Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama by Jeremy Lopez, and: Early Modern Theatricality ed. by Henry S. Turner (review)

These two books make interesting and invigorating companion reading. Each is trying to shake up how we think about early modern drama and, in Turner’s case, theatrical culture more broadly defined. I begin with Lopez. Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama is a bold and important book, and also a lot of fun to read, especially for someone like me who loves the noncanonical plays with all their quirks and alluring discontinuities. Lopez addresses himself to just these texts. He shows how a few non-Shakespearean plays became the modern critical canon enshrined in drama anthologies, and he demonstrates ways to make all those other non-Shakespeare texts intelligible and interesting.

Lopez first explores how a non-Shakespeare canon of dramatic literature took shape. Beginning with Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) and ending with The Routledge Anthology of English Renaissance Drama (2003), he summarizes what plays were included in approximately two dozen key anthologies and the implicit or explicit principles guiding selection. A few conclusions stand out. First, the non-Shakespearean canon has shrunk over the twentieth century. Since 1911, the major anthologies have included just sixty-five plays, of which seventeen occur in six of them. The various editions of Dodsley, by contrast, published “just under” one hundred plays, and “nearly” one hundred more appeared in other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies by Dilke, Collier, and others (12). In general, early play collections avoided printing works already in print elsewhere, and when an author’s plays were included in a freestanding edition of his works, they were usually cut from the next anthology. Priority fell on including as many texts and authors as possible. Sometimes plays were arranged chronologically, sometimes by author, but seldom were aesthetic criteria employed to cull out “the best” of these old texts. Overwhelmingly, these anthologies were published in Britain by antiquarian scholars, and comedies outnumbered any other genre.

By contrast, the eleven twentieth-century anthologies of non-Shakespearean drama have generally been prepared by American scholars with a classroom audience in mind. They have largely replicated the same plays, and the principles of selection have gravitated toward a “‘Shakespearean’ aesthetic” (18), which Lopez defines as an investment in the intrinsic goodness of the plays determined by formal unity, rounded characters, and themes of money and desire. Tragedies considerably outnumber comedies in modern anthologies. Paradoxically, even as these anthologies implicitly base their selections on particular aesthetic criteria, they also claim to offer representative works and authors from the period.

In the second half of Lopez’s book—the polemical half—he makes a strong case that we need a new vocabulary for reading non-Shakespearean drama and making it meaningful. He argues that many of the plays he discusses that are left out of current anthologies—plays like Fletcher and Massinger’s Custom of the Country, Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive, or the anonymous Guy of Warwick—are less interested in highly individuated characters, original story lines, or a unified plot structure than in the juxtaposition of story lines that never meet, the repetition of familiar motifs and stage tropes, and flat characters. “Bifurcation” (103) and “opposition” (137) become keywords for analyzing these plays that often resist large-scale formal coherence and set audiences at cross-purposes with themselves. Crucially, Lopez argues that the formal and aesthetic features of these plays reveal their historical and ideological import, rather than their direct reference to “real” historical events. In a bravura ending, he closes the book with his own utopian anthology of early modern drama consisting of the thirty-seven plays he has discussed. This grouping—and he encourages us all to create our own—highlights Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, and Chapman; includes a few often-studied plays and many more...