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

One has to admire the sheer audacity of Richard Helgerson's decision to take on four nations, three centuries, and (at least) two art forms as he discusses the already dauntingly large categories of "home, state, and history." The result is a well-written and suggestive look at representations of domesticity as prisms refracting political and aesthetic changes. Such ambition perforce leads to simplifications, and for this the specialists as well as the general reader can be grateful: the work of challenging, modifying, and substantiating Helgerson's generalizations could spawn hundreds of doctoral theses. No reader, I think, could come away from this book without learning important new specifics about early modern art and politics; moreover, one will view works one does know in a fresh light through the unexpected juxtapositions and broad scope of this inquiry.

Helgerson's overarching thesis concerns the "prehistory" of the emphasis on the bourgeois and domestic that has shaped European and American culture. Through what he calls an "episodic macrohistory," he comes to identify shared features among English domestic drama, Dutch genre painting, Spanish peasant drama, and French eighteenth-century drama (with a nod to Tartuffe). First and foremost, they all pay "serious attention" to "the nonaristocratic home and family," which is put "into a significant and signifying narrative relation with the monarchic or potentially monarchic state" (3). More precisely, Helgerson focuses on the double function of the state, represented first as a "sexually predatory intruder" but then as a deus ex machina, resolving the troubles its own emissaries have caused; nevertheless, "the state is representationally and affectively outshone by the bourgeois or peasant home through which the state expresses its power" (4). The logic here relies on the assumption that women's bodies represent the home and its vulnerability because "the domestic sphere is to a large degree theirs" (4); women then become the site of a contest between men of different status or loyalties. One would like to see a bit more detailed grounding for this key assumption and more recognition of the theoretical alternatives to this emphasis. Nevertheless, he makes a forceful case for this important shared pattern in unlikely and otherwise quite distinctive artistic sites. Moreover, in analyzing how drama and painting represent tensions between the loyalties due, on the one hand, to towns and local constituencies and, on the other, to the emergent state powers of western Europe, he accounts for the way in which a rigidly hierarchical structure would eventually be turned upside down: "history," once the province of the elite, would be reshaped in a dialectical relationship with the domestic, culminating in the triumph of the French Revolution's fraternal bourgeoisie. Although Helgerson adds a caveat about his own uneasiness at the "progressive" sound of this argument (8), it remains the book's strong throughline: without it, the difficulty of delineating "home," "bourgeois," and "domestic" in vastly disparate political and artistic contexts would likely undo the book's coherence.

The chapters most directly relevant to Shakespeareans are likely be those grouped together in the first section under the rubric "On the Margins of History." These three chapters focus on Elizabethan plays that can all be called "domestic," despite their generic variety. In "Murder in Faversham," Helgerson asserts that Arden of Faversham is the first English play based on a true crime, the first given a domestic setting locatable on a map, and the first with "a woman its most prominent and powerful character" (13). He argues that "Horribleness is what made a particular and private matter—a matter of women, of commoners, of the home and the local community—fit for inclusion in either a national chronicle history or the repertory of a national acting company" (15). Some might regard the central private/national division as a case of...