have assumed that Q2 (1600) is an exact reprint of O, it is not; and Cox and Rasmussen call into question previous editorial decisions regarding emending lineation in particular (pp. 151-2). On the author question, they again consider this an unanswered and unanswerable question: either Shakespeare wrote it alone or with "indeterminate others" (p. 49). Whichever the case, conjectures about compositional circumstances in the early modern theater suggest that authorship was (like their edition) a dialogic enterprise. The text they establish profits not only from this thinking but also from departures from editorial overdrive: light emendation prevails and, in most cases, they rely on F readings as entirely defensible (p. xvii), so that, throughout, the text is more than usually unmediated. In addition, there are few added stage directions; moreover, choosing to gloss lightly and comment briefly means that a page actually contains a large proportion of text. For a play filled with persons and places, appendices on casting and potential doubling (sixty-seven roles apportioned to twenty-one adult actors and four boys), and on battles provide useful maps. From its textual thinking and apparatus to its splendid introductory materials, this is an admirable editorial re-performance.
Briefly noted, two volumes from the Malone Society: an edition of a previously unpublished and untitled play, The Wisest Have Their Fools about Them, prepared by Elizabeth Baldwin; and a facsimile of John Lyly's Sapho and Phao, prepared by Leah Scragg, represent welcome additions to this important project.
To conclude this section (mostly) on Shakespeare, I consider studies that, in one way or another, take up issues of critical practice. Although not strictly a "companion," David Bevington's Shakespeare reads as the ultimate companionate guide: using Jacques' "All the world's a stage" as an organizational metaphor, he traces Shakespeare's writing career "as a mirror of the human life cycle as experienced by Shakespeare" (p. 243). Indebted to the work of Richard Wheeler and Janet Adelman and to C. L. Barber, who stands behind both, Bevington's "little book" (p. x) draws a wealth of examples from the plays to construct a Shakespeare who "lives with us today with such vitality because he speaks, with unrivalled eloquence and grace of language, to just about any human condition one can think of" (p. 3). To be sure, reading tropically and thematically tends to iron out [End Page 521] weightier contradictions, but Bevington's consistently insightful commentary on the plays and poems remains plural, never insisting on one interpretation. Although his book addresses a general audience, there also is much here for the specialist reader, especially his readings of the sonnets. Putting an immense range of expertise to work, Bevington provides an excellent alternative to Harold Bloom's humanist Shakespeare.
Kiernan Ryan's Shakespeare is not David Bevington's. The third edition of a popular volume first published in 1989, here expanded, it is intended as a contribution to radical criticism. Ryan desires "to contest and displace the established interpretations of canonical works, and thereby transform both the present function of past texts and the practice of criticism itself" (p. 1). This is a tall order for a small book, but Ryan's overall aim of breaking what he sees as a disabling deadlock between a Shakespeare "fossilized in the past" and one "so drained of determinancy as to mean nothing for certain or whatever we like" (p. 15) will appeal to many. Imagining a Shakespeare who speaks from a dissident position and envisions potential change, Ryan argues, for instance, that the endings of comedies and romances in particular are not "ideologically enslaved," that their mood is subjunctive rather than indicative, mapping resolutions that "cannot be achieved within the normal social framework they present or presuppose" but "lie beyond the reach of contemporary society" (p. 118). It is easy to see why Ryan's book has found a niche in this briefly postmillennial moment when reconsiderations summarizing recent work seem to be one order of the day. If, as Ryan argues, criticism indeed has reached an impasse, his study offers one view of rethinking past practice.
Two books represent additional, antithetical perspectives on critical practice. Jeffrey Hart's Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education tours the Western tradition, arguing for sustaining "the great conversation" (p. 13) and its centrality to American culture. Among the "world-changing" texts he wishes restored to the curriculum is, of course, Hamlet, and in "Hamlet's Great Song," he presents a romantic, essentialist, and masculinist aria on Hamlet as a "credible genius" (p. 182). Repeatedly, Hart derogates theory (interrogating a work, he writes, calls to mind "rubber truncheons and bare light bulbs" [p. 246]); faulting multiculturalism as a form of "anti-Westernism" (p. 247), he sees disinterestedness as the highest end of literary study. Equally polemical, Sex, Literature and Censorship, Jonathan Dollimore's latest entry into the critical-cultural wars, is concerned with the failures of theory and the taming [End Page 522] of texts. Traditional academics, he argues, have domesticated literature by confining it within liberal humanities education; advocating the power of art as a medium of dangerous knowledge, Dollimore calls for recovering aspects of our cultural past too often ignored or disavowed (p. xii). His concerns fall into three sections, "Desire and Theory," "Dangerous Knowledge," and "Desire and Art"; turning to writing on sexuality and Shakespeare, he lashes out at the use of "idealist and aesthetic criteria to ignore or repudiate whole areas of culture and experience" (p. 108). And in "Shakespeare at the Limits of Political Criticism," he warns that "The idea that anything can be explained if a full enough historical context for it can be recovered, may become, paradoxically, a way of disengaging from the past" (p. 125). Viewing the academic Shakespeare industry as an intellectual embarrassment, he argues not for the end of postmodernism but for an intellectual culture which entails a historical understanding that "knows that we always risk misrecognizing the realities we live . . . and that going back into the past via intellectual history is one way of reducing that risk." In conclusion, Dollimore imagines "a critical engagement which strives to understand the contradictions we live, which knows the difference between human agency and human essence, [one] that makes writing ethical in the broadest sense of the word" (pp. 170-1).
Arthur Kirsch has reconstructed W. H. Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare, given at the New School for Social Research in 1946-47. Based on notes taken by Alan Ansen and Howard Griffin, who succeeded Ansen as Auden's secretary, with supplementary materials from Helen Lowenstein and Bea Bodenstein, they represent an introduction to Auden's intellectual universe as well as a commentary on Shakespeare. Occurring throughout are references to Søren Kierkegaard, Dante, St. Augustine's City of God, Blaise Pascal's Pensées, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Magic Flute, and Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt—lodestones for what Auden termed "Christian psychology." Several appendices, one of which transcribes Auden's markings in George Lyman Kitteredge's edition of Shakespeare, complement this record of two writers' conversation across centuries.
Performance and Theater History
Four books on Shakespeare films embrace a range of perspectives. In Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Productions on Screen, H. R. Coursen takes a descriptive and evaluative stance (many pieces rework reviews from Shakespeare in the Classroom): [End Page 523] announcing that he believes in an "inherited script" that "outlines the options for production available to actors and directors" (p. 1), he maintains that production occurs in physical and conceptual space, by which he means the transition from one medium to another, the relation of one acting space to another, and the historical moment. His tendency to pronounce on films—Prospero's Books is "a travesty" (p. 17), the Loncraine-McKellen Richard III "unbelievable" (p. 19), Midwinter's Tale "trades on clichés" (p. 19), Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night is "psychologically plausible" (p. 28)—makes his study read like the personal diary of a super-reviewer intent on monitoring the field. Nonetheless, Coursen knows a lot about Shakespeare films, and sharing his viewing habits invites readers to fashion their own opinions. In contrast, Graham Holderness's Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television collects seven previously published essays, including case studies on Henry V, Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet. Two central essays, "Shakespeare and Cinema" and "Shakespeare Rewound" address issues of canonicity to advocate looking, not at the "big" films but at those such as the Celestino Coronado Hamlet (1976) or Derek Jarman's Tempest (1980), which he sees as cinematic equivalents to a modern (or postmodern) theoretically activated text (p. 88). Energized by Holderness's distinctive voice, his studies mobilize film theory, comparative media studies, and cultural theory to serve his political commitment to a "new and different" Shakespeare.
Stylishly written, Stephen M. Buhler's Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof constructs a particular narrative of filmed Shakespeare; significantly, his book avoids what has been a norm in Shakespeare film studies: examining what has been lost in negotiating between page and screen. Instead, he aims "to place all Shakespeare films amidst the cultural practices, economic pressures, career trajectories, and audience expectations that shaped their production and reception" (p. 8). Here, readers experience the films as situated within a historical and cultural matrix that extends beyond "Shakespeare-speak" to reveal their own history. Chapters on documentary approaches (from Herbert Beerbohm Tree's King John to Al Pacino's Looking for Richard), frankly commercial films (Franco Zeffirelli's and the United Artists' Shrews), self-consciously "filmic" films, actor-directors (Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh), transgressive films (Sven Gade's Hamlet,Prospero's Books, Nunn's Twelfth Night) relate past and present practices; a final chapter reads Shakespeare in Love, Dreams by Adrian Noble and Michael [End Page 524] Hoffman, and Julie Taymor's Titus as centennial interventions in the relationship of cinema and the literary, dramatic, and visual arts. Buhler's smart, timely mini-history comes highly recommended.
Equally smart and timely, Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern is both original and conceptually brilliant. Making a strong case for a collaborative rather than individual authorial presence, she argues that recent films and film directors engage in processes of filiation, re-producing Shakespeare's texts to remarket him (and themselves) within what Fredric Jameson has called the "cultural logic of late capitalism." Lehmann brings a dazzling command of cultural and film theory to chapters on texts and films: viewing contemporary directors as postmodern auteurs or bricoleurs, she offers inventive readings of Romeo and Juliet, Dream, and Hamlet before turning to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Branagh's Henry V, and Shakespeare in Love. Neatly organized and elegantly written, her study moves from Shakespeare's "real" body or "remains" to textual and cinematic "bodies," keeping the idea of the author firmly in view even as she situates these films as "remainders" of authorial presence under historical conditions of erasure. Assured work by one of the best scholars of Shakespeare films, this is a "don't miss" book.
Carol Chillington Rutter's Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage not only is the best new work on performance, it also is a book that only Rutter could have written. Energized by two questions—When the body comes on stage, how does it "play"? And how do spectators read it?—her study examines, not the disembodied theoretical body, but specific bodies: case studies of how women's bodies perform theatrical, political, sexual, and cultural work on Shakespeare's stages, early modern as well as present-day. Nobody writes more richly about performance than Rutter; her book is filled with "close readings" of staged behaviors, complemented by investigations of primary documents and readings of "character" as it appears in actors' performances. For Rutter, reading performances means "re-imagining the canon, opening up its supplementary physical, visual, gestural, iconic texts [to make] more space for the kind of work women do in play" (p. xv). Beginning with the corpse as a limit case for performing body work, she sets her study within early modern culture's ideas about spectacles of death and dying. Extending that concern, she looks at four filmed Hamlets to [End Page 525] analyze Ophelia's funeral, paying attention to the cultural practices Shakespeare both invokes and inverts in order to discern what is erased when films ignore Ophelia's body. In a stunning chapter on the raced body, she considers the white-ing out of black Cleopatra. Contextualizing her discussion by reading the black narrative in the margins of white history to align Cleo with Anna of Denmark, another "black" queen, Rutter details how performances displace Cleopatra's blackness onto those bodies surrounding her to address the wider issue of the work women's black bodies do in present-day Shakespeare. Looking at Troilus and Cressida to analyze the designed body in a theater of theatricalized sexuality, she then turns to Zoe Wanamaker's performance of Emilia, finding in Emilia's need to remember and to re-cite Desdemona's ending a trope for the kind of performance studies her book theorizes—acts of memory that re-perform performance "with a [crucial] difference" (p. xvii). Another "don't miss" critical (re)performance.
Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions, Alan C. Dessen's latest argument for paying closer attention to texts, draws upon his "expertise in dramaturgy and staging practices of the 1590s and early 1600s in order to shed some light on problems and choices found in the 1990s and early 2000s" (p. 2). Observing how rescripting and rewrighting occur in contemporary performances, Dessen weighs the pluses and minuses, price tags and trade offs of such practices. Much of his general argument will be familiar: here, however, he forgoes an absolutist or purist stance to consider what present-day performances deny to spectators and auditors and at what price. Chapters take up rescripting Shakespeare's contemporaries, adjustments and improvements, inserting an interval, rescripting stage directions and actions, the problems posed by the Henry VI plays and Taming of the Shrew, and the editor as rescripter. Fortunately, a fine index enables readers to track the staging choices of a particular play through the categories Dessen explores, and questions following each chapter invite readers to engage the issues he has considered. Despite Dessen's tendency to circulate a vocabulary of loss, this is an important study by one of the most astute critics of the performed text.
Three volumes in Arden's Shakespeare at Stratford series, under Robert Smallwood's general editorship, appeared: Patricia E. Tatspaugh's "Winter's Tale," Gillian Day's "King Richard III," and Miriam Gilbert's "Merchant of Venice." Making use of the Shakespeare Centre Library's rich archives, each covers postwar [End Page 526] Stratford performances, alludes to non-RSC performances, provides a brief "back-history" of prewar productions to situate performances since mid-century, and includes forty or so production photographs. Alert to the look of the staged play, Tatspaugh's "Winter's Tale" explores the staging of key scenes to consider how the work of actors, directors, and designers impacts on the eruption of Leontes' jealousy, the period and place of Sicilia and Bohemia, the presentation of Time, and the blocking of the final scene. By contrast, Day divides her study into "Political Richards," "Psycho-social Richards," and "Metatheatrical Richards," mapping the gamut of the role's performance history from main stage to touring productions. Whereas both Tatspaugh and Day march through each production, Gilbert's strategy of moving from basic questions and problems to issues of narrative design and choices made by individual actors generates a more satisfying study. Her consummate knowledge of the play and its performance history shows up on every page; from incisive analyses of program materials to discussions of pre-shows and curtain calls, her book is filled with telling details that help readers to understand how performance makes meanings of Merchant's most complex and debatable aspects.
Two entries in Cambridge's Shakespeare in Production series, under J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey's editorship—James N. Loehlin's Romeo and Juliet and Emma Smith's King Henry V—merit special (if all too brief) mention. Both contain introductions based on exhaustive archival research that tracks what is currently called a play's "afterlife" through its configurations in theatrical and cinematic cultures; both are equally alert to changes in characterization over time, to actors' performances, and to production design. Because the detailed commentary on each scene is necessarily selective, what is documented enables readers to trace one critic's view of performance choices—a reminder that, as with all history, it matters who tells the story.
Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, edited by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall, brings together a distinguished group of theater historians who, in a series of interlinked essays, provide a richly rewarding view of the pleasures and dangers of patronage, its edgy circumstances, and its cultural business to resituate the study of this phenomenon. Addressing issues such as the functions of patronage, the impact of the theater on patronage, the intersections between political power and playing, and questions of personal and professional identity, the essays converse with one another, mapping [End Page 527] a complicated territory; moreover, a complementary website features supplementary materials, maps, and appendices pertinent to Alexandra Johnston's work on the city of York as patron and to Mary Blackstone's essay on provincial patronage networks. Other highlights: Sally Beth MacLean tracks the patronage of Leicester's Men; Leeds Barroll explores Shakespeare's links to the Essex circle; David Bergeron examines how theater's entry into publishing competed with and complemented aristocratic patronage; Michael Shapiro writes on gift-exchange systems whereby schools such as the Children of the Chapel Royal offered plays and decorated manuscript copies to Elizabeth I as rewards for her patronage; and Alexander Leggatt considers the "rebellious" audience represented in Knight of the Burning Pestle—aptly (and wittily) concluding the volume by addressing the volatility (and volubility) of that most difficult patron, the unruly audience.
David Grote's The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company revisits Shakespeare's relation to the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, in order to establish a detailed, chronological history of the company, beginning with its formation in 1594 and continuing to the burning of the Globe (1613). Circulating familiar data in a specific order, Grote argues, throws new light on old debates, among them the identity of Love's Labour's Won (As You Like It) and the dating of All's Well and Coriolanus (1608; both revisions of earlier plays). Readers will want to measure Grote's interpretations, often prefaced by phrases such as "we know we can be relatively sure," against existing accounts in order to assess his claims. And in Kingdom for a Stage: Magicians and Aristocrats in the Elizabethan Theatre, Joy Hancox extends investigations presented in The Byrom Collection (1992) on a series of 516 geometric drawings to argue that hermetic concepts lie behind Elizabethan theater design. Constructing a network of adepts that included Dr. John Dee, Francis Bacon, Thomas Herbert, Robert Dudley, and William, the third earl of Pembroke, her account of dynastic patronage, touching on imagined royal alliances and conspiracies to link statecraft with stagecraft, offers a challenge to theater historians' narratives.
By contrast, in Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Ashgate Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter provide a comprehensive survey of masking practices, tracing their "shifting, fluid intertwining of forms, performances, and meanings in play of all kinds—popular as well as courtly, spiritual as well as worldly, [End Page 528] sporting as well as theatrical" (p. 1). Viewing masking as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon and examining traditions as well as offering data from historical records of performances, this study also theorizes the wider implications of masked performance—its ability, for instance, to foreground role rather than performer, thus initiating a "dynamic and unsettling relationship between . . . masked and unmasked figures" (p. 13). Sections on "Theatrical Masking," "Theory and Practice," an extensive bibliography, and lavish illustrations make this book an important resource for scholars, teachers, and theatrical practitioners. Seemingly poised halfway between specialist and general readers, Beatrice K. Otto's Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World is a compendium of fools and fooling; although primarily Eurocentric, her account also embraces China, the Middle East, and India and is filled with fascinating anecdotes, among them stories of jokes crossing borders to appear, centuries later, in another fool's mouth. Her claim that fools and fooling, like "love, lust, and a longing for bed" (p. xviii), are universal offers a slim thesis, but the book's value lies in its range of information about the traditions of jesting and the limits of license; fools' relations to monarchs, scholars, and clerics; and their appearances in drama. Packed with illustrative materials, it also features a Table of Named Jesters, ranging from the Egyptian Danga, allegedly a pygmy (2325 B.C.), to Porea, a "natural fool" whose patron was a Maori Chief (1860).
Companions, Collections, and Annuals
We seem to be in a "companionate" age, perhaps energized by millennial thinking: buoyed by attacks on academic writing, accessibility is the catchword for such books, which attempt to make Shakespeare appeal to a wider readership or/and to create new specialists. Although some fine new work appears in these volumes, what often prevails is a fairly conservative, even preservative, view of Shakespeare. Leading off, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, is less a companion than an encyclopedic A to Z map of Shakespeare's centrality within Anglophone culture. A thematic listing of entries allows readers to track its 541 pages; claiming coverage of Shakespeare's "works, times, lives, and afterlives" (p. vii), it seems, as might be expected, selectively long on the past and shorter on the present (for instance, neither Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides nor Simon Russell Beale receive mention). [End Page 529]
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (the first since 1986), edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, proudly announces a "global" range of contributors and advertises itself as responding to changes in Shakespeare studies by offering "an expansive historical, cultural, and global context which will enhance the enduring but ever-changing value and force of Shakespeare's works" (p. xvi). Nineteen new essays, many written by the usual suspects, examine traditional and emergent topics: Barbara Mowat's fine essay on the reproduction of texts maps the territory, as does Susan Snyder's on genre; Valerie Traub writes thoughtfully on gender and sexualities, as does Ania Loomba on religious and racial Outsiders. Theater reports from Lois Potter (1660-1900) and Peter Holland (twentieth century) provide excellent capsule histories, complemented by Russell Jackson's survey of Shakespeare films; Michael Dobson writes on the perennial issues of page and stage; Dennis Kennedy, on worldwide Shakespeares. The volume concludes with critical surveys by Hugh Grady and R. S. White and one by Dieter Miehl on reference books. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, purports to provide broad coverage of staged Shakespeare, British as well as international. Targeting an undergraduate or omnibus reader, this Companion offers capsule histories swimming with names: to devote twenty-eight pages to 250 years of North American performance (1752-1994) means that blinking risks missing a half century. Nonetheless, Richard W. Shoch's "Pictorial Shakespeare," Marion O'Connor's "Reconstructive Shakespeare," Robert Smallwood's mini-history of twentieth-century Stratford and London productions, Peter Holland's "Touring Shakespeare," and Anthony B. Dawson's incisive analysis of the dialectic between national and international performance supply useful surveys of an admittedly huge arena.
A Companion to Renaissance Drama, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, constitutes a rewarding group of thirty-eight essays, each with a list of further readings, from major scholars. Evoking "All the world's a stage" and Arden of Faversham, Kinney frames the collection, to show how the "space of dramatic performance merges with the spaces of daily human performance," suggesting how the "line separating text and context dissolves, becoming a re-enactment of the drama's world in the world of the drama" (p. 8). Sections on "The Drama's World," "The World of Drama," "Kinds of Drama," and "Dramatists" continue Kinney's metaphor. A sampling: Annabel Patterson writes on the difficulty of matching political [End Page 530] thought in the abstract to political comment in a play text; Martin Ingram explores the drama and family relations; Raphael Falco considers medieval and Reformation roots, noting how traces of continuity, however they may embody distortions, offer historical markers of what is often construed as "progress"; and Suzanne Westfall links performances in great households to patronage. Overall, this is an exemplary "companion" to Norton's new English Renaissance drama anthology.
Among several festschrifts, "A Certain Text": Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others, edited by Linda Anderson and Janis Lull, celebrates Thomas Clayton's interests in literary editing, close reading, philology, and puzzle solving. "The Physics of Hamlet's 'Rogue and Peasant Slave' Speech" shows off Stephen Booth's trickiest close reading; Jay Halio suggests the possibility of Shrew's Sly returning as Kate; Janis Lull's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blooper: Some Notes on the Endless Editing of Richard III" riffs on how editors have accounted for the date of Buckingham's execution on All Souls Day. Also notable, Achsah Guibbory's "Hesperides, the Hebrew Bible, and Herrick's Christian Identity" connects Jewish and Christian spirituality to Robert Herrick's "pagan" classicism, arguing that Hesperides expresses a kind of "spiritual multiculturalism" (p. 147). Another volume, In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, contains fourteen essays from a distinguished group of contributors, many of which concern evidentiary issues. Among the most lively: Heather Dubrow meditates on the romance and the festschrift as cognate literary genres to read the dynamics of parental loss in Pericles ; J. J. M. Tobin argues for Nashe's presence in 1 Henry IV and Merry Wives; Marjorie Garber writes a mini-history of Roman numerals, swerving from the Renaissance to America's "desperate cult of greatness" (p. 246); and Brian Gibbons considers Alan Bennett's Madness of George III as a meditation on Shakespearean history plays.
Three volumes in Routledge's criticism series—"Taming of the Shrew," edited by Dana E. Aspinall; "Merchant of Venice," edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon; and "Othello," edited by Philip C. Kolin—bring competing and complementary perspectives together, effectively enlarging plays with complex cultural, critical, and theatrical histories. Disturbing errors mar these volumes ("tow" for "two"; "adn" for "and"; Virginia Vaughan and I were surprised that she had supposedly authored an essay of mine on Othello); the quality of the illustrations, particularly in [End Page 531] "Shrew," is disappointing. That said, each has an exemplary introduction and a useful bibliography. Aspinall's "Shrew" contains (mostly) excerpts of previously published work ranging from formalist to feminist studies arranged chronologically, with Lynda E. Boose's famous "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member" marking a moment of feminist outrage that seems to be fading. Here, too, is Lena Cowen Orlin's essay on the performance of things, Michael Shapiro on framing the taming, Laurie Maguire on cultural control, Ann C. Christensen's witty meditation on Petruchio in Postwar Suburbia, and my own "Katherina Bound."
Both the Mahons' "Merchant" and Kolin's "Othello" commission new essays on varied perspectives. Notably, John Drakakis's "Jessica" views her as mirroring the play's economic necessities; John K. Hale advises reading the play less through Shylock than through the design established in its sources; essays by Hugh Short and Maryellen Keefe address James Shapiro's careful examination of the play's cultural faultlines; and Gayle Gaskill, John O'Connor (Shylock), and Penny Gay (Portia) provide theatrical perspectives. In Kolin's "Othello," Sujata Iyengar has an excellent essay on the production of race from Ira Aldridge to Patrick Stewart in Washington DC's "photonegative" production. John R. Ford writes on "Roderigo and the Mixed Dramaturgy of Race and Gender"; Jay Halio tries "Reading Othello Backwards"; Nicholas Moschovakis reads judicial tropes in relation to early modern courts; and Francis X. Kuhn considers stage violence. Both volumes offer lively essays on plays that have become crucial to debates about ethnicity, gender, race, and class.
The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2, edited by W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo and made up of review articles, several more "companionately-oriented" pieces, and two essays in memory of Paul Oskar Kristeller, addresses where we are now in Shakespeare studies. Of twenty-two essays, six concern criticism, among them Joseph Pequiney's on sexualities and the sonnets; six focus on text, textuality, and technology, including Ros King's on Renaissance punctuation and Richard Proudfoot's "New Conservatism and the Theatrical Text: Editing Shakespeare for the Third Millennium"; and seven on Renaissance conventions, including Robert Weimann writing on theatrical space, revisiting locus and platea, his trademark terms.
"Shakespeare and Religions," Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001)—the second volume edited by Peter Holland—gathers a series of essays on various aspects of religion relative to Shakespeare, [End Page 532] accompanied by a shorter list of essays on more general topics and by Survey's always admirable overviews of professional Shakespeare performance in England and professional Shakespearean scholarship. The essays devoted to religious matters encompass a wide range, from David Daniell's overview of "Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind" to Boika Sokolova's finely tuned analysis, "Between Religion and Ideology: Some Russian Hamlets of the Twentieth Century." Several essays, such as Knapp's "Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Religion of Players" and Lake's "Ministers, Magistrates, and the Production of 'Order' in Measure for Measure," ally with their respective monographs reviewed here. Although this is an unusually strong and provocative collection, readers especially will not want to miss Gary Taylor's intricate meditation on representing God in "Divine [ ] sences"; Robert S. Miola's "'An alien people clutching their gods'?: Shakespeare's Ancient Religions," an examination of how classical forms of divinity and divination mix with early modern theologies to "constitute a cultural Catholicity, which in Shakespeare's Greece and Rome, has real presence" (p. 45); Richard McCoy's fascinating contextualization of commemorative rites in "A Wedding and Four Funerals: Conjunction and Commemoration in Hamlet"; or Hanna Scolnicov's "The Hebrew Who Turned Christian: The First Translator of Shakespeare into the Holy Tongue," in which she explores Isaac Edward Salkinson's early-nineteenth-century translation of Othello into Hebrew.
Richard Burt's edited collection, Shakespeare after Mass Media, engages with the familiar Burt-ean territory of "Schlockspeare" to meditate on Shakespeare's mediations and re-mediations within contemporary mass culture, never forgetting his status as marketable commodity, and offers some fine essays. Arguing that the critics represented (as well as others) are themselves embedded in late capitalism and in economies of criticism that, like the transitory nature of the media they address, face "possible obsolescence and uselessness" (p. 25), Burt takes a somewhat cynical view of academic labor. Although I confess (slightly tongue-in-cheek) to sharing his view of the "loser" critic as I write this review, I read these essays as winning contributions to a critically hip agenda. Peter Donaldson, looking at Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, explores the interrelations among media in its surreal landscape and ties the film to an Australian Mardi Gras, one of its cinematic "sources"; Diana Henderson writes persuasively on how theme parks reproduce Shakespeare's cultural work over time, as do Laurie E. Osborne (on Harlequin [End Page 533] novels), Mark Thornton Burnett (on the Branagh phenomenon), and Donald Hedrick (on citationality in advertising, corporate management-training manuals, and fashions). Among several case studies, Douglas Lanier explores American radio; Frances Teague, Broadway musicals; Stephen Buhler, Romeo and Juliet in pop and pop-reactive music; Bryan Reynolds and D. J. Hopkins theorize what they call "Shakespace" to situate Robert Wilson's Hamlet; and Burt, reading Julie Taymor's Titus through Holocaust politics, details fragmentation, manipulation, and presence in its several worlds.
Whereas contributors to Burt's collection discuss comic books and romance novels, Megan Lynn Isaac's Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature examines illustrated editions as well as historical fictions detailing early modern life. Appearing regularly in the genre are Romeo and Juliet (adolescent love, family issues), Hamlet (friendship, death), Macbeth (witchcraft), Tempest (fantasy worlds), and Othello and Merchant of Venice (racial, religious, and cultural prejudice). As appropriated by young adult fictions, Shakespeare's plays function as self-help for living: Isaac's book mines under-explored territory deserving further study.
In Harold Bloom's Shakespeare, editors Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer examine Bloom's impact as writer and literary icon, focusing especially on Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human to challenge Bloom's own Eurocentric, humanist "invention." That Bloom's book has provoked such differing responses within and outside the academy demands that, in Linda Loman's words, "Attention must be paid," and this collection undertakes a significant conversation. A frontispiece juxtaposing the Chandos portrait to a photo of Bloom (re)presents the issue: an introduction neatly maps Bloom's affiliations, filiations, and anxieties of influence, and sections divided into "Bardolatry/Bardography," "Reading and Writing Shakespearean Character," "Anxieties of Influence," and "Shakespeare as Cultural Capital" measure a wide variety of positions. Overall, the consensus seems to be that, as Edward Pechter writes, although Bloom rages against a lost romanticism (p. 162), he nonetheless assesses the state of present criticism; overall, too, a subtext—that it may be wiser to bow one's head when the devil is mentioned, just in case—marks many contributors' own anxieties. There are few golden opinions here, although some, such as William Kerrigan and Hugh Kenner, gesture toward reinvented humanism, only to be countered by Gary Taylor and essays by James R. Andreas Sr. and David M. Schiller, [End Page 534] revealing how Merchant's anti-Semitism and Bloom's refusal to identify with Shylock not only complicate but mark the limits of Bloom's Bardolatry. Linda Charnes's meditation on Bloom, the "literary scholar as Supreme Subject," takes him seriously as the "literary critic of the educated, nonacademic middle class" and sees his work as writing on the wall which suggests that academics must "find better ways of telling stories about stories" (pp. 259, 262, 267) if indeed we hope not to be perceived simply as talking to ourselves.
Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright, brings together Christian readings of the last plays, nearly all concerned with intuiting Shakespeare's poetic career and political-philosophical purposes. The "politics" to which the title refers is most clearly revealed in R. V. Young's sustained meditation on the vices of poststructuralist criticism, marking the extent to which it has marginalized as well as challenged the idea of a "universal," "humanist" Shakespeare.
The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England gathers together, under Henry S. Turner's editorial eye, essays deriving from a 1998 conference on "Working Capital." Here, thirteen historians and literary critics address the so-called transition period in early modern England, loosely 1500-1700, in a grouping of projects that, although reliant on Marxism and anthropology, extend the boundaries of both. This is an important collection in which contributors are searching for interdisciplinary paradigms that will account for social and cultural domains in and of themselves while simultaneously exploring the "generative and fully dialectical relationship" between them (p. 9). Divided into "Economic Capital," "Topographic Capital," and "Cultural Capital," the collection overall works with (and within) several fields of study rather than simply across borders and reflects recent interest in material culture and "knowledges," a rubric that appears in several books reviewed here as a (fairly) new term. Especially notable is Lena Cowen Orlin's well-judged "Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory," in which, reading postmortem inventories "anecdotally and with skepticism" (p. 76), she shows how capital as personal property emerges into representation. Turner's own "Plotting Early Modernity" turns to topographic analysis, examining how the vocabulary and formal concepts derived from geometry and property measurement made possible a knowledge of land and object as capital and then were deployed in dramatic production as "plot and plat mov[ed] from [End Page 535] meadow or workshop and into the public theaters" (p. 6); here, too, a section on London explores how citizens made sense of the city—its neighborhoods, households, spaces, boundaries, and population turnovers.
Four essays concern cultural conflict, the interpretation of present and past, and London as a locus of production for "the new"; all invoke multiple conceptions of capital, whether in a strictly Marxian sense of economy or in terms of formations of material and intellectual property. In "The Metropolis and the Revaluation: Commercial, Urban, and Political Culture in Early Modern London," David Harris Sacks mounts a detailed survey of the questions that have occupied historical debates over the transitional period to argue for adapting traditional accounts of a totalizing narrative of capital to reflect the breadth of current work in a number of interrelated fields. Jean E. Howard's essay, on the mythologizing of Sir Thomas Gresham and the Royal Exchange in Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, argues that its reshaping of Gresham's life and its representation of a world obsessed with accumulations and riches mark a new phase of merchant capital as well as of the cultural place occupied by the stage; comedy, she claims, here gives symbolic form to social mobilities, providing urban citizens with a sense of national belonging. In "Walking Capitals," Karen Newman reads Donne's Satire I as an instance of "pedestrian" urban poetry that articulates the experience of the city at street level to explore the kinds of cultural, sexual, social, economic, and psychic knowledge such movements made available (p. 205). Denise Albanese addresses the changing cultural capital accorded to early modern mathematics, numeracy, and protoscientific thought; Peter Stallybrass, continuing his previous work on material culture, undertakes a detailed analysis of the moment when a notion of cultural value separates from financial or economic modes of valuation, marking that distinction as fundamental to modernity in order to argue that Christianity offers an example of such a mode of valuation, one that borrows from economics only to invert and suppress it. In suggesting how projects linking history and culture might find new sites and "sitings," Turner's collection provides a provocative array of models.
Beyond Shakespeare
Among entries here are two stellar books on Marlowe: Constance Brown Kuriyama's fascinating biography, Christopher [End Page 536] Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, and Ruth Lunney's Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595; both are revisionist projects. Kuriyama's study is filled with conditionals on every page—a measure of the difficulties of writing history from scant or contradictory documentation and of the problems of writing against a received narrative. Quarreling with traditional representations of Marlowe's early life as well as with the narratives surrounding his death, Kuriyama resolutely avoids the sensationalism that has marked our understanding of Marlowe. She is, for instance, more than a little suspicious of the tradition that his absences from Cambridge coincided with his trips abroad as an agent for Francis Walsingham's supposed spy network: he was, she points out, absent from college no more often than other students of the time (or since); moreover, a student working to complete a degree is hardly a likely choice for a ruthlessly professional, proto-James Bond. Similarly, in "A Trim Reckoning," she debunks Charles Nicholls's conspiracy theory surrounding Marlowe's death to argue that all the available evidence shows that, among those gathered at the Deptford tavern, the most likely person to attack another physically was Marlowe himself. That we find this hard to accept, she suggests, has to do with not wishing to think that "the dashing creature of our imagination could attack another man for frivolous reasons and then botch it disastrously" (p. 140). Treating with circumstantial speculation the transgressions surrounding his reputation, her study touches not at all on Marlowe's sexual preferences (seemingly taken for granted) and downplays his potentially seditious and atheistic reputations to view him and his afterlife as an "anti-authoritarian poster boy" (p. 170) whose trajectory resembled that of members of radical underground groups in the 1960s. Especially intriguing is Kuriyama's argument that humanism encouraged narcissism: Marlowe, she writes, "fetch[ed his] gentry from the university" (p. 40), where he encountered a society in which he was increasingly awarded for achievement, not birth. What makes her study especially telling is the choice to include many of the documents on which she draws: occupying nearly a third of the book, they are placed in chronological order, with Kuriyama's comments on their significant features, contexts, and interconnections. Among them, the coroner's account of the death of William Bradley (translated from Latin and appearing in its entirety) and Thomas Watson's pardon for outlawry (debt) appear for the first time (p. 175). Cued by her narrative, which finally argues that we invent our own Marlowe, I traced through the inventory [End Page 537] of John Gresshop's estate, which lists the books in his library—Gresshop supervised Marlowe's studies at the King's School in Canterbury—looking for the books he may have read. Kuriyama has written a smart "life" shot through with learning—a timely look at the most notorious early modern "bad boy" and his reputation.
Although Lunney's study clearly complements Kuriyama's carefully researched "life" in a number of ways, reading her book after Kuriyama's occasionally prompted me to ask, "But how can we know?" Interested in exploring how, in the late sixteenth century, "old" drama became "new" again, she views her study as a way to examine "the nature and timing of the change in the theatre, to redraw the boundaries between 'traditional' and 'Shakespearean,' between 'medieval' and 'modern' drama" (p. 9). Following a survey of critical method and theatrical contexts, each chapter treats one aspect: emblematic representation, Marlowe's modifications of audience response to the cautionary tale (Edward II), his transformations of theatrical clichés associated with the popular tradition (the Vice in Jew of Malta; the angelic psychomachia in Faustus), and the staging of ceremonies, again focusing on how the plays reshape relations between audience and play. "Marlowe's challenge to traditional perspectives and values," she proposes, "was achieved less by substituting new ideas for old than by the processes of performance" (p. 13). Revising the notion that Marlowe's plays document extraordinary individualities or instances of individual virtù, she locates their power "in giving individual spectators the chance to make sense with their own individual stories. In this empowering of the audience lay the real subversion, the most notable innovation in the English drama before 1595" (p. 186). Especially alert to the relations between players and audience and to what she calls the rhetoric of theatrical space, Lunney argues that Marlowe marries unconventional ways of seeing to conventional ones, especially in terms of Edward II's history, in order to convey the specificity of a moment-to-moment experience: on the basis of how particular conventions of tragedy are not deployed, she claims that Edward II's death is not to be seen as poetic justice but as a dramatization of his excessive suffering. Somewhat similarly, she proposes that, although Jew of Malta activates expectations common to moralities, it also works to dismantle its morality frame, thus not only producing a "new rhetoric" of the Jew as Vice but also suggesting that just as evil, no longer contained, is set loose in the world, spectators also are set free (pp. 122-3). If Lunney overemphasizes the idea that Marlowe's plays call upon spectators [End Page 538] to feel rather than to think, her account of his "difference" usefully counters a narrative of progress that views the later drama as rising full-blown out of a messy complex of competing conventions. Nonetheless, her book certainly suggests that Shakespeare in Love may have been right, and that Will did get some of his best ideas from Marlowe.
Alan Shepard's Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada also offers to revise Marlowe's reputation. The plays, he argues, exploit war fever in the wake of the Armada (nothing new here), making questions of national security into entertainment, taking advantage of a timely moment. Acknowledging a debt to Klaus Theweleit's study of fascist imagination, Shepard reads masculinity as a discursive performance; his discussion of the rhetoric of absolutism and absolutist impulses toward martial law seems especially pertinent in early 2003, as the United States government rattles its six-guns across the globe. Notably, his study goes against the grain of reading the plays as dramatizing the glorious deeds of Marlowe's military (and other) figures; instead, his chapters offer insights into Marlowe's critique of hypermilitarism, not by moving chronologically through the plays but by suggesting his movement from endorsement to repudiation. Thus the initial chapter on Tamburlaine addresses the final one on Faustus, representing the least and most ironic instances of "the culture wars between soldiers and civilians" (p. 15) to recirculate the idea that Faustus "A" offers a recantation of Tamburlaine. Especially interesting is his argument, most thoroughly developed in the chapter on Faustus, that Marlowe's drama asserts playing itself as an activity or strategy of state security. "In presenting playing as a legitimate form of epistemic aggression in its own right . . . Doctor Faustus ironically reclaims for the art of playing a measure of respectability and nationalistic utility that opponents of the theater—including the soldiers who wrote military handbooks—considered impossible" (p. 16). Cataloguing images of pollution and purification in order to read Massacre at Paris in relation to ethnic cleansing, Shepard focuses on how the play "subverts the codes of epic masculinity" pervasive in historical accounts (p. 162). Overall, he argues that Marlowe offered audiences a more complex experience of war fever than any other contemporary English playwright by asking audiences to engage in the contradictions and ambiguities residing in the rhetoric of war.
In Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, Lukas Erne constructs what might be called a Spanish [End Page 539] Tragedy sandwich: four of his ten chapters concern Kyd's most famous play, nearly half the book; taking issue with previous identifications of Kyd's patron, an appendix argues for Henry Herbert, the second earl of Pembroke. Consistently, Erne not only goes against traditional criticism of Kyd but comes dangerously close to protesting, like the lady, a bit too much in asserting that Kyd is more than a playwright associated primarily with a single play. Much of his argument seems to rest on conjecture ("By no means implausible" often recurs) and on the desire to construct a "new" Thomas Kyd; that becomes perhaps most obvious in his speculations about Hamlet-ing. Chapter 1 mounts an account of the provenance, authorship, and textual construction of 1 Hieronomo and its relation to Don Horatio; intriguing here is Erne's attempt to establish connections between both plays and Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 concern Spanish Tragedy, mentioning in particular its echoes in other plays, and chapter 5 offers a useful overview of additions, adaptations, and the play's modern stage history. Chapter 6, devoted to the so-called Ur-Hamlet, argues that it may well have been a highly topical play, perhaps with connections to the murder of Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots's husband, and Mary's later marriage to the earl of Bothwell; here, too, Erne attempts to locate the source for the Pedringano episode in The Copie of a Leter (1584), printed in Paris and smuggled into England, recounting Leicester's alleged Machiavellian practices (p. 154). Chapters 7 and 8 on the much neglected Soliman and Perseda detail the play's narrative structures and time scheme, offer an extended consideration of Basilisco (recalled in King John I.i), and argue that the play's debt to commedia del arte is largely responsible for its curious mix of comedy and tragedy. Chapter 9 treats Cornelia, exploring the circumstances of its dedication to the countess of Sussex and arguing that Kyd drew on Robert Garnier's Cornélie when writing Spanish Tragedy and on Spanish Tragedy when writing Cornelia—a "relationship of mutual stimulation" suggesting that Kyd "was an author who worked with a limited body of material which he then used and reused, transformed and adapted" (p. 215). Chapter 10 concerns other works and apocrypha, notably The Householder's Philosophy (1588), a translation of Torquato Tasso's Il Padre di Famiglia. While few would disagree with Erne's assertion that Kyd and Marlowe were the cofounders of modern (early modern?) English tragedy, his revisionist project, like all such endeavors, is likely to draw fire from readers with other opinions. [End Page 540]
In A Cultural Studies Approach to Two Exotic Citizen Romances by Thomas Heywood, Joseph Courtland views The Four Prentices of London and The Fair Maid of the West as works of colonial discourse within the mode of fantasy, using the writings of Tzvetan Todorov, Fredric Jameson, and Rosemary Jackson to explore the plays' connections to plot structures and conventions of chivalric romance and the heroic folk- or fairy-tale. However, Courtland's readings, which ground Four Prentices in the 1595 Irish crisis and situate Fair Maid in relation to the commercial politics surrounding the 1600 Moroccan alliance, remain more indebted to Paul Brown's and Peter Hulme's work on colonial discourse as well as to Stephen Greenblatt than to the poetics of fantasy, which at times seem tangential to his analyses.
Russell West's Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage from Shakespeare to Webster uses space as both trope and theme to explore Jacobean drama's concern with spatial aspects of early modern experience and theater itself as a spatial art form. Noting that little attention has been paid to early modern drama as a spatial artifact, he acknowledges that any attempt to reconstruct a cultural history rests on slim documentation, including less-than-complete stage directions. Given this limitation, his study relies primarily on reading spatial signs in dramatic texts. In particular, West's introductory chapter neatly frames those that follow; his study not only complements earlier work by Steven Mullaney and Douglas Bruster but also includes some discussion of theater semiotics. Following an analysis of the spatial dimensions of early modern cultural life in which the ambivalent position occupied by theater plays a large role, subsequent chapters take up the court masque in terms of relations between an idealized realm and a real-world kingdom; the spatial mobility occasioned by protocapitalism and its effects on the economics of the stage; the performance of social mobility, as evidenced by changes in land ownership, fragmented kinship relations, and the erosion of family (in which he sees costuming as a crucial social marker); the threats posed by masterless men; the travel drama as a genre performing "the topos of geographic transgression"; and the emergence of new modes of subjectivity arising from a clash between "localized, empirical thought" and traditional ideas of hierarchical order (p. 10). Although the example risks oversimplifying an often-subtle study that represents a foray into little-examined territory, West concludes with a neat riff on how the mode of reference embodied in Antony's "Here is my space" shifts, during the period in question, to "Here is my space," to [End Page 541] mark the entrance of a "new theatre [in which] a new subject takes its place on the stage, and in so doing, seizes a place in an evolving society" (p. 243).
Teaching Anthologies and General Readership
English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, edited by David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen is a long-overdue replacement for Russell A. Fraser's and Norman Rabkin's two volumes (1976). Even though readers will find Norton's flimsy paper (which makes size and price manageable) annoying to handle, this is a most welcome volume, containing most of the usual suspects and some surprises: Greene is out, Mariam (thankfully) is in; John Ford's Broken Heart is missing, but big chunks of Jonson—Volpone, Epicene, Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair—join Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Arden of Faversham. All texts have been freshly edited, and several protocols deserve mention: original readings have been kept where they make sense, emendation is judicious, scene breaks are minimized, original stage directions appear without brackets, and glossing is light. A general introduction setting plays and their authors in historical and cultural context represents the "Art of the Introduction" (a genre with which an SEL reviewer has a special relationship) at its best: I especially liked the section on "Pushy People," which treats self-assertion and its implications for social structures and fantasies of social mobility. Introductions to individual plays are alert to cultural contexts, to characters' ambivalence, and to narrative structures: readers will find those to Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Arden, each balancing neatly between then and now, especially useful; equally admirable are those on 1 Tamburlaine and Faustus, both of which offer invigorating commentary. Maps of southeastern England, western Europe, and Europe and beyond let readers know where they are; an up-to-date bibliography tells them where to go for further information.
Another volume in Bedford/St. Martin's Texts and Contexts, M. Lindsay Kaplan's edition of Merchant of Venice makes a superb addition to that exemplary series. Following the series' mandate for "deep" contextualization, Kaplan's meticulous interweaving of extra-dramatic materials enriches the play as textual object, situating it within a complex cultural milieu of religious, ethnic, and racial issues and identities. An exceptionally well-gauged general introduction tracks a range of ideas; sections on "Venice" (including excerpts on English ideas of Venice [End Page 542] and Italians and on nation, race, and religion), "Finance," "Religion" (including selections on the problem of conversion), and "Love and Gender" are prefaced by splendid individual introductions; following each excerpt, Kaplan poses questions readers might address or debate. Her concern, to represent fully the ideas and ideologies available in the period, opens out the play beyond traditional critical binaries of Christian and Jew, Venice and Belmont; a well-chosen grouping of twenty illustrations complements her resourceful edition, sure to become useful in classrooms as well as to specialist readers.
Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series), edited by Bernice W. Kliman, offers an extremely useful guide to this most canonical play. Containing essays on verse and meter, the multi-text Hamlet, narrative, character, and theme, comparative approaches, modern and postmodern strategies, and performance approaches as well as "short takes," practical advice on "How to Do Things with Hamlet," many of which seem adaptable to other plays, the volume includes work from teachers outside the West as well as details about strategies used in conservatories, law schools, and comparative literature programs. Information on editions, journals, and other teaching materials, a section on Hamlet online, and an annotated filmography, including adaptations and selected derivatives, offer further resources designed to engage students with "the Hamlet effect" (to paraphrase Jonathan Bate).
The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays, by John Lennard and Mary Luckhurst, aimed at students of English literature, general readers, and playgoers, offers a short guide to "all the basics"—that is, what "such readers need to know to avoid misunderstanding drama, and to develop their reading in ways that promote better connections with their experiences of spectating and auditing" (p. 1). Containing sections on "Performance, Notation, Text," "Reading Structures" (i.e., genres), "Defining Architectures," "Personnel in Process," and "Theatre Today," this little book meets its agenda admirably; although clearly directed (especially in a final section on "Exam Conditions") toward a UK market, it should prove equally useful to readers everywhere as a source book. It also contains a glossary, bibliography, and videography.
In a rather different category, Who's Who in Shakespeare, a mini-encyclopedia or dictionary compiled by Peter Quennell and Hamish Johnson, focuses primarily on entries that are aide-memoires, enabling readers to recollect in which play particular [End Page 543] characters appear and the function she or he performs in each. Each entry summarizes a character, noting her or his importance to the action; quotations from early critics—Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and William Hazlitt—flesh out the detailed accounts of most important persons. Despite the claim that this is not an "interpretation," the entries for characters do interpret their place in the action. Yet another book aimed at the general readership is After Shakespeare: An Anthology, edited by John Gross; it should please readers who buy into the Harold Bloom school of greatness. Much of the commentary gathered here, most from those who are themselves "famous authors," falls into the general area of criticism; although novelists, poets, and playwrights predominate, this "Bartlett's-Quotations-like" volume ranges across centuries, including entries as diverse as passages from John Ruskin's Brantwood Diary, Wole Soyinka on Antony and Cleopatra, poetry by W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes, and snippets from the Norman-Stoppard Shakespeare in Love. If nothing else, this is a book to reach for when searching for just the right epigraph.
In conclusion, it seems appropriate to paraphrase Heminge and Condell, those consummate ad-men for the 1623 Folio. Within these books, I have found much to draw and hold me; now, I leave them to those who will lead themselves and still others to read them—some, indeed, again and again. So as this show closes and another, with a new cast, already is in rehearsal and preparation, I wish my successor well and wish her or him a new bookcase (perhaps courtesy of SEL?) to hold what is sure to be a wealth of writing.