Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (review)

Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. By Michael Neill. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Illus. Pp. xvi + 527. $39.00 cloth.

Putting History to the Question collects what its dust jacket claims are "a body of critical writings . . . previously unpublished or available only in a series of hard-to-find journals." This is slightly deceptive, as only one of the fifteen essays in the volume has not, in some form or another, appeared elsewhere. And if periodicals such as Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Quarterly, and ELR are considered unduly hard to find—this in the era of JSTOR!—we might as well all give up now. What is true is that this volume is best approached as a "body of critical writings"—a collection of very fine essays rather than a monograph. As Neill makes plain in his introduction, these essays have not undergone the kinds of revision necessary to weave them into a seamless whole: "I have thought it best instead to let [the essays] bear the marks of their own histories, however local or even parochial these may now seem" (9). Specific chapters frequently overlap with and even repeat one another. Indeed, one comes to recognize while reading Putting History to the Question that the book contains the germs of a number of possible monographs, on bastardy, or rank, or adultery, or empire. All of these topics and many more are taken up in ways that wonderfully illuminate the dramatic texts Neill examines.

Neill's book is divided into two sections, one titled "The Stage and Social Order," the other titled "Race, Nation, Empire." Part One draws on the social history of early modern England in order to consider the significance to various plays of important period determinants of social difference, including rank, gender, and illegitimate birth. Particularly fascinating is Neill's opening essay, "Servant Obedience and Master Sins: Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service," which considers (as to some degree do later chapters on Arden of Faversham and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts) tensions between service "idealized as a virtually universal state—a defining condition of social order—and recognized as a particular social institution subject to disconcerting local and historical pressures" (19). In this chapter Neill draws on a number of dramatic texts in order finally to locate, in the breakdown of the ideal of service, a glimpse of the emergence of autonomous subjectivity.

A pair of essays in this section considers the importance of bastardy to Renaissance drama, especially tragedy. The first, "'In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard in English Renaissance Drama," offers a compelling series of assertions about bastardy that center on the threat that the stage bastard—who, as Neill points out, is almost always male—poses to stable systems of social classification: the bastard is, following Mary Douglas, "matter in the wrong place," the polluted and polluting result of a forbidden alliance who is the "incarnation of the disruptive antisocial energies associated with his begetting" (127). Mentioned in this essay but developed in detail in the following one is the connection between bastardy and counterfeiting. In "Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger's Tragedy," Neill considers the character of Spurio in light of the insight that illegitimate birth, like counterfeiting, entailed "the debasement of a sacred patriarchal image" (153). Spurio's adulterous revenge against his father, then, is of a piece with the way in which "the spurious child constitutes a living affront to the patriarchal order, seeming . . . to cancel the father out" by casting continual doubt on "the exclusive function of the womb as patriarchal mint" (158). What unites most of the essays in this section is an emphasis on the relationship between identity and (knowing) one's place in the social order. For example, in the first few essays Neill shows how close attention to the deployment of...