Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community by David Gay , James G. Randall , Arlette Zinck (review)

Abstract

reasonablespreadof plays, though with a recurrentfocus on Shakespearethat does not leave a great deal of space for other dramatists.Janet Adelman's opening essay provides an important antidote to the tendency amongst Renaissance scholars to treatThomas Laqueur'saccount of the one-sex model as orthodoxy.Adelman looks closely at a range of English vernacular medical treatises and finds the Galenic model not only notablyabsent,but subject,where present,to vigorouscritique.She uses this finding not only to question broad assumptions about early modern understandingsof gender, but alsoto contest, throughbriefbut suggestivereference to Antony andCleopatra, the widespreadtendency to write about boy-actorsas though they necessarilyhighlighted female absence. Anne Walworth'sessay also takes up the question of oppositional constructions of gender via contemporary medical theory, demonstrating how the theatrical use of illusion to cure delusion (both in stage-fictionand in documented medical practice)exposes the ambivalence of such constructions. Michael Shapiro'saccount of the advent of actressesto the Englishstage usefully complicates Stephen Orgel's recent work (in Impersonations) by shifting Orgel's view of England as uniquely insistent on an all-male acting profession to one that sees England simply as later than other European countries in introducing women to the stage. Shapiro also returns to the question Orgel was asking when he first began work on the subject of boy-actors in the late I98os: 'Why were women more upsetting than boys to the English?' Where Orgel's own discussion, stimulating and suggestive as it is, considers the question within a context that assumes sexual anxiety and thus necessarily loads the answers in that direction, Shapiro brings together the available evidence on actresses before and just after I660 succinctly and helpfully, and reframes the argument in economic rather than sexual terms. Laurie Osborne's article offers some illuminating discussion of the female playgoer. Concentrating on Love's Labour's Lost and Hamlet, she argues that Shakespeare's representations of female spectators on stage play out Stephen Gosson's concern that women in effect provoke theatricality by their presence. Her analysis shows how when men become the spectacle their female audience may be empowered by thereby becoming established as spectators, but demonstrates at the same time how compromised by issues of class and formality that empowerment is. Other essays look at plays by women (Cary; Cavendish and Brackley), Marlowe's Dido, Webster's WhiteDevil, and other Shakespearean plays. The book offers a range of thoughtful and stimulating approaches to gender on the Renaissance stage. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM JANETTE DILLON Awakening Words.John Bunyan and the Languageof Community. Ed. by DAVID GAY, JAMES G. RANDALL, and ARLETTE ZINCK. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 223 pp. f30. This volume is offered as a reflection of 'the community of scholarship formed around the International John Bunyan Society'. In his introduction, Richard L. Greaves reminds us, 'Words were Bunyan's sole means to reach his disparate audience. He had no traditional liturgy, pageantry, or clerical costume and virtually no material symbolism.' A 'threefold investigation' is counselled for the grasping of Bunyan's meaning: 'to date each work as precisely as possible [.. .], to assess Bunyan's remarks in the context of contemporary writings; and to subject [his] language' to an appropriate 'biblical reading'. Bunyan's commitment to the invisible makes contextualization difficult. We are reminded (p. 27) that the complex intertextuality of the more materialist Milton reasonablespreadof plays, though with a recurrentfocus on Shakespearethat does not leave a great deal of space for other dramatists.Janet Adelman's opening essay provides an important antidote to the tendency amongst Renaissance scholars to treatThomas Laqueur'saccount of the one-sex model as orthodoxy.Adelman looks closely at a range of English vernacular medical treatises and finds the Galenic model not only notablyabsent,but subject,where present,to vigorouscritique.She uses this finding not only to question broad assumptions about early modern understandingsof gender, but alsoto contest, throughbriefbut suggestivereference to Antony andCleopatra, the widespreadtendency to write about boy-actorsas though they necessarilyhighlighted female absence. Anne Walworth'sessay also takes up the question of oppositional constructions of gender via contemporary medical theory, demonstrating how the theatrical use of illusion to cure delusion (both in stage-fictionand...