Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (review)

This study of jest culture deserves serious critical attention. Informative, straight-forward, and refreshingly bold, Pamela Allen Brown's study finds substantial indications of women's agency in an early modern culture of jesting, defined broadly as "any verbal, gestural, or dramatic form that could be used to spur laughter or ridicule" (3). Through jests, ballads, and pamphlets selected for material featuring women as the laugh-getters or primary audiences, Brown ably investigates "how women may have taken part in revising, negotiating, or resisting ideological paradigms rather than assuming that women were tragic victims, passive ciphers, or cultural sponges" (7). Brown's claims for women's agency become most convincing in her discussions of the circulation and reception of narratives themselves. Whether as gossip in the neighborhood or as ballads in the alehouse, women's narratives provided an effective means of monitoring behavior. Brown ably demonstrates the serious function of jests not only as entertainment, but as a significant form of social engagement by those with few legal rights.

Brown's study possesses the difficulties as well as the benefits of a corrective reading. Exaggerating critics' attributions of utter powerlessness to women, she compensates at times by becoming overly sanguine about the ability of jests to empower women. The trouble may lie in the term agency itself. Registering anything from unavailing protest to effective action, this term has become perhaps too broad to be useful. The jests Brown presents are sometimes more ambivalent than she would admit. Forced each night to warm the cold bed, a wife shat where her husband slept; when he befouled himself, she wittily replied, "'It is but a Coal dropt out of your warming Pan'" (11). A fart by the alewife Mother Bunch blew down Charing Cross (77). Beaten by her drunken husband with a rope, an abused wife showed "linguistic mastery" by serving the rope-end, baked like an eel, to her husband for supper, asserting it as "'no worse than what you gave mee'" (129). It is in the nature of these anecdotes to leave the consequences of these jests unspoken. Was the wife forced to continue to serve as her husband's warming pan? Whether Mother Bunch was admired or denigrated for her most powerful fart surely depends upon the audience. Most poignantly, was the agency of the wife's "linguistic mastery" as she served the baked rope-end sufficient to prevent a future beating? Yet these recorded jests and spunky comebacks do provide a comforting sense of the inner resources attributed, no doubt accurately, to some early modern women.

A primary strength of this study is inextricably tied up in a methodological difficulty endemic to any study of oral culture. While Brown's frequent positing of a female audience is refreshing and right, many records are, as she herself points out, inevitably mediated by print (177, 219). Her study might have examined more closely how the low social status of many of the female informants—alewives, fishwives, milkmaids, and spinners—denigrated the culture of jest, and for what cultural purpose. This blind spot causes her to reduce unfairly the arguments of reputable scholars such as Diane Purkiss, whose consideration of ballads, Brown claims, "fails to consider" that ballads such as "Have Among You, Good Women" helped to constitute a female group (148). She too quickly dismisses Lori Humphrey Newcomb's argument that a construction of a "degraded female reading public" served masculinist objectives (158n). These analyses of masculinist agendas do not suggest that women readers or performers were not also present. As Brown notes in her epilogue, "No representation can provide a transparent window into a mentalité" (219); yet she consistently presents these jests from the "neighborhood-based mentalité of women spectators as the primary frame of analysis" (32). According to Brown's reading, pamphlets describing the female...