In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama by Dorothea Kehler (review)

Book Reviews239 working in the areas of European modern and poststructural literary theory. MARIA GARDETA-HEALEY Mesa Community College DOROTHEA KEHLER and SUSAN BAKER, eds. In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991. 345 p. The title of this collection alludes to the trivializing of women by Barabas in the Jew ofMalta when he is accused of fornication: "But that was in another country: / And besides, the wench is dead" (IV.i.39-42). Significantly, the essays in the collection are divided into three categories: the rhetoric of women in Renaissance drama; power and patriarchy; and gendered bodies/ bodies politic. In spite of the three divisions and the even more varied methodologies within them, all the essays come together within their historical and dramatic contexts in the assumption that woman's position in the Renaissance was, if not always trivialized, at least always at the mercy of male patriarchal definition and expression. At the same time, the richness of the collection—including, by the way, two helpful bibliographies for feminists by Kehler and by Baker and Lorena L. Stookey, respectively, on Shakespearean and Renaissance drama—rests upon the reader's discovery that drama, like all fictional narrative, always plays with the ironies between stereotyping and individualizing. In the end, then, however limited the types of women projected by Renaissance preachers and even dramatists, many playwrights, like Shakespeare in the case of Cleopatra, move their characters out of limited feminine stereotypes into human individuality. In Renaissance drama other than that of Shakespeare, particularly on the Jacobean stage, the movement of women toward the center of tragedy makes that point even more poignant and interesting , as Christy Desmet illustrates in her discussion of TAe Duchess of Malfi (71-92) or Margaret Lael Mikesell in her essay on "The Formative Power of Marriage in Stuart Tragedy" (233-45). Critics have always noticed the play between type and individualized portrayal in Shakespeare, but these excellent feminist analyses of the limited typology of woman in Renaissance culture have exposed the lively interplay between culturally assigned role and particular characterization in Renaissance drama in general. However fixed the roles of women were by a culturally assigned view of marriage, as both Mikesell and Coppelia Kahn indicate, drama in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first two decades of the seventeenth presents the scholar with a range of experiences of women, from Shakespeare's Emilia to Victoria Corombona in TAe White Devil. Dramatically, part of what adds to the interest is that mingling of types that informs both life and stage. Perhaps the most horrifying and amusing example of such a mixture occurs in Kahn's allusion to Mistress 240Rocky Mountain Review Allwit, delivered of her bastard child in Middleton's TAe Honest Whore. Although a mother and married to Allwit, she is actually mistress to Sir Walter Whorehound and therefore a carnival mixture of wife, mother, and whore (254). Out ofthe juxtaposition ofboth Renaissance dramatists and several feminist methodologies, including both deconstructive and transformational as well as "new historicist," this collection provides an important overview of what is going on in gender studies in the Renaissance. Certain key works are already being cited by the authors as definitive, for instance, Carol Neely's Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays and Linda Woodbridge's Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. In the field of social history several books are cited as fundamental, especially Lawrence Stone's TAe Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 and Peter Laslett's TAe World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (the important Second Edition). For her essay "Sex and Marriage in TAe Dutch Courtesan" Susan Baker also cites some important new sources that help to refine literary understanding of the cultural context: Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, and John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present. In fact, whatever the methodology used for the critical approach, "new historicism" and the influence of Greenblatt are discernible in almost all the essays. What this suggests is the continuing assumption by feminist critics...