Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance.(Book Review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses

Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance. By Michael Mangan. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Pp. xi + 276. Cloth $75.00 Paper $24.95

Although the title of Michael Mangan's Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance glances in the direction of the complex theories raised in the wake of Judith Butler's influential study of gender and performance, Gender Trouble, (1) the book is less a work of theory, perhaps, than a demonstration of how theater history can intervene in and complicate (indeed help legitimate) masculine studies. Mangan writes that whereas one concern of the men's movements of the past twenty or so years has been to "identify and respond to the current crisis of masculinity in late-capitalist society," a corollary interest in the history of men's issues reveals that "there is no single stable anterior position against which this contemporary crisis is to be measured, no Edenic state from which modern masculinity has fallen. On the contrary, it now seems, crisis and anxiety are rather the conditions of masculinity itself" (247). This last sentence echoes Mark Breitenberg's ground-breaking study of "[a]nxiety and masculinity" in early modern England, (2) and it reveals the focus of Mangan's work: the differently situated historical tensions and anxieties surrounding masculinity that can be read in the English drama from the Middle Ages through the late twentieth century. Theoretically, Staging Masculinities relies on the perhaps by now obvious point that there is an overlap between social performativity of gender and theatrical performance. It studies dramatic texts and their stagings in predictably key periods and genres of English theatrical history, and by connecting these to an emerging history of masculinity, shows some of the ways masculinity is "performed," revealed to be historically contingent or always relational and provisional. The book is not wholly successful, as I will suggest. Nevertheless, it usefully attempts to de-essentialize masculinity from within men's studies, which sometimes seemingly threatens to re-center men socially and discursively (if, that is, they were ever truly de-centered to begin with).

At its best, Staging Masculinities provides readings of the interrelations of drama and masculinity that are genuinely invigorating. To take just a few of the better examples, ones that will particularly interest readers of this journal, Mangan argues that the medieval Robin Hood plays represent an outlaw masculinity that emerged in folk rituals, and hence he makes an interesting...

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