Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage. Matthew Hunter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. vii+259.Lisa HopkinsLisa HopkinsSheffield Hallam University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMatthew Hunter’s lucid and innovative book begins from the assumption that play scripts were mined by audiences and readers for examples of eloquence: “In early modern England, consuming drama was a practice of imitating it, and imitating it for the sake of its talk” (2). Hunter considers, among other things, conversations in plays in which lines of earlier plays are quoted (perhaps the most famous example being the many characters who quote or paraphrase Hieronymo’s “Oh eyes, no eyes” speech from The Spanish Tragedy) in order to pursue his aim of giving us “a book about the relationship between aesthetic form and social life in early modern England” (3). Aesthetic form is easy to recover since it survives in the plays themselves; understanding the lived experience of social life is a more complex and ambitious goal, but it is a necessary one for Hunter because he is committed to understanding literary styles as “more than ornaments to action, but rather constitutive ways of doing things to the world” (3). This unusual and provocative insistence that plays had effects off the stage as well as on it recalls but recasts the terms of the old debate about containment versus subversion. Hunter similarly revisits but revises the concept of Renaissance self-fashioning with a very different take that suggests that even failure has value. He uses Thomas Tomkis’s underappreciated Albumazar to argue that even when quotations misfire “the early modern stage recuperates them as new forms of sociability” (5).This attention to Albumazar is only one of several ways in which the book does not line up the usual suspects. There is no Ford or Fletcher to be found in its pages and almost no Webster, although Marlowe and Shakespeare do figure, and both are presented as the authors of texts that are seminal in the development of styles. Both are also particularly interesting examples of the fact that the “feedback loop” (4) between conversation as originally found in one play and conversation as subsequently imitated in another is complex. Hunter sees all style as aspiring to the condition of the charismatic (23); when it achieves this, it has the potential to bond audiences through a sense of shared sensibility and shared language, and this is particularly important in a society that he views as becoming increasingly aware of the concept of the public. (The idea of publicness is almost important to the book as the idea of style.) However, to imitate someone else’s style risks implying a lack of original ideas, which is why the first section of the introduction is entitled “Misfires and Heaps.” In it, Hunter sets out the book’s thesis and usefully explains that it aims to hold in tension “the idea of style as a way of doing something” and “the idea of style as the way of doing something” (7). In a discussion that I found particularly suggestive, he distinguishes style from form but explains that throughout the book he aims to track a dialectic between them.After this substantial introduction the book has five chapters. “Stage Talk” pays particular attention to Tamburlaine, whom Hunter identifies as “an avatar … of publicness” (48) and who allows him to trace “the strange static electricity that gets generated when the language of Marlowe’s play is brought into ordinary social interactions” (41). We then move on to “Love Talk,” where Romeo and Juliet is the star exhibit, because Hunter identifies Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and Romeo and Juliet as among the most influential of Shakespeare’s texts. Although, as James Thurber inimitably pointed out, Hamlet is full of quotations, Hunter sees it here as influenced rather than influential, since he regards Polonius in particular as responding to Lyly (139); the Lylyan qualities of Polonius’s talk, along with the Lylyan aspects of As You Like It, are explored in the third chapter, “Court Talk,” although Hunter provocatively identifies “court talk” as “a style that does not exist” (118), since we only ever encounter aspirants to it rather than bona fide practitioners. The fourth chapter is on “Tough Talk” (as found for instance in Every Man out of His Humour, The Malcontent, and The Roaring Girl) and considers among other things the tension between publicness and embodiment. Finally, there is a chapter on “Plain Talk,” exemplified above all by city comedy, with special attention to Every Man in His Humour and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. The book concludes with an afterword that offers some interesting remarks on Shakespeare’s late style in general and The Winter’s Tale in particular.Hunter’s book is not only about style but stylish in itself, and although it is very high concept, it is also attentive to detail: he explains that his sophisticated approach to conversation is informed by metapragmatics, but he also offers a lot of very nice close reading. It is a pity that there is persistent confusion between principle and principal (e.g., 52–53) and compliment and complement (e.g., 110–11), but I suspect this might well be the fault of the copyeditor rather than the author, and it is easy to see what is meant. Above all the book’s examinations of its various chosen styles are valuable in their own right as well as illustrations of the author’s thesis. In this age of social media, it is good to be reminded of “the special cachet that humanism placed on the arts of conversation” (8) and to be offered such a sustained and perceptive account of the way in which early modern plays contributed to the development of talk both on stage and off it. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724734 Views: 27Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 08, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.