Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage ed. by Viviana Comensoli, Anne Russell (review)

352 letters in canada 1999 relationship to historicism. Woodbridge writes convincingly of the dangers attendant on the casual uses of social history by literary scholars, emphasizing particularly the consequences of the evasion of literary issues. Acheson uses the `rhetorical structures of historical forms of writing' to place Anne Clifford in a subtle and shifting relationship to modernity which complicates both the relationship between history and textuality and the very idea of the modern. Another discontinuity to which many of the essays speak is the relationship between scholarly and professional work and claims for the political effects of work in the academy. These issues are explicitly addressed in a final section, `Political Engagement and Professional Discontinuities.' Barry Taylor critically examines the commonly held assumption that British cultural materialism preserves a political dimension which American new historicism suppresses. In this context, though, the omission of any attention to the specifics of the Canadian academic scene in the collection as a whole is a cause for regret. In a final essay, which might facilitate a provocative rereading of many of the earlier essays, Sharon O'Dair interrogates the significance of anti-capitalist rhetoric in contemporary criticism, arguing that it masks an anti-populist desire to preserve the privileges conferred by the modern university. Other essays examine significant areas of controversy in contemporary Renaissance studies. One group of essays, `Rethinking Subjectivity: The Turn to Lacan,' takes up the question of psychoanalysis, arguing for the relevance of Lacanian analysis as an alternative or as a supplement to historicism. Another section, `What to do with Shakespeare?' offers one of the most provocative contrasts in the collection between Elizabeth Hanson's subtly nuanced account of the distorting effects of a `synecdochic Shakespare,' who stands for the literary culture of the period, and Karen Newman's insistence on the strategic value of this literary and historical substitution. Hanson's and Newman's essays are cognizant of the pedagogical implications of their arguments. But the discontinuity between research and teaching is explicitly addressed in Marta Straznicky's Afterword to the collection. She notes the tendency of many of the authors to ignore issues of pedagogy. She also worries about the lack of attention to teaching strategies capable of incorporating the research of the contributors into the classroom and providing an alternative to pedagogical aims and methods still derived, in many cases, from the old New Criticism. It is a useful cautionary note on which to end the collection. (DAVID GALBRAITH) Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, editors. Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage University of Illinois Press. viii, 270. US $49.95, US $19.95 humanities 353 Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage is a collection of ten essays by scholars from Canada, the USA, and Britain, which participates enthusiastically in various currently fashionable approaches to the subject of gender ideologies and their representation in drama and theatrical practice. It is divided into two parts. The first, and more theoretical, consists of five essays which explore this subject in relation to what the editors in their introduction call `early modern homologies of sex, race, and subjectivity'; the second, of five essays discussing aspects of the material conditions of early modern theatre, in both public and private forums, with a focus on the roles played by women. The editors stress the revisionary nature of the essays in part 1, an aspect most evident and significant in Janet Adelman's `Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,' which is given pride of place. Adelman draws on vernacular medical and related texts to challenge the view that the Galenic one-sex model of human sexuality was pre-eminent in the Renaissance. She not only establishes convincingly the presence of elements of the twosex model in Renaissance medical discourse but also briefly suggests some of the implications of this for the English stage. Her account of Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia (1615) clearly demonstrates that an establishment medical writer did not accept the Galenic view of woman as an imperfect version of man, and although that view was obviously sufficiently widespread to require refutation, it did not carry the almost monolithic status that many critics of the drama have assumed. Adelman...