Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare.

Wilson, Luke

Drama and the Market, one of two opening titles in the new series Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, under the general editorship of Stephen Orgel, fits precisely the series' stated purpose, "to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theatre which [make] use of the insights afforded by theoretical perspectives." Distinguishing his approach from earlier ones by rejecting the idea of an analogy between the theater and the market in favor of a thoroughgoing interconnection, Bruster emphasizes that the theater was itself a market and argues, primarily in economic and psychoanalytic terms, that it was permeated by what he calls the "materialist vision" of early modern London, its growing preoccupation with the material world, and specifically with objects as commodities.

The book makes good on Bruster's promise to examine "three general strategies" through which the dramatists "attempted to come to grips with social change" (xii-xiii): the transformation of traditional links between sexual and economic production, particularly in the figure of the wittol, or willing cuckold, who for economic gain allows other men sexual access to his wife; the adoption of rural tropes to city use, as in cuckoldry and farce; and the exploitation in a new economic climate of traditional parallels between Troy and London, particularly in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

Chapter 3 announces itself as an argument that the generic category "city comedy" has outlived its usefulness; but whether or not this is the case, the real interest of the chapter lies in Bruster's striking claim that the "anatopism" of Renaissance theater - its insistent conflation of remote and proximate geographical sites - was not mere "geographical blundering" but rather the formal device which most clearly articulated its complex identification with the market.

Perhaps the most original and interesting chapters are those which discuss the "objectification of subjectivity" in farce from Jack Juggeler (1555) to Bartholomew Fair (1616) by way of Shakespeare and Dekker. Bruster argues that in these plays human subjectivity comes to be invested in commodified objects in a commodity fetishism which, rather than alienating the subject as in the traditional Marxist account, works as the vehicle through which subjectivities are constructed and manipulated. Bruster's readings of particular plays in terms of this objectifying - and simultaneously subjectifying - process are almost always highly suggestive, though some seem elliptical or inconclusive.

The theoretical core of the book - the attempt to integrate economic and psychoanalytic modes of reading social and aesthetic phenomena - is clearest in Bruster's discussion of Freud's fort/da game in the final chapter on Troilus and Cressida. Yet this attempt points to a strategic vagueness in Bruster's implicit account of human agency. Readers may feel, for example, that the recurrent description of Renaissance drama as an attempt to "come to grips with social change" (a significantly broader focus than that implied in the "drama and the market" of the title, and perhaps a post hoc attempt to link somewhat divergent chapters), is never satisfactorily accounted for, despite Bruster's later remark that "in assimilating and mediating the topical energy of the urban market, plays functioned as what one might call social dreams, collective fantasies in . . . which English society worked through issues and anxieties irresolvable by non-ludic means" (37). The relation between such motivating impulses and the influence of economic competition, the profit motive, and so on, remains unexplained.

All this notwithstanding, this seems to me one of the most interesting and resourceful studies of Renaissance theater to appear in the past several years. Bruster's ability to turn to interesting account his extensive reading in the drama of the period makes this book both of very high scholarly quality and positively exciting to read. It will prove invaluable to Renaissance scholars interested in materialist accounts of Renaissance drama; but it should also be useful to those interested in integrating economic, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches to the literature of the period.

Luke Wilson OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY