ADAM SMYTH, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Pp. xxv + 214. Woodbridge and Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2004 (ISBN 1 84384 009 X)

Abstract

APPEARING in the series Studies in Renaissance Literature, this collection offers a valuable approach to socializing and sociability, and one that raises pertinent issues about male bonding and male–female relations. Some of the essays, such as Charles Ludington's ‘The Politics of Wine in England, 1660–1714’, can readily be located in the world of historical scholarship, but others are more obviously literary in their interests. Karen Britland considers ‘Wine and Women in Early Modern Drama’, with particular reference to John Marston's The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedie of Sophonisba, as well as with interesting discussions of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida. The central symbol is Circe's cup, and Britland suggests that, while woman is central to the good functioning of society through her roles as mother and housekeeper, yet she is a constant reminder of death and mutability, intoxicating and confounding the senses like wine. Susan Owen takes the story forward into Restoration Comedy, suggesting that drink provides a way to explore the themes of sex and power. She argues that in Aphra Behn's The Rover, the treatment of drink reveals Behn's ambiguity about libertinism, the drunken rake becoming a predator, while in William Wycherley's The Country Wife, drink becomes central in an altered balance of power between the sexes. Lady Fidget's drinking song reveals that drink is the agent of women's emancipation, with men becoming marginal, and simply instrumental to women's purposes. Charlotte McBride uses the characterization of the Englishman as a beer-drinker to discuss national stereotyping in early-modern culture, and indicates how the representation of the Englishman as a beer-swilling drunkard reveals public concerns and subversive placings.