The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, & the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature by Denys Van Renen (review)

In The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, & the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature, Denys Van Renen richly uncovers the ways in which marginalized groups—specifically, women and the working poor—shaped the emergence of middle-class consciousness in early eighteenth-century England. The first five chapters analyze discursive representations of women, servants, and the urban underclass to reveal that these groups, as Van Renen states in his introduction, "either provide the conceptual framework or embody the economic trends and cultural institutions of the period" (Van Renen 1). The final chapter contributes to discussions of the formation of the novel by asserting that the genre "renders it increasingly difficult to access the natural states that characterize the lower orders;" the novel, Van Renen contends, erases the lower orders' crucial role in sustaining and shaping society (17). Van Renen's careful and thorough examination of the lower orders' awareness of and agency within socio-cultural structures that aim to displace them provides a different and necessary perspective on the texts and period he treats.

The opening chapter reads Ben Jonson's (1572–1637) The Staple of News (1626) and Richard Brome's The English Moore; or The Mock-Marriage (1637) as representative of theatrical responses to emergent English economic theories and anxieties about transculturation—anxieties exhibited by both texts' treatment of the circulation of money and physical bodies—and discusses how women and the urban underclasses recognize and respond to these anxieties. Van Renen thoroughly considers Jonson's engagement with related cultural debates surrounding the printed news (as it shapes the identity of the reader and by extension the public sphere), British identity (as fragmented by increasing globalization), and commodity exchange (immigrants and foreign commodities coming into London, as well as the commodification of women). Van Renen then argues that Brome's play appropriates and revises The Staple of News to exploit specific cultural anxiety about the growing power of merchants while revealing the urban underclass and women's challenging of that power (34). A concluding example analyzes the character Millicent's use of blackface as demonstrative of the allure of the potential for the Barbary States to "be appropriated, Anglicized, and purified by English women" in their shrewd navigation of a changing, fluid economic marketplace. Van Renen demonstrates that within this changing world depicted by Jonson and Brome, "the urban underclass and women seem equipped to thrive" (41).

The second chapter focuses on Jonson and Brome as well, analyzing Brome's appropriation of Jonson, Brome's treatment of the changing topography and urban development of London and its suburbs, and the effect of that development on the poor. Given the framework of the chapter—internal colonialism and New World expansion—Van Renen may miss an opportunity to contextualize suburban developers' promotion of their project as a "'plantation'" with an analysis of the role of race and enslavement within the asymmetrical power dynamics he comprehensively illustrates (62). However, this chapter succinctly highlights what will remain the guiding tenet of Van Renen's project: the tension between, broadly speaking, "natural" and "unnatural" states and the ultimate displacement of the former by the latter.

Chapter three explores Aphra Behn's (1640–1689) treatment of natural or what he in this context calls "true" (86) or "real" (87) interpersonal communication exhibited and, ideally, fostered by the theatre. Van Renen lays out a nuanced reading of The Rover (1677) and The City Heiress (1682), demonstrating the female protagonists' acute awareness of the (gendered) structures in which they operate and their ability to recognize and subvert those structures (and the male characters). According to Behn, Van Renen suggests, language must be reinterpreted to allow for the emergence of new political ideas, and the theatre provides the best medium through which to foster that change.

Van Renen discusses the imbrication of military activities, behavior, and discourse on the life of the urban underclass in George Farquhar's (1677–1707) The Recruiting Officer (1706) in chapter four. Examining Farquhar's larger motif of air, Van Renen connects it to what he...