Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599 by Ineke Murakami

Abstract

Ineke Murakami. Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599. volume 18 of routledge studies in renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: routledge, 2011. 247 pages. $141.Reviewed by Jennifer R. RustIneke Murakami's Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599 testifies to vitality of tradition in fif- teenth and england. it is a significant contribution to schol- arship on pre-shakespearean drama, particularly in its attention to continu- ities between late-medieval drama (represented by initial chapter's analysis of fifteenth-century Mankind) and flourishing professional theater of later sixteenth century (addressed in concluding chapters on Marlowe and Jonson). Murakami argues that dramatic allegories of moral plays are so- phisticated discourses that enable new forms of consciousness. she elaborates this claim with ambitious theoretical forays, drawing upon Marx- ism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics to explicate breadth of cultural and social work performed by these dramas. in addition to providing a new per- spective on english tradition of moral drama, Moral Play and Counterpublic makes a meaningful intervention in growing body of critical work on early modern spheres.In Murakami's introduction, interrelation between the genre of mo- rality and emergence of diverse sixteenth-century spheres is posited as unifying principle (4) of study. Murakami favors Michael warner's formulation of over Jurgen Habermas's much- critiqued account of public sphere as primarily an eighteenth-century bourgeois phenomenon. warner's concept of counterpublics originally the- orized relations between, on one hand, discourses produced by marginalized collectivities and, on other, a dominant discourse in contemporary American culture. Nonetheless, Murakami finds this concept to be apt to describe kinds of publics that emerge in conjunction with early modern theatrical performance, particularly their ephemeral, non- elite and often agonistic (12), anti-authoritarian characteristics. Murakami further builds on steven Mullaney's contention that early modern theater was a particularly fertile zone for producing publics: [a]s a particularly hybrid me- dium that partakes of several modes of publication at once . . . drama constitutes a mode of publicity that 'precipitates new forms of critical and aes- thetic thinking about . . . relation between theatre and commonwealth' (13). Murakami is particularly concerned to illuminate hybrid nature of moral play itself, as a discursive tradition that moved both within and outside authoritative institutions without collapsing into either propaganda or politically radical ideology (13). Moral plays were particularly adept at so- liciting counterpublics because they activated among their audiences a faculty for judgment-of not only aesthetic quality of play but also its po- litical and social dimensions (14). To further this interpretation, Murakami develops a versatile concept of allegory, which emerges as a polyvalent and dynamic discursive mode that enables moral drama to address political, so- cial, economic, and religious tensions in a flexible and sophisticated manner. Murakami argues that early modern moral plays are best understood through this multifaceted, fluid conception of allegory, which liberates these dramas from some of more stultifying homiletic interpretations to which they have been subjected in past.Acknowledging that legible evidence of counterpublics generated by early modern moral plays is often hard to discern, Murakami nonetheless in- sists that a careful analysis of historical and literary documents will allow one to extrapolate publics(15) that moral plays both invited and sum- moned into being. …