Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England by Daryl W. Palmer (review)

Book Reviews97 read, is a major contribution to Chaucer scholarship. It is the product of many years of diligent effort by a distinguished scholar. JOHN UNRUE University ofNevada, Las Vegas DARYL W. PALMER. Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1992. 220 p. Coppelia Kahn and Steven Mullaney use felicitous and illuminating phrases in their book jacket descriptions of this remarkable study by Daryl Palmer. Kahn says that "Palmer identifies a new site of social and literary practice on the border of popular and elite cultures." Mullaney "is struck by the eloquence and mastery of complex materials and theoretical perspectives in a manner that is always both accessible and engaging." I wholeheartedly endorse these judgments and the remainder of this review seeks to suggest a way of reading this work that would, I think, be pedagogically rich for the advanced student and the scholar-teacher. Open the study to chapters 3 and 4: "Powerful Pinners and the Dispersion of Genre," followed by "Pageantry, Hosts, and Parasites." If you are not moved to re-read Robert Greene's George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, Peele's The Old Wives Tale, Kemp's Nine Day Wonder by William Kemp, and Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, I suggest your devotion to the scholarly study of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson partakes of a good deal of self-deception . Such single-minded devotion to Shakespeare should probably be tempered by allocating more of one's time to jogging and rock-gardening. Palmer assumes George a Greene is by Robert Greene but unobtrusively indicates his exact erudition by noting that evidence for Greene's authorship is "less than certain" but the case is probable (113-14n4). I know of no evidence that would modify this judgment. Greene in this appropriation of plebeian practices reminds us of his association with Nashe, and all of this suggests that we move beyond the sterile wastelands of a polemic which would pit the idolatry of the author-centered text against the totalizing fantasies of power using langue to instantiate the pointless puppet-plays ofparole . While I certainly endorse Palmer's placing of the Nine Days Wonder as "a kind of strategic narrativizing by a writer of low rank" (132), it may be that Kemp's household origins are not quite as low as those of his persona. Taking their departure from McKerrow's fine edition, Nashe studies in the past thirty years have been first rate. Not only is Palmer conversant with this learned criticism, he adds to it in his splendid discussion of the "hearing culture" in the enchanting Summer's Last Will and Testament. This is the note I would sound in his placing of passages in chapters 2 and 5 from Shakespeare's romantic comedies and his tragedies. No matter how well you think you know King Lear, I should be mightily surprised 98Rocky Mountain Review were you to read "King Lear and the Perilous Claim: ? am Your Host' " without having your awareness of the play extended and deepened in fresh and valuable ways. I offer an extension to Palmer's discussion of Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby and the hospitality extended by Sir Thomas and his Lady to the wild group of tall fellows from the Catholic household of Ralph, Lord Eure. This Sir Thomas, first cousin to Sir Robert Cecil and to Sir Francis Bacon, would seem to be the initiator of the Star Chamber matter (1610-13) of the Lord Chomley's Players, the Catholic households of the Yorkes, Inglebys, and Chomleys, and the performances of Shakespeare's King Lear and Pericles. Finally we come to reflections on chapter 1, "Hospitalities: Practices and Representations." Palmer is engagingly candid in linking his theoretical perspectives to the new historicism and cultural materialism. Scholars and students who, having devoted days and nights to Terry Eagleton's lucubrations , are still somewhat baffled as to how much blindness has been remedied and how much insight has been gained will find this study to be an oasis in what are often Arabian sands; I refer to the Empty Quarter. And so, I...