Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

Abstract

No generalization about a single year's collection of books can claim much significance-even in millennium year-yet it is a rare SEL reviewer who can resist making something of texts she has just herded into a single essay. So I begin with a few generalizations about expansion and diversification of recent scholarship. First, (effective) dramatic canon seems to be opening up. Shakespeare still claimed largest share of books in 1999 (only two were devoted to Christopher Marlowe and three to Ben Jonson). But many individual essays in this year's collections examine, or call for greater availability of, non-Shakespearean plays (asJames Bulman did last spring in his presidential speech to Shakespeare Association of America). As if in response, Manchester University Press is reprinting Revels plays in paperback, a welcome offering. Even more noticeable, critical practices introduced in last quarter-century of old millennium continue-but with a difference. Writers this year remain less interested in formal properties of a literary or dramatic text than in its function as part of material, social, economic, political, and cultural world in which it was produced and consumed. And it is true that some of this year's writers do return to same texts, same functions, and same debates-whether subversion/containment or feminist/new historicist. The difference, however, is that many others demonstrate a trend toward mellowness and amalgamation that recognizes multiple influences on texts and different functions for them. Among more noticeable trends is a move toward the domestic as historicist laser beam widens out from hegemonic power to illuminate educational practices (Eve Rachele Sanders), women's alliances (Susan Frye and Karen