Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. By Wendy Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xiv + 292. $60 hardcover

Abstract

Wendy Wall's book analyzes domestic scenes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama by blending the methods of recent cultural studies with the caveats of recent literary theory. Examining such plays as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Shoemaker's Holiday, The English Traveller, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, she argues that the scenes of everyday life become uncanny, shifting their meaning so that the familiar becomes strange. These moments challenge the usual associations their original audiences might have harbored regarding everyday tasks. A kitchen scene might invert class relations, blur gender stereotypes, suggest illicit sexual attraction, and so forth. The book considers such domestic activities as wet-nursing, housecleaning, food preparation, medical care, and butchering. For each activity, Wall examines contemporary texts, especially books of household advice and manuscript collections, to understand the culture of the early-modern householder. She then considers how popular drama fits into such a householder's assumptions and beliefs, and she discusses what such scenes offered to early-modern viewers.