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Reviews455 Wendy Wall. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 220. $60.00. Wendy Wall is very much a practitioner of "the new new historicism," as outlined in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt [1999], 1). Distinguishing "the new new historicism" from the new historicism' and cultural materialism of the 1980s and early 1990s, which subordinated the "common" or everyday to politics and elite culture (3), the editors and contributors of Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, following French theorists Michel DeCerteau and Lucien LeFebvre, expanded and explored the concept of "everydayness" as manifested in early modern British culture. StagingDomesticity follows this Une ofwork, though its author makes an important distinction: Wall wants the "common" to remain connected to "the political." Indeed, she is adroit in analyzing both the everyday aspects of early modern drama and culture and the political hierarchies they are shaped byand articulate, embody, challenge, or subvert.While Fumerton's critique spoofs the New Historicist use of the anecdote, Wall as it were reanimates the anecdote : she explores its nooks and crannies, situating it within its publication, performance, dissemination, translation, and/or quotation history, laying it alongside myriad cultural contexts, therebypromoting it from mere"local color" to subject of study in its own right. "Thick description" morphs into richly textured landscapes or miniatures of material culture with political and social brush strokes. More gracefully written than her first book, Staging Domesticity also covers a lot of ground and will serve as a foundational text for future scholars in the discipline. This volume includes versions of two ofWall's published essays ("Why Does Puck Sweep?" and "'Household Stuff': The Sexual Politics of Domesticity and the Advent ofEnglish Comedy") along with substantial chapters on household guidebooks ofthe period; "The Erotics ofMiUc and Live Food, or, Ingesting Early Modern EngUshness"; a provocative feminist/queer reading of Knight ofthe BurningPestle; and a conclusion on domestic drama. The invaluable archival research she presents convinces us that early modern household life—from routine to extravagant food preparation, from cleaning floors to administering purgatives, from mothers to apprentices and guests—these manifestations of ordinary life (and lives) are vital contexts for the drama. The main virtue of the book lies in the author's care with detail. For example, the earlychapters nuance their claims abouthowdomestic books function —in"marketing EngUshness,"promoting frugality, fostering identity,buUding its readers' "cultural capital," complicating assumptions about "patriarchal 456Comparative Drama authority" (see esp. 5, 7, 46).WaU's detaUed textual readings (and the contradictions and fantasies they reveal) might serve as models for doing the new new historicist criticism. Wall observes: "When historians cite [a domestic advice manual] to document the housewife's experience, they must maneuver around powerful fantasies—offemininity, nation, production, rural life—that skew his advice" (40). WaU's literary expertise serves her (and us) weU as she maneuvers around these "fantasies." Close readings support the book's larger critical and historical narratives (on, for example, the evolution ofdomesticity over about two centuries, the uses of folklore and language in forming national identity, the familiarity ofviolence in domestic life). Staging Domesticity weaves analyses ofthe plays with equaUy intricate scrutiny ofcultural practice. For example, the section on "Queer physic" in Knight of the Burning Pestle explores the "kitchen wisdom" (168) ofthe grocer's wife both onstage and in "real" kitchens whUe also discussing the relative power and position of housewives and apprentices in other citizen plays and in the society at large (163-83). Another strength is in the choice of primary dramatic texts: WaU enhances an illustrative critical tradition both in "attending to women" and in attending to dramatists other than Shakespeare (see, forexample, articles andbooks byLena Cowen Orlin, Frances Dolan, FrankWhigham, Mark Thorton Burnett). Her own agile eclectic thinking is glimpsed in the witty subtitles—a discussion of Freud's unheimlich caUed "Canning the Uncanny" (18), "The buck(ing) never stops here" (117) on The Merry Wives ofWindsor, "The way of all flesh: food in the streets" (146) on urban consumerism. Chapter 1,"Familiarityand Pleasure in Household Guides,"advances original arguments about the...

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