Ben Jonson and the art of secrecy (review)

310 Reviews pronouncements at the beginning of the play about the importance of enforcing laws and exacting punishments, he nevertheless allows social and humanitarian motives to prevail over strict justice in the end. This seems to have something to do with the fact that he presides over a small community, not a large one. Shakespearian comedy, for the writer of this book, is not revolutionary in its sympathies: 'All that Gonzalo would banish from his perfect commonwealth—trade, magistrates, letters, riches, poverty, servitude, inherited privilege, and individual property—are the very stuff of Shakespeare's comic societies.' While acknowledging that Shakespeare's plays 'were written and performedfirstin an undemocratic, racist, sexist culture', Slights clearly feels that their representations of cohesion and community make up for these failings. Besides, a monolithic culture, unified through uniformity of beliefs and values, 'was neither a reality nor an ideal for the Elizabethans: in fact, emphasis on the desirable heterogeneity of society was commonplace.' So rather than re-present the plays for a twentieth-century culture, Slights prefers to resituate her reader in what she regards as the relatively benign imaginative world of the Elizabethan playwright. While acknowledging writers like Greenblatt, Montrose, Dollimore and Sinfield, and (outside the realm of Shakespearian criticism) Bakhtin and Eco, Slights does not confront them. She prefers to go behind them to the plays themselves, reverting to a type of largely empirical criticism which was prominent two decades ago. Within these limitations the book is wellwritten and often perceptive. W h U e it is unlikely to effect a turnaround in Shakespearian studies, it should give its student readers some creative insights into the imaginative world of Shakespearian comedy. T. G. A. Nelson Department of English and Communication Studies The University of N e w England Slights, William W. E., Ben Jonson and the art of secrecy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994; cloth; pp. ix, 241; R R P not notified. Wtiliam Slights focusses attention on an issue of considerable significance for any consideration of Ben Jonson's representation of social interaction. He studies Jonson's 'art of secrecy' in his six 'middle plays' of the years 1603-14, from Sejanus to Bartholomew Fair, and argues that 'the tension Reviews 31 j between concealment and revelation affords a model for the poise that sustained Ben Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre' (p. 3). The book thus establishes an intention to deal with several issues of moment in studies of early m o d e m theatre and culture, including the relation between self and society, and the discursive basis of power. Slights approaches his task on various interconnected levels. In his analysis of the plays he concentrates at once on the construction of individual characters and processes of social and political interaction. A parallel line of inquiry links these concerns with issues of dramatic structure and theatrical discourse. Jonson was at best ambivalent about the movement towards enclosed theatrical space, but was masterful in his depiction of struggles for privacy in worlds riddled with spies and rich in intrigue. Slights also suggests the cultural functions of secrecy beyond Jonson's theatre, in an environment of contested knowledge and fluid power relations. H e places the playwright at the heart of a crisis in attitudes towards interpretation and information, which revolved around the Bible and the discourses of political power, and which was of particular concern to an author in an age of patronage and censorship. Despite these broad parameters of investigation, this is a book which works best through the traditional resources of literary criticism. Slights betrays a certain ambivalence in the face of debates shaped in the work of new historicist and cultural materialist critics. While he acknowledges ongoing arguments about questions such as literary constructions of the body and gender, and the relation between drama and the Jacobean court, he prefers to stand on the margins of the theorised battlefield. Similarly, his engagement with social theory and anthropology, which might have offered much to the cultural analysis, is disappointingly small. The blurb promises that Slights will draw on 'the sociology of secrecy'; however he rarely ventures beyond some basic assertions from...