A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen Francesca Bua Ann C. Christensen, ed., A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), lix + 229 pp., 18 ills. Ann C. Christensen's edition of A Warning for Fair Women (1599) decidedly accomplishes its stated goal and successfully asserts the play's "many merits for students of Shakespeare as well as directors and dramaturgs" (xii). A Warning for Fair Women is a domestic tragedy based on a real Elizabethan murder trial in which George Sanders, a successful London merchant, is murdered by his wife's lover, George Browne. Christensen's edition, with its modernized spelling, thorough endnotes, and inclusion of similarly edited primary sources, will no doubt benefit students, teachers, and dramatists alike. This edition provides a wealth of accessible and contextual information in the generous front matter, including but not limited to the genre of domestic tragedy, the staging and performance aspects of the play, and the uniquely compelling aspects of A Warning that number it as a play deserving of its own place in the early modern literary canon. Underscoring her commitment to this aim, Christensen explicitly showcases the pedagogical possibilities of her edition and helpfully offers a number of relevant and topical avenues of engagement for students toward the end of the introduction (e.g., public and private; church and state; work and professional identity; place and space/setting), under which she likewise includes discussion and/or research questions for students about early modern social and domestic spheres, providing examples from the play that delve into these ideas. In her introduction, Christensen immediately delineates the play's genre as a domestic tragedy, providing a helpful review for those who may not be well versed in the nuances of genre on the early modern stage. After turning briefly to a review of the critical attention given to domestic tragedy since the 1980s, Christensen outlines what is at stake in her edition and maintains the necessity for historicizing A Warning for Fair Women: [End Page 238] When we consider the social and institutional contexts for the play's depiction of marriage, family, religion, and the law, as well as tragedy as a genre, we can better appreciate both A Warning's novelty and its participation in aesthetic and cultural traditions … because A Warning stages uneven power and affective relations within a household space that is permeable, while also dramatizing, for example, facets of the legal system and the commercial economy, it offers insights into older forms of everyday life that still concern us today. (xxii–xxiii) For Christensen, A Warning for Fair Women shows how the early modern quotidian not only is of the past but also stretches into the present. Playfully, the editor uses the play as referent to various pop culture phenomena, the O. J. Simpson trial for example, to highlight this compression of the past into the present and to help facilitate connections between the genre of early modern domestic tragedy and modern notions of domesticity. In this vein, Christensen gestures toward true crime and domestic tragedy in the introduction, but unfortunately does not meaningfully engage with these themes in relation to A Warning's commitment to spectacle. The invitation to take up Christensen's call to read "the play's engagements with the society and culture of its time on a deeper level" (xxii) and consider the ways in which these engagements apply today is especially seductive when thinking about the sustained and ever-rising popularity of true crime narratives and domesticity's central role in them. An allusion to the O. J. Simpson trial, coupled with the misleading paragraph title in the introduction, left me itching to read Christensen's thoughts on the explicit early modern/modern connection between these two highly popularized and nearly selfsame genres. The edition continues to address possible contextual lacunae in one's first encounter with an early modern, non-Shakespearean play. For example, Christensen gives a historical overview of early modern performance conventions—notably the play's dating, theater company, and authorship, as well as its structure and stagecraft...