Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599 by Ineke Murakami (review)

Ineke Murakami's Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599 testifies to the vitality of the "moral play" tradition in fifteenth and sixteenth-century England. It is a significant contribution to scholarship on pre-Shakespearean drama, particularly in its attention to continuities between late-medieval drama (represented by the initial chapter's analysis of the fifteenth-century Mankind) and the flourishing professional theater of the later sixteenth century (addressed in concluding chapters on Marlowe and Jonson). Murakami argues that the dramatic allegories of moral plays are sophisticated discourses that enable new forms of public consciousness. She elaborates this claim with ambitious theoretical forays, drawing upon Marxism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics to explicate the breadth of the cultural and social work performed by these dramas. In addition to providing a new perspective on the English tradition of moral drama, Moral Play and Counterpublic makes a meaningful intervention in the growing body of critical work on early modern public spheres.

In Murakami's introduction, the interrelation between "the genre of morality play" and the emergence of diverse "sixteenth-century public spheres" is posited as the "unifying principle" (4) of the study. Murakami favors Michael Warner's formulation of "counterpublics" over Jürgen Habermas's much-critiqued account of the "public sphere" as primarily an eighteenth-century "bourgeois" phenomenon. Warner's concept of counterpublics originally theorized the relations between, on the one hand, the discourses produced by marginalized collectivities and, on the other, a dominant public discourse in contemporary American culture. Nonetheless, Murakami finds this concept to be apt to describe the kinds of "publics" that emerge in conjunction with early modern theatrical performance, particularly their "ephemeral," "non-elite" and often "agonistic" (12), anti-authoritarian characteristics. Murakami further builds on Steven Mullaney's contention that early modern theater was a particularly fertile zone for producing publics: "[a]s a particularly hybrid medium that partakes of several modes of publication at once . . . public drama constitutes a mode of publicity that 'precipitates new forms of critical and aesthetic thinking about . . . the relation between theatre and commonwealth'" (13). Murakami is particularly concerned to illuminate the hybrid nature of the moral play itself, as a discursive tradition that "moved both within and outside authoritative institutions" without collapsing into "either propaganda or politically radical ideology" (13). Moral plays were particularly adept at soliciting counterpublics because they activated among their audiences a faculty for " judgment"—of not only the aesthetic quality of the play but also its political and social dimensions (14). To further this interpretation, Murakami develops a versatile concept of allegory, which emerges as a polyvalent and dynamic discursive mode that enables moral drama to address political, social, economic, and religious tensions in a flexible and sophisticated manner. Murakami argues that early modern moral plays are best understood through this multifaceted, fluid conception of allegory, which liberates these dramas from some of the more stultifying homiletic interpretations to which they have been subjected in the past.

Acknowledging that legible evidence of the counterpublics generated by early modern moral plays is often hard to discern, Murakami nonetheless insists that a careful analysis of "historical and literary documents" will allow one to "extrapolate" the "publics"(15) that moral plays both invited and summoned into being. In both the introduction and subsequent chapters, the extrapolated counterpublics are portrayed as intrinsically involved with burgeoning economic tensions in early modern England, although religious conflicts are also acknowledged, and these conflicts form the basis for some of Murakami's most interesting readings. In the first chapter, a Marxist perspective prevails as Murakami traces how the moral drama Mankind registers the forces of "socioeconomic transformation" (19) in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Murakami shows that the play's allegory is polysemous, capable of addressing the pressures of economic change (in particular, the rise of the proto-capitalist "yeoman" class, embodied in the titular character) as well as the religious...