Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (review)

Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama by Michael Neill. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+527. $34.50 cloth.

Why do we need a collection of essays on early modern English drama ranging from the late seventies? Because Michael Neill is not as well known as he is informative and thought-provoking, less influential than he deserves to be. His collection is welcome for what it teaches about the plays and the period, for what it shows about our craft, for what it says about critical approaches, and for what he exemplifies as a scholar.

This collection is informative because Neill weaves a scholarly tapestry of early modern England and its drama, neither history as context for plays nor plays as strands of history. "To recognize the ways in which the kind of history I am interested in exploring may be inscribed in the minutest detail of dramatic texts is, of course, to recognize the final inseparability of the aesthetic from the social and political in literary works" (5). The fifteen essays that follow the brief introduction are divided into "The Stage and Social Order" (seven) and "Race, Nation, and Empire" (eight). But throughout they interweave thematically. The initial essays open with questions about hierarchies of service and rank, weaving among social historians today, conduct tracts then, local histories and anecdotes, and plays, bringing rogue Gamaliell Ratsey together with stage villains Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi and De Flores in The Changeling; the Marquis of Newcastle with Kent and Lear; I. M. and his plea for reform of the patronage of serving men with Mosby in Arden of Faversham; Cleaver and Dod's A Godly Form of Household Government and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha with Sir Giles Mompesson and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City Madam. This web blends into questions of the adulterous connotations of bastardy and then counterfeiting from Joan La Pucelle in 1 Henry VI through Edmund in King Lear to Spurio in The Revenger's Tragedy. The series concludes in a rhetoric of hands from John Bulwer's The Art of Manuall Rhetorique that relates a semiotics of the conspirators' bloody hands in Julius Caesar, the severed hands in Titus Andronicus and of polemicist John Stubbs and of New World Natives, by way of bloodied hands like those of Macbeth and his lady. The following essays open with considerations of Othello, weaving in the importance of place, political and social and sexual position, so that questions of replacement and adulteration both refer to earlier essays and merge into questions of adultery and race, bestiality and alienation, colonization and empire. Then, colored by postcolonial thinkers and writers, accounts of colonizing savagery and imperialism in Hakluyt's Voyages, Purchas's Pilgrims, and other travel literature modulate into Fletcher's The Island Princess and The Sea-Voyage with The Tempest before they turn to the colonization of the Irish in Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, John Derricke's Image of Ireland and other polemics, representations in the maps of John Speed and Richard Bartlett, thence back to Shakespeare's histories, particularly Henry V. Finally they weave through grammars and tracts advocating a uniform national language only to reemerge in travel as translation with Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The effects in Neill's collection, just like the multitudinous reports of the age of travel and discovery or of Ben Jonson's record of intellectual travel in Timber, Or Discoveries, are cumulative. Neill's strands, seemingly disparate, keep resurfacing in the tapestry through the social or political or economic framework or a cue from the connotations of a word or an image or an action represented as historical or fictive.

Neill's weaving displays radical conservatism or conservative radicalism. That is, he conserves history by...