Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield

Abstract

no6 Reviews and noting how all of these issues are germane to recent critical work in the areas of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, disability, the status of indigenous peoples, and postcolonial politics and aesthetics.What isalso obvious from thevarious chap ters in this book is the enormous interest that students, from those doing evening classes through undergraduates to advanced postgraduates, also have in life writing. The contributors, who teach and research inAmerica, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, and South Africa and in differing academic environments, outline their responses to thevarious challenges posed by both the structures of the institutions inwhich theywork and the experiences and expectations of the student bodies with which they engage. They show a high level of theoretical awareness of work in the field, and a very impressive teasing-out of different pedagogical approaches within the different courses taught. The purpose of the collection, its editors state, is twofold: to suggest the range and creativity of lifewriting worked on in various departments and programmes throughout theworld, and to share the experiences of their contributors as sources of encouragement for new and veteran instructors of lifewriting. On the second count, they succeed admirably. I cannot imagine how anyone involved in any di mension of lifewriting, in either a theoretical or pedagogical sense, could fail to find something of interest, and even some inspiration, in thisvolume. On the first count, despite theirbroad range, they are perhaps a little less successful.We do not see examples here from teachers in all corners of theworld (Europe isnot accorded much space), and where non-English-language texts are considered as core literary works, most of them are taught in translation intoEnglish (French isan honourable exception, in part because of the significance of the critical writings of Philippe Lejeune and Roland Barthes). There is, for instance, only one Italian work of fiction mentioned (Anna Banti's Artemisia, studied as a mixed-genre text in a graduate seminar on lifewriting taught at Cornell byMiriam Fuchs). This raises the issue of the effectsof translation, and of teaching works in translation. The impact of this process in terms of both stylistic analysis and cultural context is not much men tioned, and this seems odd in a volume that isotherwise highly attuned to contexts of culture and race. This is a significant issue for those of us teaching texts in lan guages other than English (and often under pressure to teach these texts to larger audiences through translation). Apart from these issues, this book is an invalu able pedagogical and theoretical resource; to this end, the extensive bibliography provided by the contributors and supplemented by the editors is truly impressive. University College Dublin Ursula J.Fanning EarlyModern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Ed. byGarrett A. Sullivan, Jr,Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. xiii+338 pp. ?23.99. ISBN 978-0-19-515386-6. This collection of twenty-seven essays represents a masterclass in critical writing intended forgraduate and undergraduate teaching. There are two scene-setting dis cussions, Wendy Wall on what it meant to be an earlymodern author, and Roslyn MLR, 104.4, 2009 1107 L. Knutson on what itwas like to be a player. Four essays are allocated to each of Marlow, Shakespeare, and Jonson, leaving thirteen to cover the rest,who aremany: not onlyWebster, Middleton, Fletcher, and Ford, but also Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (dated to 1491 (p. 23) and 1497 (p. 12)) and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy ofMariam (1613). The chapter titles take the form 'X and Y': 'Death and The Revengers Tragedy (Michael Neill), or 'The Island Princess and Race' (Clare Jowitt).This might become rigid, but in practice each essay skilfullymakes its topic complex, usually by ar guing historically from earlymodern understanding of the chosen terms. Students will soon be immersed in, say,what Erasmus said but also?less expectedly? inMary Frith's lively interventions into theatrical space, or the complexities of seventeenth-century ideas about race. A second strategy is to break down likely student preconceptions. For example, Kristen Poole writes that 'there is really not such a thing as "Elizabethan religious thought'" (p. 102). The idea of...