Staging the Blazon in Early Modern Theatre Edited by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison Farnham, and: Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 by Andrea Ria Stevens (review)

Both of these books participate in a critical discussion that is deeply invested in the materiality of the early modern English theater. The sources of the scholarship that informs this discussion are primarily the plays themselves, rather than the archives or the contextual material that tends to support historicism. Emphasis is thus increasingly, and I think productively, falling on dramaturgy, confirming that we are starting to read plays with an eye to the forms and devices that make them work effectively on the stage. The new investment in materiality is, in other words, beginning to pay off in an exciting dramaturgical formalism.

The articles in the Uman and Morrison collection grapple with a formal conceit associated with Petrarchan poetry, the blazon. The purpose here is first to articulate the ubiquity of the form in the drama of the period, but also “to complicate what has become a standard reading of the blazon and to contribute to a growing understanding of the relationship between the material conditions of the theater and interpretations of dramatic literature” (3). The pieces in the collection, as well as the editorial mandate that organizes them are heavily indebted to work on the lyric blazon (Catherine Bates, Heather Dubrow, Lynn Enterline, and especially Nancy Vickers and Jonathan Sawday) and to scholarship on materiality and corporeality (Margaret Owen on dismemberment, Elizabeth Williamson on religion and theatrical materiality, and Carol Chillington Rutter on body parts). Also haunting all the essays in the book are the sixteenth-century collections of blazons anatomiques: Clément Marot’s famous sixteenth-century collection as well the standard manifestations of the conceit in the English Petrarchan tradition. But the point here is, I think, to challenge, at least to some degree, the notion that the blazon’s rhetorical force derives solely from its fragmentation of the body of the beloved into an inventory of desirable parts—a formal move that has been read as both erotic and violent in its drive to subjugate female subjectivity and self-governance to the aesthetic and artistic ambitions of the male blasonneur. Cora Fox’s excellent essay on Troilus and Cressida puts the collection’s project most succinctly: “on the embodied stage, the blazoning impulse fails to create the dismemberment it seeks to describe, and it points to the ways that these foundational economies of desire in Western culture may seem to represent binary models of subject and object, but can never actually be characterized by such clear demarcations of agency” (192).

To a great extent, the collection lives up to the challenge it sets itself. Grant Williams, using Barnabe Rich’s An Allarme to England and some of Shakespeare’s comedies as his sources shows that “in obsessing over the beloved’s body, the blasonneur really exposes himself to the scrutiny of the public” (21). This observation allows Williams to question the unshakable collaboration orthodox readings of the blazon find between male identity formation and patriarchal ideology. Ariane Balizet also draws attention to the ways in which the blazon destabilizes the notion of male authority as whole and complete when it is used to anatomize the male rather than the female body: “By staging this potential for violence,” she argues, “early modern drama challenges the violence encoded in models of domestic order […] by forcing the audience to consider the messy material consequences of ideologies built upon rhetorical dismemberment” (108).

Sarah Morrison’s work on Measure for Measure and The Duchess of Malfi considers how the material conditions of the theater allow us to “see blazonic violence as strangely restorative, resulting in re-materialized articulated female bodies” (81). Lisa Starks-Estes, working in a similar vein on...