“This Earthly Stage”: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (review)

The thirteen essays that comprise This Earthly Stage have been selected from the 2006 symposium of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group (PMRG) at the University of Western Australia. They are linked by an intentionally broad theme: “World as stage, stage as world” (1). The contributors, whose diverse work was selected from a group of “thirty-five papers by scholars from twelve countries,” range from those who are firmly established in the field (such as Heather Dubrow) to those who are relatively new (1). These scholars explore the theme in widely divergent directions—the variety of their approaches is emphasized by the fact that they are not grouped into sections of related work but are instead presented alphabetically—but they are united by the way in which they read early modern and late medieval literary texts in relation to something else in the world, often a material object, an emblem, a site of dramatic performance, or a textual medium. In doing so, they represent fields such as literary criticism related to environment and animal studies, material culture, and the digital humanities, as well as history, philosophy, and iconography.

The alphabetical organization of essays avoids the potential problem of positing contrived relationships between works, but it should be useful to reorganize them in this review (in the interest of comprehensibility) by engagement with similar subjects or by their similar approaches. The first group represents the increasingly dynamic field of environmental and animal studies in literature; specifically, these essays engage with a recurring visual and textual emblem in relation to literary texts. Victoria Bladen’s “Pruning the Tree of Virtue in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” explores multiple aspects of the disturbing forest and tree imagery of the play, centering on Lavinia herself (sometimes referred to by Bladen as “the Lavinia-tree”) as the “lopped” Tree of Virtue, a popular early modern emblem. Although this image and her cautiously optimistic conclusion that such metaphors of lopped trees “were also, paradoxically, optimistic emblems” and that the “lopping of the political state could ultimately prove a beneficial pruning” run the risk of dehumanizing Lavinia’s character and muting the horror of the play’s events, her study productively suggests a reading of the play as more palatable and nuanced than it is generally understood, adding an innovative layer to its context (61). Brett D. Hirsch, in “From Jew to Puritan: the Emblematic Owl in Early English Culture,” combines a sobering discussion of medieval and early modern anti-Semitism, a thorough and engaging treatment of visual images, and a distinct note of whimsical humor—see the essay’s “Conclu-hoo-hoo-sion” (170). He demonstrates that the owl was an emblem of difference, associated first with Jews and later with Puritans as a means to represent the perceived reversion to Judaism on the part of the Puritans.

A second category of essays can be described as those that access the world-stage concept through regional/national identity, specifically Australia and Australian identity. Alan Brissenden provides a survey of Australian productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and argues for a distinct Australian style in “Twentieth-Century Australian Dreams.” In “The Elemental Gertrude: Howard Barker’s Refashioning of Hamlet’s Mother,” Steve Chinna draws on his experience as a director of university theater as he discusses a University of Western Australia production of Howard Barker’s Gertrude (The Cry), a controversial “palimpsest” on Hamlet. In what I understand as a third category of approaches focusing on early modern myths of kingship and nation, Clayton G. MacKenzie turns to Marlowe and focuses on the space of England insofar as it has been mythologized as an earthly paradise in “Edward II and the Rhetoricians of Myth.” Mary-Rose McLaren, in “Making Men out of Kings: Shakespeare’s Sources and Kingship,” explores early modern notions of kingship by broadening the study of Shakespeare’s sources to include a...