The Renegado, or The Gentleman of Venice (review)

The appearance of the Arden Early Modern Drama series is occasion for rejoicing. Non-Shakespearean early modern drama has been well served in the last decade, with the publication of the new anthologies Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Blackwell, 2000) and English Renaissance Drama (Norton, 2002), as well as several authoritative collected works (the Oxford Middleton, Richard Brome Online). But there are still comparatively few single-volume editions of early modern plays. The Oxford World's Classics has several single-author or thematic collections, and the Revels series has expanded its paperback offerings and added the Revels Student Editions. However, many works are still only available in the older New Mermaids or Regents Renaissance Drama series, and many more are not in print at all. This scarcity has an effect on classroom practice. The Norton and Blackwell anthologies both provide an excellent backbone for an undergraduate course, but are limited, especially in their selection of Caroline plays (the Blackwell anthology has only Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; the Norton adds Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts). Good single-volume editions can serve as a supplement to these anthologies, or as an addition to a broader survey course, particularly one that is thematically based. But editions such as the Revels plays are expensive for students to buy, and less expensive editions typically lack the annotation and apparatus that makes such texts accessible. Up to this point, only the Revels Student Editions have provided the kind of affordable, well-annotated editions of early modern playtexts to parallel the many series available to teachers and students of Shakespeare.

The new Arden series is thus a welcome addition. Modeled on the format of the Arden Shakespeare, the series presents fifteenth- to seventeenth-century texts in modern-spelling editions with detailed and complex scholarly annotation, supplemental documents (in the case of The Renegado, a translation of a scene from Cervantes's Los Baños de Argel [The Prisons of Algiers], one of the play's sources), an introductory essay which includes a survey of criticism, sources, performance and textual history, and a thorough bibliography. Moreover, if future volumes meet the standard set by Michael Neill's edition of Massinger's The Renegado, the series deserves to become a fixture. While the series is clearly targeted at a student market, Neill's substantive, informative and illuminating edition will also be of great value to scholars and critics; this is the best single-volume edition of a Massinger play since Martin White's edition of The Roman Actor for the Revels series.

Initially, The Renegado seems a surprising choice, since Massinger's most commonly anthologized plays are the satiric comedies A New Way To Pay Old Debts and The City Madam and the metatheatrical tragedy The Roman Actor. But, as Neill points out, tragicomedy is a far more representative genre for the playwright, and a comparatively neglected one (6). The choice of The Renegado fills this gap: it is an excellent example of Massinger's work in the genre as well as an entertaining piece of theatre. The play has also recently received considerable critical attention, particularly in postcolonial discussions of Islam's relation to the West. Neill's substantive and substantial 71-page introduction begins with a survey of these critical approaches, noting the centrality of the play to current interests in the intersection of early modern mercantilism and imperialism, "Turk plays" and texts that deal with relations between early modern Europe and the Ottoman/Islamic world, and discussions of the religious politics of early 1620s England.

Neill's introduction discusses the play from three critical perspectives: its connections to the Fletcherian genres of tragicomedy and romance, to early modern visions of the Muslim world, and to the themes of religious conversion, apostasy and toleration. The discussion of tragicomedy stresses Massinger's unorthodox addition of elements from genres as diverse as voyage drama, Marlovian heroic tragedy, citizen romance...