Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange ed. by David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton (review)

Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange is a timely intervention in the growing field of early modern literary geographies, particularly in reference to the 'spatial turn' in early modern studies and to the current interest in the importance of domestic rituals and their place in the larger landscape of early modern social interactions and hierarchies. David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton open the collection with a reading of perhaps one of the most (in)famous stagings of the betrayal of hospitality —Macbeth. This reading introduces the complexities contained in ceremonies of hospitality, and the important messages that both adherence to and deviation from these conventions could send. This analysis raises an awareness of how alien some of the complex facets of early modern hospitality may appear to a modern audience/reader. Equally, this introductory example sets the stage for how the ceremonies and rituals of hospitality offered rich framing devices for playwrights staging interactions across the social landscape, from meagre domestic meals to the entertaining of royalty. This was a period when debates around hospitality, and the question of its decline, were rich and prolific. This book's analyses of theatrical interventions into this debate offer a fascinating window into the shifting sense of what early modern hospitality meant, how it should be conducted, and what the implications of its enactment and potential decline may be.

The introduction sets out the volume's exploration of hospitality as a 'vernacular phenomenology: as a daily engagement, at once cognitive and embodied, into the conditions of human co-existence in a world of dearth and plenty as well as risk and trust' (3). Complementing this phenomenological underpinning of a quotidian, embodied relationship to space, many of the authors refer to Derrida's writings on hospitality, which insist on the traces of previous experiences that have bearing on the embodied self's interaction with its surroundings. The intertwining of these two related approaches offers a nuanced way to analyze the established, repetitious parameters of hospitality through their actual manifestations in different scenarios. Throughout the collection there is an admirable attempt to include complex and rigorous critical frameworks alongside historicist analysis. The theoretical breadth and density of the entries in the volume can, at times, be intimidating, but the reward is that each of these essays offers a challenging and novel insight into the subject matter at hand.

The collection is split into four sections, with the third and fourth sections feeling more cohesive as sub-groups than the first two, although that is no reflection on the standard of the individual essays. Part 1, 'Oikos and Polis', focuses on 'the status of the oikos as a scene of immanent politics' (6). The essays contained in this section tackle, in various ways, the intertwining of the domestic and political spatially, linguistically, and ideologically. Andrew Hiscock's essay uses classical Roman precedents and examples to situate hospitality, interrogating the writings of Seneca and Cicero alongside early modern writings on hospitality. Hiscock also focuses on war and hostility, and their recognition and reflection in disordered hospitable relations, with Troilus and Cressida providing an example of the disordered household mirroring the ongoing war outside its walls. Jessica Rosenberg tackles the relationship between hospitality and husbandry manuals, and looks at manifestations of their interaction in Hamlet. Rosenberg sees a conflict emerge between moral duties of thrift and hospitality, in which the two can come to seem incompatible. In a particularly interesting reading, Rosenberg shows that when Hamlet uses this dichotomy as an allegorical as well as literal insult to his mother Gertrude, it takes on a gendered significance that reveals the difficulties inherent in the requirement for women to give just the right amount of themselves away in hospitable situations. In the final essay of Part 1, Thomas P. Anderson looks at the politics of friendship in Coriolanus and the ways hospitality could challenge contemporary philosophies of friendship...