Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski by Amy Boesky, Mary Thomas Crane

Abstract

434 Reviews those critics who have found the genre to be disturbingly misogynist. However, she comes to differentconclusions herself, arguing that the misogynist elements in the plays are countered by a strong admiration forvirtuous women who resist tyrannyand who use the language of religious piety to authorize their far from silent or obedient behaviour. While admitting that political and social authority in Jacobean drama is conventionally gendered, she shows how the link between biological sex and social gender is frequently broken. Not only can women act like men by appealing to ab? solute principles that override the patriarchal control of the tyrant but, in a society that places a very high value on obedience, it can be easily shown that most men are in a 'feminine' position in relation to their social superiors. This complicated 'knot of gender and authority' is tied tighter by persistent memories of Elizabeth's ability to take on some of the attributes of a male ruler and a growing dissatisfaction with James's corresponding inability to fulfilconventional expectations of manliness. Allman's central argument is a good one and her book is quite carefully writ? ten. The use of religious discourse is indeed one of the strategies by which women could achieve some degree of agency in the early modern period and there is a teasing paradox, which she might have made more of, whereby a society that insists on the inferiority of women nevertheless codes some of its most admired Christian virtues as 'feminine'. The book's main weakness is that it chooses to analyse only four plays in detail: The Maid's Tragedy, The Second Maiden's Tragedy (to be called The Lady's Tragedy in the forthcoming Oxford edition of Middleton), Valentinian, and The Duchess ofMalfi. These are all highly interesting plays and the firstthree of them, at any rate, have not yet been critically mined to the point of exhaustion, but there is no mention of Marston, Chapman, Ford, or even of The White Devil. Is it really acceptable to write a book on Jacobean revenge tragedy that includes a 42-page discussion of The Duchess ofMalfi and not even mention Webster's other great play? One consequence is that the book is rather repetitive, returning to the same char? acters, scenes, and passages again and again as it works through its argument about misogynist tyrants, revengers, noble women, and the more feminine type of men who are sometimes allied with them. Leaving out any discussion of earlier plays also exaggerates the Jacobean specificity of the dramatic situations and conflicts Allman explores, since versions of them can also be found in Elizabethan drama and the plays of Seneca. The finalchapter on The Duchess ofMalfi is quite an eloquent close reading that effectivelydraws together the themes ofthe previous chapters but, in the absence of any explicit cross-referencing to other plays, comes across as over-descriptive and rather hermetic. This is a coherent and well-written book but I cannot help wondering whether its scope is more that of a substantial article. Everything important and interesting in it could probably have been said in around ten thousand words. University of Hull Rowland Wymer Form andReform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor ofBarbara Kiefer Lewalski. Ed. by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 370 pp. ?39.50. ISBN0-87413-691-1. This volume of essays is a notable tribute to the lasting imprint of Professor Barbara Lewalski on the work ofher students and colleagues, as well as to her more general in? fluence on the study of English Renaissance literature over the past three decades. The variety of subjects and approaches represented in the collection is impressive?from abjection in the writing ofthe Prague-based neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Weston (in an essay by Louise and Winfried Schleiner) to the rhetorical drama of early seventeenthcentury political and social decorum (as outlined by Elizabeth Fowler)?a spectrum MLR, 98.2, 2003 435 which confirms just how wide-ranging Lewalski's impact has indeed been. As the co-editors Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane point out, these critics and literary historians inspired by...