Carol Thomas Neely. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture.(Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 by Virginia Mason Vaughan)(Book review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-05

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Carol Thomas Neely. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 244. $52.50 casebound; $21.95 paperbound.

Virginia Mason Vaughan. Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 190. $75.00.

These two books by respected scholars are comparable in many ways--particularly because of their shared interest in "marginal" groups who functioned as "others" in English Renaissance culture. Virginia Mason Vaughan explores staged representations of black skin color over the course of three centuries in early modern England, while Carol Thomas Neely studies staged representations of "mad" or "distracted" persons, especially in the hundred or so years beginning with the mid-1570s. In style, method, argument, and even in physical design, the two volumes have much in common, and both are also comparably successful.

Both books, for instance, are concerned to untangle what Vaughan calls the "collapsed chronology" (3) of some earlier scholarly accounts of their subjects. In other words, each seeks to examine the process of historical change patiently and minutely, warning against the tendency of some earlier writers (including, in Neely's case, Foucault) to make sweeping generalizations in a way that erases our awareness of gradual, incremental developments. Each book, then, necessarily engages in helpful and illuminating dialogue with earlier scholarship, and indeed Neely's volume is especially impressive in this regard. Her footnotes (and both books, thankfully, do place their notes at the foot of each page, rather than in the rear) are often quite lengthy and detailed. Each book makes its readers aware of trends and tendencies in earlier scholarship, and each also indicates clearly how the present volume differs from its predecessors. Each book, then, provides a solid introduction not only to its nominal topic but to earlier relevant studies.

Both books also, by surveying a multitude of dramas and studying how patterns "are repeated from play to play" (Vaughan, 4), provide a comprehensive overview of staged works dealing with their respective topics, even as they also call attention to the ways in which particular plays altered customary patterns. Neely has an advantage over Vaughan in this respect since many of the plays dealing with madness are fascinating works by major, canonical authors (especially Shakespeare) and thus are likely to be of interest to a broader range of readers because they are...

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