The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (review)

100Rocky Mountain Review Specifically, race, class, and sexuality are surprisingly absent, except for certain inadequate references, from the analyses and criticisms, and this despite the very promising titles of especially chapters two, three, and six. Because her mind and talents are manifestly wide ranging, profound, and nimble, one looks forward to Miller's next book, trusting that in it she will integrate issues of race, class, and sexuality into her formidable feminist critical enterprise. Such an integration would fulfill the marvelous ability suggested by the present impressive, if limited, study. JESSE G. SWAN Eastern New Mexico University LOUIS MONTROSE. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics ofthe Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 227 p. L/ouis Montrose's much-awaited first book will sound both familiar and new to those who have been keeping up with the work of the scholar widely considered one of the most remarkable New Historicist critics writing today. It pursues the goal that has been central to most of Montrose's recent work: to elaborate "a mode of critical practice in which formal and ideological considerations are inseparable" and which aims to uncover "the dialectic of text and history." The deceptively small volume packs a lot of punch. It provides a rigorous, lucid overview (reminiscent of Montrose's essay in H. Aram Veeser's anthology, The New Historicism, Routledge, 1989) of the problem of history and society in literary studies as well as of the "culture wars" that have been reshaping literary studies, and early modern studies, over the last decade; it articulates Montrose's project in this broader critical context; and it provides perhaps the most sophisticated analysis to date of Elizabethan drama, especially Shakespeare, in its historical context. The book has two parts. Part one is an extended discussion of the place of the public and professional theatre within the ideological and material frameworks of Elizabethan culture and society. Part two consists of an extended reading ofA Midsummer Night's Dream that illustrates the themes raised in part one. Montrose begins with an analysis of the historical and social siting of the Elizabethan theatre, suggesting that the Elizabethan playhouse evolved in consonance with other material and ideological developments that accompanied the emergence of merchant capitalism and bourgeois subjectivity in early modern Europe. He traces three major conditions that defined the peculiar place of the professional stage in Elizabethan England: 1) a cultural transformation characterized by a shift from "a culture focussed upon the social dynamics within the local community to one that incorporates the local within a national framework and subordinates it to the political and cultural center" (23); 2) the increased "performativity of sovereignty" (27) Book Reviews101 the reliance of rule on representational practices; and 3) the growth of London as the social and political nerve center of the increasingly centralized state. Under these conditions, Montrose argues, the theatre arose as a cultural practice whose functions were ideological in the most general and enabling sense of the term. The plays offered "equipment for living" (40); mediated understanding of the social and political reality and helped adjust to change by articulating symbolic frameworks for self-understanding within the social and political order; purveyed information, counsel, and fantasy; and constituted an alternative site of authority, "radically different in its sources, appeal, and potential effects from that which sanctioned the dominant institutions of church and state" (50). It is this combination, Montrose argues, that constituted the "innovative formula" for the Elizabethan theatre 's popularity and success. Montrose's central argument concerns the relations between the theatre and the diverse social and political interests that converged on it and in it: the Crown, the city, the nobility, the playgoers, the players, and the playwrights . Montrose sees the locus of the theatre's ideological function in the fact that it could, and did, become a site where the differences between those interests could be articulated and engaged. His discussion of this engagement forms the most elaborate statement to date of his position on the issue of the relationship between the literary text and its material and political context. He articulates a strongly dialectical and sophisticated interpretation of this relationship, emphasizing the diversity...