Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.

Mark, Fortier

Molly Smith. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998. viii + 160 pp. $63.95. ISBN: 1-85928-395-0.

Here we have two relatively engaging recent books on Shakespeare and early modern English drama and theater. Shakespeare and Carnival is an edited collection of essays which purports to be the first book "devoted to Shakespeare and Michael Bakhtin's ideas of the carnivalesque" (1). A product of the Literature and History Conference at the University of Reading in 1995, it features contributions by a range of scholars, mainly British, most notably David Wiles, author of an important earlier book on Shakespeare and Will Kemp. Although contributors were "encouraged to take any approach they wished" (1), Knowles sees a convergence around the view that "the ideas of Bakhtin can still elicit major reevaluative lines of enquiry in the study of Shakespeare" (2). Breaking Boundaries, on the other hand, is a monograph, in which Smith, drawing primarily upon the theories of Bakhtin, Stephen Greenblatt, Michel de Certeau, and Gregory Bateson (2), argues that English theater after 1585 features a growing interest in breaking social and theatrical boundaries, culminating in "the complete dissolution of boundaries between theater, punitive practice and carnival play in the 'social drama' of 1649" (137).

Knowles's claim that Shakespeare and Carnival is the first book on Shakespeare and Bakhtin's theories may be true, but it is hard to think of Bakhtinian study of Shakespeare as anything particularly new - the introduction itself mentions prominent studies by Michael Bristol, Manfred Pfister, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. One cannot, therefore, call this collection groundbreaking; indeed, despite Knowles's assertion that "Bakhtin's work on carnival remains for many reasons a powerful, exuberant and challenging work which continually attracts new readers" (6), a reader of this book should be forgiven for seeing in it something other than the surprising. Moreover, Knowles notes that "as might be expected in a volume on the carnivalesque, there is a concentration in this collection on the plays of the 1590s" (1). There is, in fact, a more striking, if not unexpected, focus on plays involving Falstaff - the subject of three separate essays. There are more surprising essays on later plays such as The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. Anthony Gash, who writes on the first two of these plays, stresses the forgotten theological and platonic aspects of Bakhtin's interests. Disconcertingly, his approach allows for what seems like a more traditional and conservative reading of the ending of Measure for Measure, which is not about "ruthless power disguising itself as mercy," but rather "the internal victory of a supernatural love over natural inclination" (207). Such a reading is not what one might have expected from a theory of carnivalesque subversion. In his reading of Henry VIII, Gordon McMullan moves away from a focus on the carnivalesque narrowly construed to the notion of the dialogic nature of communication. Such a refocusing allows McMullan to assert, boldly and surprisingly, that "Henry VIII is in many ways the most truly carnivalesque play in the Shakespearean canon" (225).

Knowles spends a paragraph of his introduction raising criticisms of Bakhtin's views, but lays little stress on them. In fact, his longest critique involves Bakhtin's underestimation of Shakespeare's importance for a theory of carnival - Bakhtin writes, "to speak of a fully formed and deliberate polyphonic quality in Shakespeare's dramas is in our opinion simply impossible" (8). In effect, Knowles attacks the suppositions underpinning Bakhtin's dismissal of Shakespeare in order to argue that Shakespeare is more important for these theories, and these theories for Shakespeare, than Bakhtin recognized. A somewhat harsher critique of Bakhtin can be found in Wiles's essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream. He writes, "Bakhtin's generalizing tendency encourages us to see popular culture and the carnival grotesque as a more uniform entity than it is" (64). Rather than a vehicle for popular expression, Wiles sees in court performances of Shakespeare's plays something quite different: "When we look at the plays in their performative context, the festive or carnivalesque dimension relates to the experience of the aristocratic audience much more closely than it does to the experience of the

"popular" audience" (65). Wiles concludes, "The assumption that this entity dubbed "carnival" is the property of the folk as distinct from the elite seriously obscures the mechanisms by which power was validated and maintained in the early modern period" (79).

In short, Shakespeare and Carnival raises a variety of interesting aspects of Shakespeare understood through Bakhtin, but has the good sense and caution to call its own suppositions in this area into some degree of questioning.

Molly Smiths Breaking Boundaries is often surprising and engaging in choosing, inter alia, less prominent but nonetheless powerful theatrical texts for discussion: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus; John Fletcher's sequel to The Taming of the Shrew, The Woman's Prize; Ben Jonson's Sejanus; and finally and most strikingly, Charles I's execution in 1649. Smith argues, in place of a traditional reading whereby English theater of the period relentlessly increases in moral decadence, for a theater "increasingly concerned with breaking boundaries" (2). She argues that there is a correlation in the theater of the period between an interest in complex forms of play and "a greater degree of engagement with the sociopolitical contexts of Renaissance England" (5). Smith aligns her work with new historicism, but it is new historicism of a kind which sees cultural works as contributions to forthcoming revolution rather than artefacts inevitably contained. In this light, her readings of theatrical works tend to see them in positive, subversive terms: Sejanus, for instance, features a "mockery of authority" (56). The Woman's Prize is taken as a full reversal of the mysogynist oppression of The Taming of the Shrew; "the meek and mild Maria is transformed by the experience of marriage to rectify its inequities" (80). Such a reading runs counter to a more critical and cynical spirit in recent readings of the play by Charles Squier, Kathleen McLuskie, and Sandra Clark.

For Smith, breaking and disrupting boundaries in theater and society culminate in the execution of Charles I in 1649, an event prepared for by the theater which preceded it: "the merging of theater, festive topsy-turviness and punishment in the mid-seventeenth century may owe much to the deconsecration of authority in the drama that preceded it, but the drama of the early seventeenth century owes as much to the highly experimental and bold invocation of . . . the 1580s and 1590s in the drama of Kyd and Shakespeare" (137). For those whose sympathies run counter to royal authority, Smith presents an upbeat story of a theater which contributes directly to revolution. The reader, however, is left haunted by another story, of indeterminacy, multifariousness, and conflictedness, which would more fully account for the relations between theater and politics in seventeenth-century England.

University of Winnipeg