Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (review)

Amassing a wealth of interesting information about domesticity in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, largely from domestic guides and cookbooks, Wall argues that domesticity, not only as experience but as fantasy, is at the core of early modern English national identity, at least as it is represented on the stage. While the book includes a chapter on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, one of its most important contributions is the sustained attention it gives to plays that are still comparatively neglected. Wall offers us detailed readings of Gammer Gurton's Needle, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Shoemaker's Holiday, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and The English Traveller. Along the way, she briefly discusses numerous other plays, producing as a result a nuanced account of the varied ways in which domesticity was staged in the period.

Wall is particularly interested in how charged dramatic moments depict domestic practice, even when it is not marked as transgressive, as "disturbing or slightly fantastic" (5). In such moments, she says, household work was "exoticized but celebrated as the cornerstone of community-formation" (58). Again and again, Wall shows that what might now appear fantastic about both the household and the work performed therein was the power invested in women, and how adult men, as well as children and servants, depended on women for the most basic sustenance, the most intimate and invasive bodily care, and for language itself. Wall's book expands our understanding of housewifery to include activities such as laundering, dairying, butchering, and the preparation and administration of physic. She identifies a contradiction at the heart of domesticity, namely, that it was "key to preserving the diet, rituals, and methods that constituted English culture" but was also "the abject realm to be disavowed in the name of progress" (5).

The first chapter provides a helpful introduction to the English household guides and cookbooks on which Wall bases her portrait of domesticity. Working carefully through these texts, rather than mining them for juicy tidbits (of which there are also very many), Wall demonstrates how many of them there were, how contradictory their conceptions of housewifery are even within a single text, their conventions as a subgenre, and the fascinating domestic fantasy they present, a "world with a premium on decadence, malleability, and spectacle" (45). In these domestic guides the "tension between the familiar and unfamiliar provides the material and conditions of a domestic, and sometimes national, fantasy" (28). As Wall suggests, these very oppositions are being invented through texts such as these. Neither the domestic nor the exotic, the familiar nor the strange has a stable meaning in this period.

The second chapter, on the "advent of English comedy," connects Gammer Gurton's Needle to women's roles as teachers and disciplinarians. Although Wall cites other critics in support of her claim that Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1550-60) is the first English play, I find this bewildering, since it erases the English cycle dramas in which domestic life is so vividly portrayed and in which Noah's wife emerges as what is arguably the first stage shrew. This chapter contends that housewifery was linked to "a particular kind of national identification" (60) because mothers taught their children the native tongue in early childhood, and often did so while they were engaged in other forms of household work. Thus the household was the cradle of the English tongue yet had to be repudiated when the son went to school and was inducted into "proper civic masculinity" (60).

A chapter on A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor examines the relationship between fairy lore and housecleaning, arguing that both plays exploit that connection so as to explore "how ordinary tasks...