Applying Cultural Criticism to the Study of Early Popular Romances

Courtland, Joseph. 2001. A Cultural Studies Approach to Two Exotic Citizen Romances by Thomas Heywood. Studies in the Humanities. 58. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. $49.95 hc. xvi + 159 pp.

Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. 2002. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. $49.95 hc. $19.50 sc. xiv + 332 pp.

Rejecting static distinctions between popular and elite culture, and "high" and "low" art, cultural critics seek to understand the discursive and interactive nature of a society's values, practices, and institutions. When literature is the object of study, they question the notion of "masterpiece" and hierarchies, and using analytical procedures developed in a variety of disciplines, they examine lesser known or marginalized texts, sometimes in relation to "masterpieces," at other times in relation to how these texts are produced, marketed, or read by various audiences. Though their methods vary, all cultural critics perceive literature as a form of discourse, which both shapes and competes with other forms of discourse within a given culture, and not as an unproblematic reflection of history, or of aesthetic value. Rather than evaluating what literature is, they seek to understand how literature functions in a given society and what these functions mean.

The two works under review demonstrate how difficult it is to practice cultural criticism, and the rich insights about society that can be gained if that practice is successful. Joseph Courtland's A Cultural Studies Approach to Two Exotic Citizen Romances by Thomas Heywood, and Lori Humphrey Newcomb's Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England both study lesser-known popular romances, and both use the last decade of the sixteenth-century as their starting points. This is where all similarities end. Courtland stays within a narrow two-decade period—from 1590-1608—while Newcomb considers a much broader period, to the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Because Newcomb consistently investigates the ways that popular romances function in society, her work is ultimately more successful as a work of cultural criticism, while Courtland's study prematurely terminates lines of inquiry to describe and evaluate what is found.

Though Courtland claims his book is a cultural studies approach to Heywood's romances, formalism and structuralism actually are the critical methodologies that shape this work. This is unfortunate, since the book demonstrates deep knowledge of Elizabethan culture and literature and begins in a promising manner. Courtland defines exotic citizen romances as hybrids of chivalric romances which were popular from 1590-1608 and which characteristically featured "citizen heroes, usually London tradesmen or apprentices on some heroic quest outside of England" (2001, xiii). His stated aim is to historicize Heywood's novice effort, The Four Prentices of Londonwith the Conquest of Jerusalem and the later play, The Four Maids of the West: Part I. Regretably, the three chapters that precede the reading of Heywood's two plays largely stand alone. There is little synthesis or integration between or within these chapters and, when the plays are finally analyzed, they are read as unproblematic reflections of two moments in history.

Chapter 1 discusses Elizabethan foreign policy and trade, economic hardships of the British poor, the Nine Years' War with Ireland, and two colonial discourses seen as representative of the time: Peter Martyr's The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West Indies (ca. 1555) and Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). Reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls, these two colonial discourses are then read separately within the triple context of capital adventurism, English "Christian Imperialism," and Masterlessness/Mastery, and the chapter itself ends flatly with the statement: "Wandering customs and itinerant lifestyles had no place in Spenser's reformed Ireland" (2001, 21-22).

Other chapters follow a similar pattern. Chapter 2 dutifully reviews Tzvetan Todorow, Frederic Jameson, Vladimir Propp, and Rosemary Jackson's contributions to fantasy theory and then drops this information in favor of a detailed analysis of structural similarities between...