Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.(essay)(Critical essay)

It is impossible to complete the reading for this review and continue to believe there is a crisis in scholarly publication that involves the production of too few books! All complaining aside, in the field of Tudor and Stuart drama, I found forty-seven scholarly monographs and collections of essays that were squarely in the field. Of course, American university presses do not publish as many monographs in this field as they used to: there were only eleven scholarly books produced by these presses (with a majority from the University of Delaware, long a central press in this field), but British university presses contributed eighteen books; Ashgate, Palgrave, and Routledge combined to furnish another thirteen, with five from other presses. In addition, companions, guides, and lexica continue to proliferate, and I counted twenty-eight of these. Finally, there were fourteen scholarly editions and anthologies. There are so many new books that it is difficult for anyone to remain current with the criticism in the field; hence, I suppose, the usefulness of this annual review. This year produced a number of interesting, important, and original studies, which wouldn't happen if a healthy number of books did not make it into print.

I have divided this essay, as several past reviewers have done, into a large section on scholarly books, another on scholarly editions and reference works, and still another on companions, guides, and other books aimed at students. Books that seemed primarily intended for the general reader have not been reviewed. I've divided the first section on scholarly books into rough subsections based on topics, some conventional and some not, some overlapping and some discrete.

SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPHS AND COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS

"Out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learn'd," says Jaques at the end of As You Like It, and this seems to have been taken to heart by several critics this year, since there are four books that focus primarily or in part on religious conversion. Daniel Vitkus's Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630, Jonathan Burton's Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama 1579-1624, and Julia Reinhard Lupton's Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, all treat conversions among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as a central trope. Mark Netzloffs England's Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism also touches on this theme. In general, these four books are part of a larger group focused on the multicultural and even global contexts for early modern drama, both in its own time and in the years since. Some of these books refer specifically to 9/11, and I think it's no accident that there is a focus on the early modern Islamic world in several works this year.

Conversion, on the other hand, relates these books to another major emphasis this year, on change, transformation, and liminality. Judith H. Anderson's Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England provides a theoretically sophisticated account of linguistic change in the period, and several other books focus on various kinds of cultural transformation. This focus on change may represent a way out of the subversion/containment binary that has haunted New Historicism and responses to it. On the other hand, several books oppose this trend by seeking to pin down and identify Shakespeare's political, religious, or literary identity.

Another large critical division can be drawn between books that take a materialist approach and a smaller group that seeks an alternative to the still-dominant mode of cultural materialism. A collection of essays edited by Ewan Fernie called Spiritual Shakespeares is the clearest exemplar of a simultaneous turn from historicism and materialism to spirituality, transcendence, and theory, although Lupton's book also falls within this category. A large group of materialist books focus on "subaltern" topics: the representation of servants, women, and other subordinate and marginal figures in the drama of the period. There are three books on anatomy or dismemberment, continuing the recent emphasis on the early modern body, but, to my surprise, no books pursuing the relationship between the stage and other nonmedical fields of early modern science. There are also a number of critical books on issues of print publication and the material conditions of performance. Two of these books, Zachary Lesser's study, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade, and Mark S. Dawson's Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London, seemed especially interesting and original.

Vitkus and Burton both discuss the relationship between early modern England and the Ottoman Empire using conversion as a way to emphasize the permeability of boundaries between the two. Vitkus's book, Turning Turk, argues that English attitudes toward Mediterranean cultures in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were complex and ambivalent and cannot be read in terms of postcolonial paradigms such as Orientalism. Vitkus finds "hybridity" to be a more useful concept for tracking the early modern English fascination with "exchange" and with the possibilities of transformation through exchange. He argues that "before the latter half of the seventeenth century, England's 'colonial' discourse was merely the premature articulation of a third-rank power" (p. 3). The first five chapters of the book convincingly define and trace the subgenre of "conversion play," which centered on the threat of conversions of various kinds in multicultural Mediterranean encounters. Vitkus discusses Tamburlaine, Othello, Thomas Kyd's Tragedye of Soliman and Perseda (1592), Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, or A Girl Worth Gold Part I (1602), Robert Daborne's Christian Turned Turk (1610), and Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624) as examples of this subgenre, and his readings do shed new light on these plays. A final chapter looks at plays (The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, A Christian Turned Turk) which represent "Machiavellian merchants," arguing that they respond to a fear that "the English were anxiously 'turning' into a more open commercial society" (p. 163).