Horrid Spectacle: Violation in the Theater of Early Modern England (review)

Deborah Burks has three objectives. First, she wants "to reenvision Restoration drama's historical and political place by redefining the usual . . . period within which we imagine it to belong" (1–2). Second, she affirms that early modern stage representations of rape, ravishment, and torture, as well as later polemical texts that use such tropes, derive from the sexualized imagery of martyrdom in John Bales's Epistle exhortatorye (1544) and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (especially the edition of 1563). Finally she argues "that English writers . . . perceived the violation of their rights to property and to religious faith as . . . analogous to the violation of a woman's body in rape or to the violence suffered by the male body in castration" (13).

The book takes the reader from Foxe and Bale to regicidal and Whig polemicists, and from Shakespeare and Chapman to Dryden and Behn. From 1544 to the Restoration, the language of rape and irregular sexuality goes hand in hand with the violation of property rights and religion. The strength of the book is Burks's forceful and convincing argument that the early modern period consistently stages "representations of abusive authority as rape" (89), whether it be in the Elizabethan and Jacobean, or the Restoration theater, where it is "the indulgence of desire that led monarchs to oppress their subjects" (302). The evidence that Burks adduces to demonstrate the political valence of the language of rape and sexuality is so copious that its sheer volume compels belief. There are seventy-four pages of notes, many of them referring to an impressive array of primary sources. Unfortunately the book does not have a bibliography.

The weakness of the book is in making credible the argument that the polemicists, Bale and Foxe to begin with, but also Prynne, Coke, Milton, and other regicidal and Whig writers, have a specific influence on early modern drama. The early chapters are especially weak in this regard. For instance, Burks details Foxe's narrative of Anne Askew's rhetorical sparring match with a priest sent to shrive her, then jumps to Shakespeare: "In Measure for Measure a similar contest develops between Angelo and Isabella . . ." (89–90; emphasis added). The final scene of Measure for Measure, Burks says, "presents an image not unlike the woodcut John Daye used to illustrate Foxe's account of Anne Askew's execution" (93; emphasis added), so that "for the Protestant members of Shakespeare's audience, this final scene must have resembled many of the woodcuts in Acts and Monuments" (95; emphasis added). Ultimately Burks acknowledges the weakness of an argument that depends so heavily on likeness when, in regards to Bussy D'Ambois, she says that "It is not necessary to debate whether . . . Chapman was influenced by either of these specific images [Bale's account of Askew or the woodcuts in Foxe's book]; all three share a common strategy for villainizing the men they portray" (127). A common strategy betokens similarity, but it is not the same thing as direct influence.

The book also suffers from bad proofreading. Some of the problems seem careless: we are told that polemical texts construct an audience "compromised [sic] of reformed and reforming believers" (73). Some are minor but troubling, as in the failure to match Burks's subject with Middleton and Rowley's predicate in the statement that Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling "comes to 'love anon' what she initially 'fear'st and faint'st to venture on'" (163). Some are puzzling, as when Burks calls Rochester "Wilmot" and Buckingham "Villiers," but happily calls Cooper "Shaftesbury" (342). In any case, a good editing job would have made the book briefer and more cogent. After two hundred pages of text, Burks does not need to remind the reader that "Dramatists routinely used plots centering on sexual coercion and violation as mechanisms for commentary on political power" (231).