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

218 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Chapter Three explores the variable fate of English following the Norman conquest; vernacular preaching continued and Morey stresses that English was an accepted, sanctioned and relatively continuous part of the English religious life (p. 50). ‘Genre, Audience, and Self-Representation’ traces the frequency with which authors were concerned to educate all people, and explores the relationship between leode and lewed: an intriguing lingustic conflation which highlights the didactic imperative to extend salvation to the people in the vernacular. The Word was spread amongst the laity, but the Word had to be in the vernacular to reach the majority. These words were part of the way to salvation of the Word not only of the people, but also for the writers themselves, who saw themselves as furthering the kingdom. Morey’s invaluable book raises many points which should be considered in assessing the literature and the culture of the Middle Ages. Although romances may appeal more to the modern reader, it is necessary to contextualise these works within the far more extensive tradition of biblical stories. The pervasiveness of a typological understanding must be considered in analyses of the thoughtworld of medieval writers. Although this is a profoundly Christian literature, Morey’s work reveals how the physical suffering of Christ on the Cross formed only a small part of the extensive biblical translations and paraphrases; a corrective necessary in a period which sometimes privileges the experience of the body. There is much in Book and Verse to stimulate research and to enable such research to take place. Scholars in literature, history or cultural studies, as well as theology, will be indebted to James Morey’s work. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Neill, Michael, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000; paper; pp. xii, 527; 31 b/w illustrations; RRP US$41.00; ISBN 0231113331. In this book Michael Neill argues for a ‘fully informed historicism’ which will take into account ‘the way in which historical meaning is embedded in every aspect of a dramatic text down to the level of its most intricate verbal details’ (pp. 49-50). Too often, he suggests, have historicist critics devoted their energies Reviews 219 Parergon 20.2 (2003) to explicating discursive contexts. He urges attention to the literary texts themselves as rich ‘historical repositories’, as’‘unfailingly sensitive registers of social attitudes and assumptions, fears and desires’ (p. 3). Putting History to the Question is a collection of Neill’s essays written over two decades. They discuss a number of Shakespeare’s plays in detail (Othello is the subject of three essays), as well as the anonymous Arden of Faversham and plays by Middleton, Massinger, and Fletcher. The older essays are not revised to any significant extent; rather, Neill is content that they ‘bear the marks of their own histories’ since ‘they belong ... to a process of questioning in which the answers are invariably time-bound, provisional, and subject to endless reinterrogation’ (p. 9). This sense of history as constant questioning is also a feature of the essays, with each topic framed by a comprehensive discussion of changes in ‘attitudes and assumptions’. Neill’s essays are grouped into two sections, with Part 1, ‘The Stage and Social Order’ largely concerned with exploring social relationships, issues of status in particular, for masters and servants, gentlemen and bastards, patriarchs and debtors. Neill notes the transition from older notions of ‘communal obligation’ (p. 97) to new values based on money, though the older values persisted in a ‘tense coexistence of ... fiercely conflicting attitudes’ (p. 46). Two essays address the development of the figure of the ‘bastard’ in response to ‘widely diffused anxieties about questions of legitimacy and succession’ (p. 165). The final essay in this section, ‘“Amphitheaters in the Body”: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearean Stage’, argues the importance, now generally overlooked, of gesturing hands on the Renaissance stage. In discussing the ‘extraordinary symbolic adaptability’ of hands in Shakespeare (p. 169), Neill recovers the relevance of writings such as John Bulwer’s The Art of Manuall Rhetorique with its illustrated catalogue of gestures. Part 2, ‘Race, Nation...