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COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 191. $35.00.
Mathew Martin's book contextualizes recent critical concerns such as city comedy's representation of subjectivity and the effects of market forces by placing them within the context of Renaissance interest in philosophical skepticism. This approach seems eminently appropriate for examining early modern city comedy since the philosophy of skepticism is closely allied to the moral comedy of Jonson and Middleton. As the philosopher Sextus Empiricus explains, skepticism is "an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever" (14). Given city comedy's emphasis on the gap between appearance and reality, Martin's application of skepticism promises to bring useful insights to bear on the plays, particularly because of its valorization of provisional and improvisational perceptions. As Martin himself says, skepticism "emphasizes the situatedness of the knower, the mediatedness of argument" (14). These issues have long been one of the central foci of criticism on city comedies, and Martin's approach serves as something of an influence study, for he shows that the plays that he examines are permeated with the skeptic willingness to contain contradictory ideological positions.
Martin's larger goal, however, is to examine Jonson's and Middleton's uses of skepticism not in order to consider how these playwrights were affected by the revival of interest in Pyrrhonism but "to explore the connections between theater and skepticism at a more fundamental level" (15-16). His introduction points out intriguing connections--philosophical skepticism depends on theatrical conventions, and, conversely, skepticism is inherent in theater. Throughout this study, the author treats his playwrights as...
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