Lawrence Manley

Proverbs, Epigrams, and Urbanity in Renaissance London

ECORDED in Camden’s Britannia (1586),’ the epigram with which I begin attests to a relationship between cities and poetry R which is perhaps timeless, but which enjoyed a special prominence in the work of Renaissance poets, who often contributed directly to the structures of political power. The humanist Brunetto Latini had identified the science of rhetoric as the “highest science with which to govern the city,”Z and Italy was perhaps the most brilliant exemplar of this theory; but even in the very different setting of Henrician England Lord Berners could also claim that “through the monuments of writynge” men had “ben moued . . . to bylde cytes. ”3 When so many of the chief Tudor apologists for poetry-George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, and Thomas Lodge-invoked the myths of Orpheus and Amphion in order to proclaim, in Lodge’s words, that “poets were the first raysors of cities, 4 they were endorsing the implicit claim of Camden’s epigram: like other Renaissance cities, London lived by more than bread alone. Among the varieties of literature on London-satires, ballads, sermons, chronicles, plays, and pageants-a major species is the epigram, a form widely practiced throughout the English Renaissance, but one 9 ,

The Oxford Shakespeare Henry VI, Part Three (review)

For editors and textual scholars as well as anyone interested in Shakespeare’s early career, a crucial problem has been the nature of the relationship between The third Part of Henry the Sixt, whose sole authority is the First Folio of 1623 (96), and the anonymous True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, a play attributed on its title page to the Earl of Pembroke’s Men and published in octavo by Thomas Millington in 1595. In his new edition of 3 Henry VI, Randall Martin offers an approach that makes much good sense of this problem. His approach results in a relatively conservative text, based on the Folio; but it contains, paradoxically, some radical implications about Shakespearean revision that will take some time to digest. Martin’s approach combines features of two previous interpretations of the problem. The earlier of these originated with Edmund Malone’s suggestion that The True Tragedie was an “elder drama,” an anonymous source play which Shakespeare “new modelled and amplified” as 3 Henry VI (115). A second interpretation, originating with Peter Alexander, argues that The True Tragedie was a faulty report or memorial reconstruction of an earlier version of the play that is represented in the Folio text of 3 Henry VI (114). While Alexander’s arguments about memorial reconstruction were congruent with then-current beliefs that such plays were “stolne, and surreptitious copies,” Madeleine Doran’s similar work on memorial reporting in the “bad” texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI was concerned to show that The True Tragedie was not an incompetent piracy exploiting the market for printed plays but a theatrically viable script shortened for performance, probably by the reduced personnel of a touring company (114). Respect for the theatrical validity of texts like The True Tragedie has been further enhanced by the more recent work of Laurie E. Maguire, who defends the idea that variant texts represent theatrical

Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (review)

connections among Romeo’s desire for a place outside “the aristocratic clan” (131), the historical fragmentation of kinship structures, and such stage business as Romeo’s leap over the Capulets’ wall or his interruption of the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt.) Second, it makes a small but important contribution to the study of Renaissance geography by subordinating the geographic to the spatial; emphasis is placed not on, say, the significance of the history of Venice for a certain play, but on the way in which, in a dramatic text, the geographic often emerges from and in subordination to stage business. The third contribution is related to the second. For most of this book, West considers space outside the study of geography altogether. In this regard he shows how one might take up space without focusing exclusively on the cartographic, chorographic, or geographic. Finally worth observing is the place of time in this analysis of space. West is hardly alone in figuring the early-seventeenth century as a period of transition; neither is he unique in construing it in terms of emergent capitalist modernity or of the birth of the individual. That being said, I found myself troubled by West’s frequent adducement of the early modern as a “transitional period,” between hierarchical and atomistic conceptions of self (217), or fixed structures of knowledge and empiricist uncertainty (223), or “stable rural community” and an agrarian world deformed by “new market forces” (241). I am willing to accept that such historical changes occurred, but these grand narratives can map only imprecisely onto West’s narrowly Jacobean focus. (Puzzlingly, this focus is not always maintained; West’s inclusion of Romeo and Juliet, for example, is neither explained nor justified.) Moreover, such changes could be approached in a less reified fashion, in terms of specific practices rather than sweeping historical developments. That being said, West’s book stands as a fine contribution to the ongoing study of the intersecting spaces of stage and society in early modern England.

Material London, ca. 1600 (review)

What’s most intriguing about this book is its larger story concerning the transformation of early modern drama. Dillon’s narrative of a westward arc, in London, of shopping, sophistication, and sex usefully complements critical paradigms that center on, variously, Fletcherian tragicomedy, the rise of “citizen” culture, the dichotomy of public and private theaters, and the advent of dramatic realism. Ultimately, however, this story is not advanced far enough by the book’s individual readings.

Literature and Culture in Early Modern London.

Introduction Part I. The Invention of London: 1. The city and humanism 2. London and the languages of Tudor complaint Part II. Fictions of Settlement: 3. From matron to monster: London and the languages of urban description 4. The emergence of a Tudor capital: Spensers epic vision 5. Scripts for the pageant: the ceremonies of London Part III. Techniques of Settlement: 6. To be a man in print: pamphlet morals and urban ideology 7. Essential difference: the projects of satire 8. The uses of enchantment: Jacobean city comedy and romance Part IV. The Dissemination of Urban Culture: 9. Metropolis: the creation of an august style 10. In place of place: London and liberty in the puritan revolution.