Women in power in the Early Modern drama (review)

154 Reviews tales and four early poems discussed. HU1 hardly 'demonstrates the deep-seated faith that always accompanies Chaucer's skepticism', as the dustcover claims. The second argument is a case for the centrality of the 7a/e of Melibee in Fragment VII and ultimately in the Canterbury Tales as a whole. This is surprisingly convincing. Hill isolates the real change of heart effected in Melibeus at the end of his tale. Prudence (it is never clear that Hill knows the scholastic sense of prudentia) becomes, in Hill's version of Chaucer's translation, a whole reasoned, undogmatic ethic of toleration and good feeling which may be appropriated by pilgrims and readers, so that an awkward sentence like 'Approached prudentially, fictions are not to be read angrily, covetously or hastily' in the last chapter (p. 154) does make sense. Kevin Magarey Department of English (emeritus) University of Adelaide Jankowski, Theodora A., Women in power in the Early Modern drama, Urbana & Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. xi, 237; R.R.P. AUS$34.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). Women in power in the Early Modern drama is yet another product of the academic rite of passage known as 'booking one's thesis'. A n 'earlier incarnation of this book', we are warned, 'masqueraded as a doctoral dissertation'. The coyness is misplaced. This is a mediocre thesis masquerading as a book. Its opening chapter, elegantlytitled'Theorizing and repoliticizing Feminist theory in Early M o d e m studies', is a collection of cliches and received opinions. Jankowski plods her orderly way through one ism after another, in the approved sequence, only to emerge at the end firmly clutching the grail of feminist cultural materialism (T do not wish to split critical hairs over whether a methodology called materialist-feminist or one called cultural-materialist is more feminist'). In passing, she settles some outstanding disputes, which thankfully need detain us no longer, for instance: 7 also feel [my italics] that in Derrida's use of binaries deconstruction reallyrisksan essentializing of gender categories'. The more immediate risk is that her readers might not be able to tolerate any more of Jankowski's sclerotic prose. Materialist feminism notwithstanding, Jankowski's is a very old-fashioned book. Its 'methodology' is all too familiar: take half a dozen plays, add some historical background, season with feminism, and stir. The second chapter surveys attitudes to women in early modern England. It is a composite of quotations from other books and articles, which Jankowski redescribes as a 'web of . . . conflicting discourses'. By 'discourses' she simply means sets of 'formal and explicit prescriptions whose content can be more or less accurately summarised' (Halperin). Of course, this is precisely the sort of Reviews 155 approach which was supposedly superseded when Foucault bequeathed 'discourse' to cultural materialism. Jankowski tries to sound materialist, if not quite Foucauldian, by insisting that 'early m o d e m discourses about women' were 'multiple', 'conflicting', even 'contradictory'. Several times she uses the phrase 'in a state of flux'. This allows her to amalgamate the various arguments she finds in her sources. Any critical or scholarly view whatsoever on the status of women in early m o d e m England can be welcomed as further evidence of that 'flux'. Yet all we need to know, in order to follow Jankowski's reading of plays, is that early m o d e m women were supposed to be chaste, silent, and obedient She reminds us that the outstanding historical exception to this rule was Elizabeth I, whose strategic 'genius' successfully mastered and contained the threat she posed to a patriarchal polity. Each of the 'women ruler characters' Jankowski discusses in the remainder of the book 'may', she claims, 'be considered in some way a representation of the Queen of England', which is to say that they are all representations of the threat posed by a powerful woman. The more vividly the dramatist conveys this threat the more assiduously he works to 'contain' it This is now a predictable critical routine, whose attractive model is Louis Montrose's well-known essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Jankowski tells us in her opening...