Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

No generalization about a single year's collection of books can claim much significance--even in the millennium year--yet it is a rare SEL reviewer who can resist making something of the texts she has just herded into a single essay. So I begin with a few generalizations about the expansion and diversification of recent scholarship. First, the (effective) dramatic canon seems to be opening up. Shakespeare still claimed the largest share of books in 1999 (only two were devoted to Christopher Marlowe and three to Ben Jonson). But many individual essays in this year's collections examine, or call for greater availability of, non-Shakespearean plays (as James Bulman did last spring in his presidential speech to the Shakespeare Association of America). As if in response, Manchester University Press is reprinting the Revels plays in paperback, a welcome offering.

Even more noticeable, the critical practices introduced in the last quarter-century of the old millennium continue--but with a difference. Writers this year remain less interested in the formal properties of a literary or dramatic text than in its function as part of the material, social, economic, political, and cultural world in which it was produced and consumed. And it is true that some of this year's writers do return to the same texts, the same functions, and the same debates--whether subversion/containment or feminist/new historicist. The difference, however, is that many others demonstrate a trend toward mellowness and amalgamation that recognizes multiple influences on texts and different functions for them. Among the more noticeable trends is a move toward "the domestic" as the historicist laser beam widens out from hegemonic power to illuminate educational practices (Eve Rachele Sanders), women's alliances (Susan Frye and Karen Robertson), rogationtide ceremonies (Bruce R. Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.), mortgage payments (Theodore B. Leinwand), burglary (Heather Dubrow), and expectations about how the masters should address their servants (Lynne Magnusson). Twenty years after Stephen Greenblatt's introduction of new historicism in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, one of the two major intellectual influences on that book, Michel Foucault, is loosening his grip. The other, Clifford Geertz, has become almost indispensable for today's writers, who nearly all begin with thick description of their "text" and whole-culture analysis of its function. In a related shift, the aspects of the "material" world singled out by this year's writers are also more domestic and less limited to class conflict than those in their Marxist precursors: the "material" in this year's work includes not only the material means of production but also, for example, the sheer physicality of sound (Smith). In general, the opening-up of critical approaches means that few of this year's writers--whether primarily concerned with the "domestic," or gender, power, class, or race--ignore the rest of these current topics. Some (Magnusson, Dubrow, Leah S. Marcus in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook), even hint at a return to formal and aesthetic concerns, no longer seen as incompatible with other kinds. It seems natural in this company that a book about Shakespeare's cross-cultural encounters (Geraldo U. de Sousa) would depict the crossing primarily in terms of gender ideologies and ecological expectations. This last topic, "cultural encounter," points to a third kind of opening up in this year's books: the globalization of the Bard and the scholarly gaze fixed upon him. 1999 brought studies of Japanese, Italian, and American views of the plays, current or cumulative; of stage productions in Asia and Australia as well as in post-Shakespearean (and newly re-Globed) Britain; and of various rewritings, appropriations, and celebrations around the world (Thomas Cartelli). Finally, there seem to be more books than usual designed for students and general readers. Altogether a healthy beginning for a new year as well as a new millennium.

A second generic expectation for SEL reviews is the announcement of the...