Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England by Kevin Sharpe , Steven N. Zwicker (review)

Abstract

MLR, 101.1, 2006 221 ing ventures certainly sought profit (financial and political) and knowledge without necessarily formulating schemes of domination in Asia. While the introduction conjures up visions of Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to India, in the main body of the volume the firsthalt is in the fairly familiar territoryof the Ottoman Empire. This area has not been neglected critically. The 'East' of Barbour's title may be seen to include, it seems, North Africa, the Roman Empire, and Egypt; whereas this reader would have been particularly interested to see neglected early modern narratives of a 'European' East being made to rub shoulders with those of the Asiatic East. The accounts of Tamburlaine and Antony and Cleopatra are much less vigorous than the subsequent detailed analyses of royal and civic spectacle. Here, Barbour clearly comes into his own with an animated discussion stretching from Peele's pageants in the 1580s to the later Jacobean offerings of Middleton, Webster, and Heywood, for example. If 'the East' is not always within Barbour's sights in this discussion, he is expert in moving from the details of ethnocentrism, racial mytholo? gies, and stereotyping in civic display to those of court masques, for example. However, the most absorbing and successful studies are contained in the second half of the book, with the accounts of the travels of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe. Coryate, the firstrecorded Briton with non-mercantile ambitions to reach India, is clearly important as a travel author who wishes to inform, intrigue, and please his readership rather than simply broadcast narratives of religious, commercial, or poli? tical conquest. Barbour clearly exposes how the Jacobean traveller misrepresents his experiences in order to heroize himself and to appeal to contemporary tastes for cul? tural stereotyping and exoticism. During his embassy to India (1615-19), Roe's brief was to convince the Emperor that Britain was not a marginal, insignificant kingdom. Born into an aspiring family of merchants with a grandfather and an uncle as ex-Lord Mayors of London, he was knighted by James in 1603. Thus, he was a seemingly ideal character to send on this embassy to represent both royal and mercantile interests. However, neither Roe nor his company had any detailed knowledge of the languages requisite for this kind of mission and he often found himself extremely vulnerable in his reliance upon the translation skills of the resident Jesuits. If the main thrust of this volume is not upon the London theatre world, as the title might have us believe, Barbour is clearly interested in the wider politics of the cultural performance of racial expectations and composes some compelling narratives of Jacobean travellers in the process. University of Wales, Bangor Andrew Hiscock Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge Uni? versity Press. 2003. 1X+ 363PP. ?50; $70. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker describe their project as a 'history of reading or a historicizing of readers', calling for 'a true collaboration between case study and theory, between materiality and aesthetics, between social history and exegesis' (pp. 2-3). For the contributors, this frequently means an engagement with (to use Joad Raymond's terms) not 'implied or ideal readers' but 'real readers' (p. 189) who have lefttraces of their reading experience. Raymond, forinstance, surveys the marginalia and commonplace books leftby readers of newsbooks and pamphlets. Not all acts of reading were so enduring, however. As Heidi Brayman Hackel explains, Anne Boleyn 'reportedly annotated Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man for the king with her fingernail' (p. 107), and most women were discouraged from annotation by pressures similar to those exhorting them to silence. The absence of annotation from early copies of Locke's Second Treatise of Government complicates Kirstie M. McClure's 222 Reviews attempt to recover the responses of its firstreaders; she uses an intertextual critique of its anecdote about Cato the Younger to argue that, notwithstanding its subsequent reputation as a 'founding text of modern constitutionalism', the text should be read as 'oscillating' between the factual and the fictional in the manner of Utopia (pp...