Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (review)

Reviews 205 Helgerson, Richard, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. 238; 23 b/w illustrations; R R P US$29.00; ISBN 0226326241. In his much-lauded book, Forms of Nationhood (1992), Richard Helgerson undertook an ambitious and distinctly original project, namely to illustrate the ways in which a wide range of cultural genres in early m o d e m English society - from law books to cartography, from Elizabethan popular theatre to ecclesiastical debates - all contributed to the self-definition of the English nation-state. Helgerson did not simply demonstrate the importance of 'minor genres' as cultural artifacts. Arguably more far-reaching was his role as a leading figure in establishing the need to foreground political and social issues in literary study; 'literary works', he argued, 'are deeply implicated in the values and desires of the cultures that produce and consume them' (New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992). In Adulterous Alliances, his first book since Forms of Nationhood, Helgerson is no less ambitious, exploring a formidable range of works from Tudor-Stuart drama and pamphlet-writing to the plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon in Golden Age Spain, Dutch genre painting, and, ultimately, the writing and art ofEnlightenment and Revolutionary France and other European nations. Helgerson's study is wide-ranging, erudite and gripping; his thesis, a fascinating one: that these diverse cultural manifestations were linked by their underlying concern with issues of common, individual selfhood - of the evolution of the concept of the citizen, from a civic, or otherwise collective, plebeian identity to the m o d e m ideals, at once universal and individualistic, of liberty and common dignity. At the heart of Helgerson's exploration lies the ideal of the nonaristocratic home as the locus for conflict between an emerging, and in some instances absent, but nonetheless normative, male subject, and the monarchical state and its representatives. Thefirstsection, 'On the Margins of History', includes discussion of the diverse responses to the murder of Thomas Arden, the treatment of Jane Shore by a range of early m o d e m historians and popular writers, and by Shakespeare, and the intersections of emergent discourses of civic identity and concerns with female sexuality and witchcraft as presented in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives ofWindsor. Helgerson examines the intersections between a cult of monarchy, promoted as the exclusive concern of history, and a counter-version, 'an emerging bourgeois cult of home and community', displaced at that time by 206 Reviews humanist and aristocratic interests, but which would one day replace these as a social ethos. The second section, 'At H o m e in the Dutch Republic', concerns Dutch genre painting. It is a mark of Helgerson's scholarship that this material is not only explored alongside chapters about literary works, but that it makes for a highly readable and compelling account ofthe tensions and conflicts ofthe Dutch republic in the mid-seventeenth century, conflicts which Helgerson demonstrates were centred on the nonaristocratic, burgher home, and the w o m e n who were endowed with the material identity of the home and, by extension, the state. The next section, 'Fables ofAbsolutism', includes a brief but stimulating chapter on the peasant honour plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. Helgerson's explicit connection between Tudor-Stuart citizens, Dutch householders and Spanish peasants as collectivities of individuals defined as members of specific localities, and associated, moreover, with the threatened integrity of their (feminised) homes, is worth the price of the book. More intriguingly, he defends the idea that these diverse genres of 'domestic drama', 'genre painting' and so forth, were only introduced much later; indeed, that there was 'little acknowledgement and no sustained discussion' of the challenges that these genres posed the dominant ethos or culture of the elite (pp. 125-6). Helgerson displays a characteristically dispassionate historical vision which would be familiar to former readers when he considers the political implications of excess and ambiguity in the drama of Lope and Calderon. If plays of sexualised political conflict between dignified peasants and villainous noblemen, w h o die for...