The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context by John Peacock (review)

466 Comparative Drama Harrison's knowledge of the secondary literature on economics and society in French classical theater is comprehensive, and she also cites the most important titles on economics and literary theory. Her approach to the economic side of her topic, however, might have been enriched by reference to work in the "New Economic Criticism," applied to literatures other than French, such as Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 15501750 . Moreover, since Harrison's project is more about social status than economics, she might have dwelt less on the way money and language are both symbolic systems and instead included a discussion of seventeenth-century views on what constitutes true nobility in order to fill out her treatment of the various grounds for social stratification. Though presented modestly, Pistoles/Paroles is an ambitious study, covering a wide range of complex topics. Harrison has presented her material very thoroughly, and she lays out her arguments clearly. Some readers may feel certain surveys of background information could have been abbreviated, especially for an audience of specialists on seventeenth -century France, but readers from other fields will find such overviews helpful. AU readers will enjoy and appreciate Harrison's work with the text when she examines various kinds of exchange and expenditure in the plays. This is a promising first book that makes a valuable contribution to the developing body of work on economics and ideology in literary texts. BRADLEY RUBIDGE New York University John Peacock. The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xxii + 387. $145.00. In his handsomely-produced, lavishly-illustrated, and learned work John Peacock offers the first full-length study of Inigo Jones as stage designer, this last a term conveniently appropriated to refer to Jones's work for the Stuart masques and other related court entertainments between 1605 and 1640. Central to Peacock's task is the development of the argument that Jones's designs played a crucial part in transferring to Britain a knowledge, understanding, and ultimately employment of the visual language of European art, in particular that of the Italian Renaissance with which Jones became intimately familiar. Jones was, so Peacock tells us, "the first English artist to acquire a deep and inward knowledge of the whole Renaissance tradition," and, when Jones came upon the scene, "English art was still in outer darkness" (7). Peacock's insistence upon the centrality of the masques in the process of bringing the Italian Renaissance to Britain ("The affective power of the masque Reviews467 was to instil a whole unknown history of art" [13]) and his insistence upon the pre-eminence of Jones in the transformation of British artistic vision are rather startling claims that some readers will no doubt want to question or qualify. However, the evidence Peacock offers and the exploration ofJones's work that he conducts provide an invaluable study that will inevitably result in renewed thinking about Jones and, even more, renewed debate about the vexed and complex questions concerning the transmission of European artistic tradition to Britain in the first half of the seventeenth century. After a brief introductory discussion of the principal features of the Stuart masque, Peacock begins his study with a weighty chapter on "The Theory and Practice of Imitation." Taking his cue from an inscription that Edmund Bolton wrote in a book of poems he gave to Jones in 1606, Peacock argues that the court masque provided Jones with an "obvious vehicle for reviving the ancient art, or arts, of theatrical representation . . . , which combined several arts in a single art of 'Mimesis'" (11). Viewed in a certain light, "all aspects of the arts of Jones's theatre could be seen as antiquity revived" (11). Because "all his stage designs are copied" (12), Peacock argues, Jones was able to carry out the mission first outlined by Bolton—the transference of the arts of Italy across the Alps and into England. But, according to Peacock, Jones was also a reformer, actively mediating Renaissance traditions and revising them whenever he saw fit. That Jones's "copying" was not a sign of any "declining originality of vision...