The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy by Adam Zucker, and: Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650 ed. by Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (review)

From Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (1988) to Jean E. Howard's Theater of a City (2007), studies of early modern space have explored the ways in which the material and social conditions of London's geography shape understandings of the period's drama. Adam Zucker's monograph The Places of Wit in English Comedy and the essay collection Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, edited by Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, extend these considerations of space and place to the domains of genre and gender, respectively.

The Places of Wit is a capaciously researched and elegantly written book that revitalizes the landscape of English comedy by tracing an aesthetic and social geography of wit in plays as diverse as Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Jonson's Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair, Richard Brome's Weeding of Covent Garden, Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden, and James Shirley's Hyde Park. Zucker persuades us that English theater occupied real space and enacted "place-based modes of wit" (55). The spaces of English comedy—whether the theatrical spaces of the Globe and Blackfriars or the environs of royal deer parks and monastic lands that were, during Henry VIII's reign, turned into fairgrounds—make wit into something more than verbal trickery or linguistic playfulness. In this book, wit comprises a network of epistemological, political, economic, and aesthetic relations; wit manifests itself as a social art, one that might function as a "green world" correlative to the courtly practice of sprezzatura. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theories of space, Zucker maintains that specific London locales, from Windsor Forest to Smithfield to Hyde Park, function not just as settings but also as stratagems: their natural, social, and generic properties can be known, studied, and, most importantly, used. A character "uses" space by navigating it (as well as distancing himself from it), understanding the materials it makes available, and deploying them in calculated performances. When used effectively, this materially determined wit enables cultural capital to trump economic capital.

Throughout the book, Zucker remains as interested in the idiocy and imbecility of the witless as he is in the ingenuity of the witty. The former type, represented by Shakespeare's Falstaff and Jonson's Justice Overdo,"fail to understand the ways in which material, place-based cultural competencies can successfully compete with conservative structures of power" (125). Against them, Zucker sets witty counterparts who use their knowledge of place to overcome their conscription by traditional hierarchies of rank. Brome's Mihil Crosswill and Shirley's Bonavent are two such characters "whose gender, age, relative wealth, or political rank would seem to put them at a disadvantage but whose local knowledge marks them off as wits" (125).

The book's four chapters trace the pursuit, acquisition, use, and misuse of this "local knowledge" by tying a play (or group of plays) to a specific spatial site. In chapter 1, Zucker traces the critical history of Herne's Oak in The Merry Wives of Windsor before showing how the strategic use of the forest's materials can "effect political relations, distributing power in unexpected directions" (50). Windsor Forest occasions a performance of status inversion: Falstaff, who thinks himself witty, does not master the landscape in the way that the Fords and others do, and must embarrassingly realize that "he is as gross as everything that surrounds him" (53). Chapter 2 highlights both the city of London and Smithfield's fairground in a reading of the gallant in Jonsonian city comedy. Gallants attempt to replace traditional labor or work with a "witty detachment" (56). Zucker shows how these characters attempt...