Shakespeare and Domestic Life: A Dictionary by Sandra Clark (review)

Shakespeare and Domestic Life is the latest in the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series. As is true for other dictionaries in the series, this one is well written, carefully edited, and interesting. The focus on "domestic life" makes this dictionary less specialized than some others, such as the dictionaries of Shakespeare's medical, economic, and legal language. Instead, Shakespeare and Domestic Life features a wide range of terms related to food, clothing, furniture, objects, architecture, marriage law, servitude, and other domestic topics. This expansiveness is both a drawback and a strength. On the one hand, it is not entirely clear how selections were made, given, for instance, that Shakespeare and the Language of Food (2011) runs the same length as this book—why were certain types of food included and others excluded? While some of the terms are familiar ("age," "bed," and "clock"), others are less so ("aglet," "bombard," and "cambric") (xi). On the other hand, the breadth of the subject means that the book showcases the richness and complexity of the household as an economic, social, cultural, legal, material, and ideologically contested space.

The definition of the term "domestic" is not as clear-cut as terms that govern some other dictionaries in the series, since the word itself was undergoing change in the early modern period and even modern definitions vary, ranging from individual household to nation. In her introduction, Clark explains that the word "domestic" began to be used for the household in the late sixteenth century, and "the conception of the household itself was in the process of change: from being a 'little commonwealth', headed by a man, it was becoming a feminized private space, and the continuum between public and private that had characterized the medieval household in its relations to society was gradually breaking down" (2). Indeed, historians of domesticity such as Michael McKeon, whose Secret History of Domesticity (2005) is a central text on the subject, have argued that the shift toward a conception of "public" and "private" as opposing rather than as continuous concepts occurred later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Given the range of meanings for the term "domestic," a concentration on "domestic life" as household seems important, but still leads to problems of definition, given that households can be as varied as the tavern and the court—spaces that may be said to be private and public at once.

How, then, does this dictionary define "domestic life"? Clark writes that she has "included terms relating to the material processes of household life, domestic activities and implements as well as those of roles and relationships, such as father, mother, husband, wife, nurse, servant" (3). In addition to discussing marriage, stages of life, and birth and death, Clark also notes that "there are forms of social life in Shakespeare's plays that are in some wider sense 'domestic', even if they take place outside the home, such as Falstaff's relationships with Mistress Quickly and other frequenters of the tavern, or interactions between citizens over domestic issues, as in Sir Thomas More" (3). In practice, however, the selection of terms suggests a more modern perspective on the idea of the domestic realm, largely concentrating on words we would associate with the "private" home.

In spite of the somewhat nebulous boundaries around the subject for this dictionary, much can be learned from reading the entries, particularly for students who are not familiar with the historical context for the early modern household; they will find in each entry a clear definition, a selection of pertinent moments in and quotations from Shakespeare's plays, some historical information, and a fine selection of recent criticism. For advanced scholars, much of the material in the dictionary will be more familiar. Generally, the value in reading through the dictionary lies not so much in looking up particular concepts but in browsing, seeing connections between terms, and having quotations on certain topics grouped together. The entry on "feast," for example, points us to...