Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds.(Voyage Drama and Gender Politics: Real and Imagined Worlds, 1589-1642)(Book review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses

Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds, by Claire Jowitt. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 240. Cloth $79.95.

Claire Jowitt's monograph, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, is not only a study of early modern "voyage drama"; it is also an extended exercise in the interpretation of topical allegory. The book is comprised of a series of linked readings of travel plays (twelve in all) that were written during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Each reading is well researched and contextualized by a helpful array of references to current events and to other writings from the same period. Jowitt declares in her introduction that her study "concentrates on the ways travel drama does domestic work" (5), and she shows how this work is accomplished by means of allegorical insinuations that lie beneath "the primary literal level of meaning of the story" (5). Her concern throughout the book is to show how representations of colonial or foreign experience subtly "comment upon problems and iniquities at home" (5).

At first it may seem perverse to argue that these voyage plays are not really what they seem--that the foreign settings are merely substitute situations employed by the playwrights in order to communicate, under foreign cover, controversial messages that are sometimes sharply critical of those in power--but this book demonstrates quite convincingly that plays set in the New World, the Mediterranean, or even Asia, are full of allegorical allusions to domestic English issues. The issues that concern Jowitt most are intersecting questions of gender construction and national or colonial politics, and much of the discussion revolves around three rulers--Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I--and public perceptions of their femininity or masculinity.

The opening section of the book sets forth a theory of allegorical interpretation that acknowledges the complex "bifurcated or polyvalent allegorical meanings" (5) at play in early modern drama. In her introduction Jowitt emphasizes "the branch of allegory known as aenigma" (6), explaining that the plays' meanings were shrouded in obscurity, split by ambiguity, or layered by allegory in order to conceal and protect the expression of oppositional political messages. According to Jowitt, the voyage plays "have the ability to accommodate a variety of topical allegorical readings...

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