Re-presenting “Jane” Shore: Harlot and Heroine by Maria M. Scott

63 BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* MARIA M. SCOTT. Re-presenting ‘‘Jane’’ Shore: Harlot and Heroine. Hampshire, UK; Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 141. $79.95. Ms. Scott traces the representation of Jane Shore, the controversial mistress of Edward IV, from the sixteenth century to the present. As she writes, who ‘‘can resist the story of the citizen’s beautiful wife who became the mistress of Edward IV and suffered at the hands of his brother after her royal lover’s death,’’ and she is right: the story of a merchant’s wife turned king’s concubine and then accused of harlotry and witchcraft by the notorious Richard III remains intriguing. One chapter also details Shore’s representation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature, giving particular emphasis to Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) while noting several late seventeenth-century court poems where Shore emerges as a cautionary figure for court mistresses who dare to presume the durability of their own sexual and political power. Ms. Scott’s research is sound and covers not only the more notable retellings of Shore’s story, such as the above mentioned tragedy, but other more easily missed modern accounts with titles, such as The Merry Mistress and The King’s White Rose, that speak to the undiminished appeal, or at least marketability, of her story. She shows that differences emerge in retellings of this story that reflect the cultural biases of each period and paradoxically that the story remains familiar: female power and female attractiveness are inextricably linked, and *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. the ‘‘victimization’’ of a beautiful and powerful woman makes the story all the more attractive. The problem is that Ms. Scott does just what she promises: she re-presents Jane Shore—and not much more. She finds, to no one’s surprise, that each interpretation of Jane Shore reflects its period , but never fully explores how the nexus of power, sexuality, class, and gender , so central to this story, operates differently for different audiences. Hence, she finds that given the new emphasis on pathos in the early eighteenth century, Rowe’s treatment of Shore is more moralistic and sentimental than that of his seventeenth-century predecessors and, given the rise of the merchant class, Rowe is more willing to critique the aristocracy and make heroic Shore’s merchant husband. She finds Shore’s new passivity, dramatically necessary to make her an object of pathos, morally distressing and punctuates that sentiment with an exclamation point without considering , much less examining, how passivity could function strategically in the eighteenth century as a medium for female empowerment. From a contemporary point of view not ‘‘being an active agent in [one’s] own story’’ is troubling. Also troubling is the emphatically normative treatment of a contemporary response in a work predicated on the idea that all readings are historically determined and hence none of them normative. To be fair, there are, even in the discussion of Rowe’s Tragedy , glimpses of promise, in particular when Ms. Scott addresses the tension between instruction and entertainment on the eighteenth-century stage, and how 64 even a penitential story serves an erotic end when performed by an appealing actress . But Ms. Scott moves quickly from this point and literally, in this case, to the next illustration, an even briefer discussion of some of the engravings accompanying Shore’s story during the eighteenth century. In the end, one wishes Ms. Scott had promised less and provided more. Cynthia Richards Wittenberg University ABIGAIL WILLIAMS. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681– 1714. Oxford: Oxford, 2005. Pp. 1 ⫹ 303. $90. As Ms. Williams points out in her Introduction , it has long been a cliché to speak of the political victors of the early eighteenth century as the literary losers. Those Whig poets, dismissed and ridiculed by Dryden and members of the Scriblerus club, while rarely read today, were in fact popular and successful artists in their own time and, as Ms. Williams argues, the chief consolidators of the dominant literary culture. This distinctly ‘‘Whig’’ culture sought to remodel English literary culture alongside the contemporary transformations of political and social life in the post...