Playing with gender: a Renaissance pursuit (review)

Reviews 185 Quotations from the sagas are translated into EngUsh in the body of the text and given in Old Icelandic in footnotes. Judy Quinn Department of EngUsh University of Sydney Brink, Jean R., Horowitz, Maryanne C. and Allison P. Coudert, eds., Playing with gender: a Renaissance pursuit, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xxiv, 142; 12 illustrations; R.R.P. US$24.95 This is a collection based on papers from two conferences in 1987. In the way of such collections, some contributions prove rather slight in print. Of theses, 'Thomas Middleton's antifeminist sentiment in A mad world, my masters' is a competent but atavistic explication of the play. Antifeminist sentiment turns out to be subsumed under a broader concern with sexuality, which the writer argues is the focus for a critique of Jacobean society according to 'traditional reUgious and moral standards'. Three other contributions offer fresher perspectives, but they lack something in weight and read like critical sketches or prologomena to criticism. Naomi Yavneh distinguishes the Neoplatonism of Leone Ebreo from that of Ficino and the Florentine Academy by its valorizing of (hetero)sexuality and of the Hebrew Bible. Susanne Woods finds Spenser's Radigund a sympathetic 'tragedy of female powerlessness', generated partly out of a similarity between the social situations of women and court poets. Alison Taufer relates the portrayal of Amazons in Spanish chivalric romances to debate about whether N e w World indians were capable of conversion to Christianity or werefitonly for slavery or extermination. In the romances, amazons are converted while saracens are slain. Taufer argues that this distinction conesponds to a theological one between those who have not heard of Christ and those who have rejected him and a poUtical one between those who might be prevailed on to submit to Spanish culture and those who threaten it. There are three contributions of very high quality. Nancy Gutienez writes on 'Witchcraft and adultery in Othello', thus reminding us that 'playing with gender' can be a deadly game. Witchcraft may be a weapon of the marginalized, in which category Gutienez includes Iago. She shows how lago uses techniques of witchcraft to destroy Desdemona and Othello and, through them,toassault the Venetian social order. Though noting that Iago's refinement of feminine guile makes him a parodic wife to Othello, Gutierrez does not pursue the erotic aspect of their relationship. In a discussion of Pyrocles' female disguise in Sidney's Arcadia, Margaret M . SuUivan breaks new ground with an acute and intricate analysis of hierarchies of rank and gender in Sidney's text casting an eye on the 186 Reviews much discussed matter of Sidney's own awkward social position. Raymond Waddington, the book's sole representative of the spear side, contributes a dazzling analysis of a portrait of Francois I in female dress, relating it to his political humiliation and forced diplomatic marriage under the treaty of Cambrai, to the vogue in Fontainebleau art for 'aggressive, emasculating women and impotent men', and to CastigUone's exposition of courtly wit. Maryanne Cline Horowitz exemplifies elegantiy the conspectual genre of the editorial introduction. (Why do books of this nature require a small army of editors?) She reviews thefieldwith erudite authority, she does not endow the collection with factitious unity, and she does not indulge in excessive selfadvertisement despite citing her own writings five times in an essay of ten pages. Anthony Miller Department of EngUsh University of Sydney Briscoe, Marianne G. and John C. Coldewey, eds., Contexts for Early English drama, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1989; cloth; pp. xiv, 258; R.R.P. US$29. 95. This volume is the most important contribution to ongoing research into English medieval and Renaissance drama in recent years. Each of these outstanding essays provides an extensive bibliography of further reading. The book as a whole is an invaluable documentation of drama related cultural studies. In a review of this kind it is impossible to do justice to the scholarship of the individual contributors. With this in mind, I concentrate here on what I see as the major achievement of the collection, that is, the clear presentation of challenges for further research. The...