God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (review)

Reviews 235 scholarship today. The 1950s were perhaps the heyday of editors under the sway of the n e w bibliography, and they sternly warned literary critics and historians of the impossibility of making convincing statements about Renaissance plays until the definitive text had been 'established'. Unintimidated, it was critics w h o insistently developed the theory that texts are indeterminate and plural, and it was literary historians (tike Marcus herself in a previous emanation) w h o investigated the 'local', material, and political involvement of plays, both movements that finally discredited the editors' enterprise of stabilising and taming multiple texts into a single authorised version. It looks just atittleas if editors are using such developments to reassemble and besiege the high ground and open up a whole n e w professional industry of producing multiple texts. U this were to be the primary result, the scenario would be a pity because, however heady and delightful is the game of keeping textual variants afloat, the aim of most editing must surely be the rather humble one of providing students with something they can read and write about with enjoyment and insight, without having to worry about philological minutiae and textual variants. The most positive outcome of the new phtiology (if it is a movement) would be a non-hierarchical and truly coUaborative profession which respected editing, criticism, and literary and theatre history alike. It might even allow the author's intent to become once again an issue. R. S. White Department of English University of Western Australia McRae, Andrew, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (Past and Present Publications); cloth; pp. 332; 9 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £40.00, US$64.95. As the western post-industrial world moves into zero tillage, the iconography and iconology of the plough as a lost artefact and of the ploughman as a lost figure will generate m a n y books, some popular, some scholarly. The popular books will dweU on rural life and 236 Reviews ploughing as nostalgia. The scholarly books m a y interest themselves in nostalgia as a h u m a n trait and as a postmodernist subject, but they wiU centre on the nature and meaning of ploughing and ploughmen in history (or of ploughwomen, like Prudence Sarn in Mary Webb's early twentieth-century novel, Precious Bane). This history wtil embrace literature, music, art and what Andrew McRae calls in his fine book 'Chorography', or the tradition of rural writing which assures property owners that they and their lands serve the nation. Even in the mid-twentieth century that tradition had its crude expression in the British Empire as, for example, 'Australia rides on the sheep's back'. McRae's God Speed the Plough upholds the plough as a 'central symbol of agricultural activity and rural life'. After the explosion of Piers Plowman in the late medieval period, the sixteenth century sited the ploughman as conservative and stable, yet also (for Tudor Protestantism) as disruptive and revolutionary. McRae employs the vocabulary of postmodernism to make this point: 'In order to appreciate such confrontations, this study will focus on the discourses of agrarian England. For the representation of the land should be seen less as an unproblematic reflection of material conditions as the site of struggle over signs and discursive knowledge'. God Speed the Plough is concerned to survey 'signifying practices throughout a wide range of texts'. In this, the author rightly asserts, his book differs from those of most recent historians and literary critics of the period. Herrick, for instance, is considered to be an important source, but his poetry is not privileged over the texts of the pamphleteers, the court recorders, and the politicians. McRae's holism of approach and analysis gives God Speed the Plough considerable strength. Certainly it can be read with pleasure and instruction by scholars from several disciplines. Over the period 1500 to 1660 there was a movement of representation: from the complaint tracts of the Tudor and early Stuart moral economy through the massive agrarian changes into the seventeenth century (Kerridge and other historians) to an improvement literature so...