The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage by Michelle M. Dowd (review)

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage investigates the ways in which early modern drama stages and constructs alternatives to the presumably rigid system of primogeniture. Dowd’s central claim is that “early modern theater played a unique and vital role in shaping how patrilineage was understood” (5– 6), in no small part because “rightful succession is fundamentally a narrative construct” in the first place (1). The book’s broad scope demonstrates how inheritance was reimagined at all socioeconomic levels, offering an important intervention into the study of lineage, which has primarily focused on royalty and the nobility. Dowd is especially insightful in exploring how the very elements of primogeniture that ought to have enabled its stability were the elements that allowed for interpretation, flexibility, and idiosyncrasy.

The word “dynamics” in the title refers both to the functionality of inheritance and its variability, change, and movement. Dowd argues that, while “inheritance, to be sure, is usually understood in terms of temporality through a chronological line of decent,” genealogy was also being constructed in particularly spatial terms (8). She joins a growing number of critics in taking space as a crucial organizing principle, although her formalist orientation toward spatial rhetoric distinguishes her from those who think about geography and landscape, such as Garrett Sullivan and Julie Sanders, or scholars who study staging practices, such as Henry Turner and Janette Dillon. Instead, Dowd looks at “a range of dramaturgical practices and rhetorical formulations” that use space to navigate “the tensions between stasis and fluidity that characterized early modern inheritance practices” (12).

The Dynamics of Inheritance, despite its Shakespearean title, will be of interest to scholars of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century drama more broadly: the range of texts covered in the book is expansive, and encompasses both the well known (Jonson’s Volpone) and the obscure (Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas). Most chapters work comparatively, in keeping with Dowd’s emphasis on the variability of genealogical inheritance. Chapter 1 traces the history of patrilineal inheritance and locates this history within the cultural and economic conditions of Tudor England before exploring its manifestation in King Lear and The Taming of the Shrew. Chapter 2 shows how the unstaged and unseen elements of The Duchess of Malfi reveal the instability of dynastic succession. This chapter’s consideration of the “political fluidity that women and marriage could introduce into a patrilineal system” demonstrates most clearly Dowd’s feminist commitment (84). Chapter 3 looks at how travel intersects with inheritance by discussing the prodigal son trope in Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas and Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II. Dowd argues that in these plays prodigality is reconfigured as potentially productive, in keeping with changing socioeconomic values that privilege risk-taking.

The fourth chapter is the most relevant for Shakespeare scholars, and the reading of Pericles is one of the book’s strongest. This discussion confronts some of the greatest challenges to reading Shakespeare and Wilkins’s play and finds coherence and meaning in precisely the places that previous scholars have resisted or subordinated. Dowd offers inheritance as an explanation for the play’s formal inconsistencies and demonstrates how the play’s spatial and narratological wandering is already present in the “dislocation” of genealogy that occurs with a sole heiress (180). Dowd’s tripartite consideration of space, drama, and genealogy culminates in an argument that the constant movement and expansion within the play is a means of “dramaturgically managing the flexibility and expansion introduced into the family drama by the lack of a male heir” (163).

The fifth and final chapter pivots from excessive travel to extreme isolation in Volpone and Epicene. Dowd asks why Jonson repeatedly stages “claustrophobic households set in the middle of bustling urban economies” (28) and adeptly connects the social isolation of Volpone and Morose to their lack of heirs. The book’s epilogue then looks forward past the...