Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early European Drama and Painting (review)

496Comparative Drama Howard essays, in particular, provide splendid surveys of their subject matter. Rutter offers, for example, a counter-reading that argues Zeffirelli's Taming of the Shrew "disarm[s] the sexual politics" (231), an analysis complementary to CaitmeH's earlier account ofthe film that had argued "the play's sexual politics " are "far too complex and problematic for a cinema audience" today. The two critics seem to riffoffone another, and the result is provocative and generative . Howard's essay on Shakespearean offshoots has far too much ground to cover, but he tries, valiantly, to include the principal films and to raise die principal questions. Once again the constraints ofspace make themselves felt, but this chapter points toward what may be the richest field for Shakespearean critics. I have mentioned some of the strengths ofthe volume, but that need not imply that any ofthe essays are weak, for none is. The quality ofwriting is exceptionally good, the essays include tantalizing bits oftrivia, and the contributors often sketch areas in which work needs to be done. The main criticism that I have is that I want more. Is it too soon to call for an expanded edition? Frances Teague University of Georgia, Athens Richard Helgerson. Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early European Drama and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 238. $29.00. Richard Helgerson is a fine writer, consistently producing articles that are a pleasure to read. Adulterous Alliances is no exception; Helgerson casts his arguments to cover more than early modern England and, moving from the 1590s into the eighteenth century, focuses on dramatic and visual representations of what he terms the "prehistory" of mostly middle-class domestic life (1). Interested in the realistic details abounding in the plays and pictures he interprets, he sees them as traces of social and political concerns in the bourgeoisie , worth excavating not only for their meanings but also as part of an historical record of"entanglements" with the state, "adulterous alliances" (189) meant to establish and perpetuate what will become middle-class domestic life. For the most part, he makes a strong case. He first takes up Arden ofFaversham, a touchstone play for a number of scholars tracing the emergence of domestic life on the early modern English Reviews497 stage. Helgerson shows how the murder ofArden, a wealthy former mayor of Faversham, in 1551 by his wife and her lover has fascinated the English ever since: he details accounts of the murder from Holinshed, who gives it more space than any other murder, to a 1992 celebration in Faversham of the frequently revived play's publication. Recycled into ballads, songs, an opera, a novel, and even a Heritage Center in Faversham, the story ofthe murder after Holinshed's description was not seen as proper historyuntil recently. Helgerson relates with care how early modern historians redefined history as "elevating" national politics, a focus on "high" matters addressed to aristocrats, not as narratives of "petty" murders, wonders and monsters—in short, novel events addressing "a base audience" (20). And then Helgerson returns to the scene of the crime to show how, in fact, Arden and the murderers were very much caught up in Court politics, its patronage, and reallocation of land after the dissolution of the monasteries. Those connections were covered up, even in Holinshed's version of the events, except for suggestions of Arden's avarice and Holinshed's comment that "God heareth the tears of the oppressed and taketh vengeance" (27). As to Alice Arden's role in the crime, Helgerson argues that the play registers domestic space as female space, a point made by other scholars, but adds that the plot emphasizes the adulterous, murderous invasion of"private" space as a way ofreflecting on national politics, "to know not only what was done by the state but also how its doings were experienced and resisted" (31). The next chapter focuses on Jane Shore, a woman loved by Edward IV and publicly humiliated by his successor, Richard III. Like the Ardens, Jane Shore's is an oft-repeated story in a number of genres, and Helgerson argues that hers is a "paradigmatic, perhaps even a founding, case" for...