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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, by Dermot Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pp. x + 197. Cloth, $65.00.
Dermot Cavanagh pursues two announced projects in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play. First, Cavanagh seeks to "resuscitate" and to reconfigure the concept of the sixteenth-century history play as a critical category. Second, Cavanagh argues that the six Tudor dramas he studies each presents critical reflections upon the "topic" of "socially disruptive speech" (6). Cavanagh's pursuit of the first of these projects is successful and compelling; his pursuit of the second is often fruitful but at times raises more questions about his thesis than his relatively brief study can answer.
In the first of these endeavors, Cavanagh argues that critics should come to think of the genre of the sixteenth-century history play as "ideologically various, theatrically diverse, and as committed to political enquiry as much as to sermonizing" (3). Scholars should expand their sense of what counts as a history play beyond familiar chronicle histories to encompass any Tudor drama set in an English, Scottish, or early "British" past. The goal of this reconception is to bring all sixteenth-century plays that are set against British history into dialogue with one another, no matter if such plays are usually treated as tragedies, romances, or as some other generic form.
Following his own call, Cavanagh brings together several dramas not always grouped with one another, namely Bale's King Johan, Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc, Greene's Scottish History of James IV, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and Henry V. The chief element that links all of these works, Cavanagh argues, is their authors' interest in "socially disruptive speech," specific terms and modes of discourse that play key roles in the political conflicts these dramas portray. In his readings of these plays, Cavanagh shows how each playwright builds into his work recognizable modes of controversial political (or politicized) discourse. Such language, Cavanagh demonstrates, often plays key roles in the development of the action of these works and creates important tensions in and among the characters forced to confront such disruptive speech. Cavanagh's attention to the shared employment of "disruptive language" in these works persuasively bolsters his call to juxtapose works such as these and to study them as a group.
Cavanagh's true test case for his realignment of the history-play idea is Robert Greene's Scottish History of James IV. Greene's play is usually not considered to be a history play, since it has little other than its title of the actually "historical" in it....
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