Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (review)

Abstract

Ronda Arab. Manly Mechanicals on Early Modern English Stage. Selinsgrove. Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2011. Pp. 225. $72.50. Ronda Arab's Manly Mechanicals on Early Modern English Stage is a recent entry in field of masculinity studies, scholarship that examines manhood and masculinity in literature and culture rather than naturalizing male experience as normative model of selfhood. Drawing on work of such gender theorists as Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, scholars began to examine modern masculinity in 1980s, historicizing concept by placing it within context of varied cultural phenomena: all-male theatrical troupes, humoral theory, civility manuals. The best-known scholars addressing subject include Thomas Laqueur, Gail Kern Pastel, and Laura Levine, and among studies offering broadest examination of topic are Bruce Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity (2000) and Alexandra Shepard's Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003). Smith explains masculinity primarily in its social context, sometimes with reference to somatic studies, as when he explains that in modern England, concept of masculinity was primarily biological, and formed by assumptions derived from Galenic theories of body. Shepard, a historian, offers pluralistic view that the meanings of manhood implicit in social practice were enormously varied, and contingent upon age, status, and context in ways which often competed with each other and clashed with patriarchal expectations of order (15-16). Her book is divided into two parts--one that examines prescriptive literature of period, written by and for a comparatively elite group of (8), and other an examination of social practice documented largely in court records. Key to Shepard's argument is idea that gender was merely one of many status distinctions. Ronda Arab follows Shepard's lead in her focus on masculinity of dramatic characters who engage in physical labor. Arab argues throughout for what she calls the existence of a discourse of work-centered masculinity in modern theater, one that posits and celebrates worker as physically powerful ... admirable even in his potential for violence and danger and wholly laudable in his potential to contribute to realm of England as worker and warrior (130). Each chapter of Manly Mechanicals examines relationship between a different dramatic genre and ideological conflicts or desires it presents onstage. Of four chapters, first deals with what Jean Howard has called chronicle comedies (The Shoemaker's Holiday, George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield), and second focuses on two political histories, 2 Henry VI and The Life and Death of lack Straw. The third chapter examines three romantic comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and Lyly's Sappho and Phao, while final chapter discusses masculinity of shopkeepers in several city comedies. Arab's decision to treat craftsmen, laborers, and tradesmen or shopkeepers as a single social category is confusing at times, as not all of these seem to fall into manual laboring classes, stated focus of book. The author seems most interested in artisanal professions--those trades that would have been represented in guild system during an earlier period. Yet, at times, artisans are conceived here as men who did physical labor, an expression that we usually take to allude to work that is unskilled and, if not strictly agricultural, then at least performed outdoors. The confusion may be intentional on Arab's part, since part of her purpose is to defy, challenge, and deconstruct class categories that served dominant patriarchal hierarchies (14). Yet Arab takes too little account of middling sort, as Theodore Leinwand called them in an important Shakespeare Quarterly article from 1993: protobourgeois whose growth is part of reason that we call this period early modern. …