Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama ed. by Jonathan Hart (review)

HUMANITIES jOflatl1an Hart; editor. the Renaissance: and Drama Garland Studies in the Renaissance. Garland PulJlishing. that the volume is a .1..1. u"'..................,... "'f"tI",.,,.<.t"Olu Divers Critical .tl.'J11i1'YI'\I"I"M,~t:' 188 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 strengthen the sense of green-world otherness, developing pastoral romance's assertion of the achievable rather than longing for the inaccessible , particularly in 'the capacity of dramatic theatre itself to create a world at once remote and present, oneiric and pragmatic, magical and ironicaL' Thomas Greene's 'Ritual and Text in the Renaissance' and Steven Rendall 's 'Readingin the French Renaissance: Textual Conununities, Boredom, Privacy' also repay attention. Greene argues that the medieval individual was endowed with aceremonial identity, gathered through the fabric of symbolic occasions. With sixteenth-century reformations, this ceremonial aspect declined, frequently becoming suspect and open to charges of hollowness. 1his opened a space in the Renaissance for a creative play with ceremo~a1 symbols, somewhere 'twixt ernest and twixt game.' Greene develops his ideas through examples from Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Spenser, and Shakespeare. His clear distinctions between medieval and Renaissance attitudes and reliance on texts from sophisticated literary culture to illustrate them raise many objections, but the essay is deliberately provocative, hoping to prompt the development of 'historical semiotics,' a cross-disciplinary enterprise he believes has been wrongfully ignored. Steven Rendall profitably contributes to the growing field of early modem reading scholarship, exploring the way telling and listening to stories either combated or contributed to boredom. Using Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron as the principal illustration, the essay suggestively explores how connections between reading/storytelling and boredom! idleness contribute to later conceptions of reading literature as a private leisure activity. Although short, this is a rich piece. Among the rest of the essays, tmfortunately, there is little to entice attention. Lisa Neal's sound consideration of conunernoration and friendship in Montaigne is so exclusively focused on him that it is largely of interest only to Montaigne specialists. Carla Freccero's work on gender ideologies is little more than a summary of the work of others, notably Ann Rosalind Jones, while Richard A. Young's 'Narrative and Theatre: From Manuel Puig to Lope de Vega' is a strong candidate for the 1996 'signifying nothing' prize. So accomplished is the banality of its observations that it is hard to imagine that this was not its intention: a warning to beware for rhetorically challenged graduate students. Here is a characteristic gem: 'In both cases, the narratives highlight the fact that drama, especially when looked at as text, is as much about what is said as about what is done.' The other five essays are focused on Shakespeare, mostly from a comparative literary perspective. As the editor Jonathan Hart's contribution asserts, what he outlines is not novel (in his case to see the tragic in the comic, disorder in order), his difference is one of emphasis. This can apply to them all. I doubt scholarly readers will find a great deal to detain them. Garland has produced a physically handsome book, but the decisionnot to provide English translations to long quotations in a volume which cites HUMANITIES 189 extensively ~om Italian, French,Spanish,and Latinis not particularlyuserfriendly . (THOMAS HEALY) Douglas H. Parker, editor. A proper dyaloge betwene aGentillman and an Husbandman University of Toronto Press. x, 292. $55.00 The deficit. Language rights. Identity politics. Civil disobedience. Distrust of those in power. Rather than a description of our late twentieth-century political landscape, this is actually a synopsis of the issues addressed by a little-known English Reformation dialogue. A proper dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman (1529-)0) presents a spirited attack on the clergy for bringing the whole nation into debt by land-grabbing and advocates disenfranchising them six years before the dissolution of the monasteries. The dialogue deplores the tyrannical - and not unrelatedburning of books and heretics, arguing for the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. And the interlocutors, a landed gentleman and a labouring ploughman who represent two opposite ends of the social scale, consider making a trip to London to present their views to parliament advising the complete separation of secular and ecclesiastical powers. As well as its historical appeal as a contribution to Reformation polemics, this text is valuable to current discussions of the sociology of knowledge, the codicology of the early book, and - most important - the neglected field of English dialogue studies. One example may serve to illustrate the nexus of these interests: when the gentleman says that no one until now has complained against the worldlypossessions ofthe clergy, the husbandman disagrees and produces an old treatise to prove it - which he reads in the text. The inclusion of this Lollard treatise, plus a second one on translating scripture appended at the end of the dialogue, supply moments of literary interest as well as legitimating Reformation claims via the authority of Lollard, and through them more ancient English precedents. Notably, the work contains in ovo many of the concerns of English dialogue literature of the sixteenth century: the interclass debate harkmg back to medieval estates satire; the focus on social and economic theory and practical applications thereof; the discussion of contemporary events anticipating the growth of dialogues into newsbooks; the use of dialogue to foreground issues of literacy, pedagogy, and the circulation of texts; and the interlocution itself typical of the home-grown English variant of the genre - identifiable with neither classical norcontinental Renaissance exemplars. Aside from the dialogues of canonical authors like More whose entire CEuvre has been edited, the appearance of A propel' dyaloge doubles the number of popular English Reformation dialogues available in modem critical edition, following as it does Parker's 1992 edition of the satiric dialogue Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe (1528) byJerome Barlowe and William ...