Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature by Anne Cotterill

Abstract

MLR, I0 I .4, 2006 Io87 the written record in ways that erased its performative markers. Natasha Korda's authoritative narrative on the role that women performed in the networks of com merce surrounding the theatre is especially insightful. She provides the reader with an abundance of interesting factual information and cogent analysis about females in the needlework and second-hand clothingtrades who supplied and maintained the theatre company's most important investment, the costumes. Most impressive, however, is the contribution from Scott McMillin; his research adds greatly to the knowledge of the theatrical apprenticeship system of early modern England, providing valuable evidence as to how boy actors were trained in their female roles. Using the text of Othello and the pattern of its cue lines, he reconstructs a process of rehearsal, and combining information about the repertory of the King's Men with the starting and termination indenture dates of apprentices, he unearths the relationship of repertory to a boy player's career as awoman. Given the parameters of a short review, it is difficult to do full justice to the variety and ingenuity on display. It should neither undermine nor detract from the appeal of the collection to say that it asks more questions than it answers and that it hints atmany more fascinating areas of research than it collates. Throughout, the reader is provided with an accessible and rigorous challenge to return to the archives and re think easy assumptions about and narrow interpretations of the early modern theatre. This largely engaging read is a valuable resource, belonging on the shelves of anyone interested in early modern theatre history. UNIVERSITYOFGLASGOW VICTORIAE. PRICE Digressive Voices inEarly Modern English Literature. By ANNE COTTERILL. Oxford: OxfordUniversityPress. 2004. x+34I PP. ?6o. ISBNo-I9-926iI7-2. Anne Cotterill of Rutgers University guides us through the long seventeenth century. Her subject is digression inDonne, Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Dryden, and Swift; her texts include the Anniversaries, Upon Appleton House, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, Paradise Lost, The Hind and the Panther, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. She surveys the defences that digression provided against political, sectarian, and literary attack, where it acted as smoke from a rhetorical ca nister, obscuring the intentions of the writers using it. The result is an involved, laborious study, making extensive reference to the criti cism of the last twenty years, especially from North America. Those who reach the last page will feel they have travelled far. Specialists will surely return to its detailed and intricate discussion of particular texts. For non-specialists, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the book is the very strangeness of the themes analysed. On Donne, attention is thus called to images of 'the twitching, bleeding, beheaded man with a rolling tongue' (p. 57); 'aship with furled sails moving eerily on awindless sea' (p. 58); women who 'give birth constantly and irresponsibly, even "after fifty"' (p. 62); stars that 'appear and vanish in inexplicable upheaval like earthquakes or wars' (p. 72); 'amix of whales, elephants, and pygmies, the world falling out of its cradle, and empty wombs, vacuums, and vaults' (p. 78), as well aswobbling planets, midwives who stifle the child, spies, prisons, and poisonous snakes: allwithin a scheme of language breaking down. Within this melancholy universe are also Biathanatos, where Donne defends suicide, and Pseudo-Martyr, where Donne condemns as vain and futile the suffering of recusant priests and lay people (pp. 79-80). Marvell and his Yorkshire excursions are also sinister, with themes that include drowning (p. I03), lesbian nuns (p. iIo), the 'coffin-like fit of Nun Appleton House' (p. I22), and Mary Fairfax's being hacked to bits in druidic rites (p. 123). Does Sir io88 Reviews Thomas Browne inhabit similar gloom? He does. Hydriotaphia evokes 'ashortness of time, a lateness and degeneracy inhistory' (p. 136); Religio medici was published as Pu ritans sacked Norwich Cathedral and destroyed its organ (pp. 142, I45), in an agewhen soldiers at aChristmas service aimed muskets atAnglican communicants, arrested all, and imprisoned some (p. 146). The Garden of Cyrus, like gardens themselves, results from awareness of the 'inexorability of death and oblivion' (p. 15 5...