Interpreting Communities: Private Acts and Public Culture in Early Modern England

Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England by Pamela Allen Brown. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 263. $19.95 paper, $49.95 cloth.

Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England by David Glimp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxvii + 230. $21.95 paper, $60.95 cloth.

Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England by Laura Gowing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 260. $38.00 cloth.

Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society by Katherine A. Lynch. Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 250. $65.00 cloth.

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature by Jennifer Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. vi + 212. $60.00 cloth.

Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 363. £70.00 cloth.

I

Ben Jonson's Epicoene (1609/10) points us toward some of the issues raised by the books under review here. In the opening scene, Truewit delights in telling his foppish companion Clerimont, who has just returned to London from the court, the latest gossip in the city:

Why, is it not arrived there yet, the news? A new foundation, sir, here i' the town, of ladies that call themselves the Collegiates, an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands and give entertainment to all the Wits and Braveries o' the Time, as they call 'em: cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion with most masculine or rather hermaphroditical authority, and every day gain to their college some new probationer.¹

The Collegiate Ladies are "masculine or rather hermaphroditical" because they refuse to live according to that triple code of female conduct repeatedly advocated in the domestic manuals of early modern England and discussed at length by scholars in recent years: chaste, silent, and obedient.² Far from being enclosed by patriarchal decree in the private space of the household, the Collegiate Ladies live apart from their husbands and roam the streets and shops of London at will. However the unwomanly freedom they enjoy in the public, commercial realm of the city only confirms the cultural connection between domesticity and chastity, between the walls of the household and the sealed-off female body.³ When the Collegiates appear onstage they live up to Truewit's characterization of them as openly promiscuous, even recommending the use of contraception, "those excellent receipts" that maintain "youth and beauty" (4.4.50-53), to those younger wives whom they hope to convert to their "order." In line with their flagrant disregard for patriarchal authority and their promiscuous, always-open bodies, the Collegiates chatter relentlessly; worse, they voice opinions, crying "down or up what they like or dislike." Truewit returns to the issue of female opinion in act two in his fevered description to Morose of the terrible consequences of taking a wife. Morose is searching for that unobtainable ideal, the silent, and thus perfectly obedient and perfectly chaste, woman. A wife, Truewit warns him, will not only cheat on her husband and spend all his money on luxuries and fripperies, she will "be a stateswoman, know all the news: what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or so she may censure poets and authors and styles, and compare 'em, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with the t'other youth, an so forth" (2.2.99-103).

Characteristically, Jonson asserts his own literary authority here by implicitly suggesting that his only rival is Shakespeare (whose name people are already beginning to forget beside that of "Jonson"); but equally Jonsonian is the anxiety about the...