Renaissance Drama, New Series XIII, ed. by Leonard Barkan (review)

Reviews 89 clarity and accessibility, with carefully done notes, glossary and index. As with all these volumes, the dramatic records of Newcastle-upon-Tyne have much to yield up to future study of the larger patterns of dramatic activity in medieval England. DONNA SMITH VINTER London Renaissance Drama, New Series XIII, ed. Leonard Barkan. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1982. Pp. 212. $24.95. The thirteenth volume of Renaissance Drama contains eight essays collected by Leonard Barkan under the title Drama and Society. The essays pertain to subjects that range from medieval folk drama to the Dryden-D’Avenant Tempest and, while all of them draw connections be­ tween drama and its social contexts, most have more to tell us about drama than about society. This need hardly be a fault, of course, yet it is a fact related to my one general criticism concerning the volume as a whole. Renaissance Drama specifically invites essays “of some scope,” yet for a collection hoping to attract innovative work, this volume main­ tains an oddly exclusive arena of discourse concerning the social/theatrical interaction. There are, to be sure, references to the well-known work of Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone as well as to more recent historical studies, but the paucity of references to certain potentially relevant figures is striking. By my rough survey, the volume contains two footnotes to Freud, one each to Robert Weimann, Jacques Lacan, and Stephen Greenblatt, none to Victor Turner, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or to recent work in the theory of dramatic reception, and, most interestingly, none to Marx. The reader interested in evaluating the effects of the general lack of interest in theory suggested by such omissions might compare an essay from Drama and Society, Catherine Minshull’s “Marlowe’s ‘Sound Machevill,’ ” with another recent essay that focuses on the same work and on some of the same issues— Bob Hodge’s “Marlowe, Marx and Machiavelli: Reading into the Past” (in David Aers, Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress, Literature, Language and Society in England 1580-1680 [Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981]). Minshull argues that “[Marlowe’s] secret purpose in The Jew of Malta was to satirize and undercut” the popular image of the Machiavellian villain by caricaturing it in the greedy Jew Barabas while representing true Machiavellianism incarnate in the politically successful Christian Femeze. Hodge, too, differentiates between Barabas and Femeze, whom he calls “the real Machiavellian prince,” but Hodge also goes on to offer a sophisticated reading of other aspects of Marlowe’s text, of nuances and seeming confusions outside the more limited scope of Minshull’s approach. Hodge’s larger view is made possible by his understanding of the role of absences and contra­ dictions in interpreting texts, an understanding born of wrestling with Marx and with Althusser’s interpretation of Marx as presented in Reading “Capital.” Individual essays in Drama and Society are of varying power and 90 Comparative Drama interest. One of the most lively is William Shullenberger’s reading of The Maid’s Tragedy. Shullenberger takes on critics who have disparaged the works of Beaumont and Fletcher for being sensational and theatrical rather than philosophical and poetic. His defense of the play’s “sensation­ alism” as “the inevitable effect of the psychic material of sexuality and aggression which it represents” seems compelling to me, and the essay’s stated intention—to examine the play’s “faults” as points of stress indi­ cating a “crisis of soul in a patriarchal culture acutely aware of its own unstable purchase on political and metaphysical authority”—struck me as exactly right. Even if Shullenberger’s analysis is not always as clear and forceful as his premises, the essay remains bold and useful. Equally interesting is Catherine Belsey’s study tracing eighty years of intense interest in and recurrent redefinition of Alice Arden’s crime, the notor­ ious murder that provided the central focus of Arden of Faversham. Belsey examines the play as well as contemporary accounts of the crime in pursuit of a larger argument concerning anxieties about the place of woman and the nature of the marriage relationship during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Two of the essays in the volume...