Matthew Kendrick. At Work in the Early Modern Theater: Valuing Labor.

Rivlin, Elizabeth

Matthew Kendrick. At Work in the Early Modern Theater: Valuing Labor. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. Pp. xix + 185. $75.00.

Matthew Kendricks At Work in the Early Modern Theater opens with an absorbing anecdote about the author, the child of a working class family, finding himself uncomfortably cast in the role of Richard III in a middle school production: he uses this episode to narrate both the distance he felt from Shakespeare as an icon of high culture and to introduce his later discovery that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries did in fact portray "the struggles" of laboring characters with whom he could identify (x). This is the only personal detail in an otherwise traditionally structured monograph, but it offers an early indication of the unwavering value that the author attaches to labor and to laboring bodies as they are represented in the early modern theatre. The author is adamant in his view that there is a direct line of descent from early modern laborers to Marx's industrial-era working classes and, further, that labor in late sixteenth-century England (as today) is invested with an inherent dignity. These certainties are both a strength of the book and, at certain moments, a limitation.

At Work might be said to respond to Michelle Dowd's call in a 2010 Literature Compass piece on "Shakespeare and Work" for research on

   the relationship between work and subjectivity in Shakespeare....
   To what degree might the practice of labor as an embodied act
   produce an understanding of subjectivity that is based as much in
   physicality and economics as in interiority or sexuality? While the
   desiring body has been pervasive in recent Shakespearean
   scholarship, the laboring body ... remains relatively unexplored.
   (190)

And if this observation holds for the study of Shakespeare, how much more relevant for the larger body of early modern drama, much of which remains comparatively understudied? Like Dowd in that essay, At Work defines labor as an embodied practice that is fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. Within the generic parameters of early modern drama, the book thoroughly explores the ramifications of that claim.

In seeking to articulate laboring subjectivities, At Work actually treads some ground that will be familiar to early modern scholars. What distinguishes Kendrick's approach is his detailed engagement with Marxist theory. In the introduction, he argues that "anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater's socioeconomic position, an emerging working-class identity engendered by the violent emergence of capitalism" (xii-xiii). Chapter 1, "The Theater between Craft and Commodity," fills in the outlines, taking issue with the periodization established by E. P. Thompson, which dated the development of the working classes as a discrete and self-conscious entity to the rise of mass industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kendrick sees an opening for an earlier date in Thompson's own insistence that class formation is an extended struggle playing out along a spectrum between self-determination and external agency. Following in Richard Halpern's footsteps, Kendrick derives even more fundamental justification from Marx's primitive accumulation, under the theory of which the early modern period was the moment when the detachment of capital and labor from feudal structures consolidated the interests of dispossessed laborers against those who owned the means of production.

To bear out this theory of labor's rising self-consciousness, the first half of chapter 1 surveys "the emerging view of labor as a commodity, as a productive force to be tamed and harnessed in the pursuit of profit" (6). In the second half, Kendrick turns to the theatre as a workplace that exemplifies the contradictions and challenges facing early modern labor, his point being that the theatre's defenders represented theatrical work as autonomous and skilled in the face of its detractors' attempts to devalue and commodify it. This section is premised on the notion that previous critics have neglected the economic precarity of theatrical labor in favor of a more optimistic portrayal of the theatre as a breeding ground for entrepreneurial opportunity. The critique seems overstated, however, for several recent studies have already explored in some depth the intersection of theatrical labor and cultural discourses of idleness, vagrancy, and subsistence.

Despite the sometimes exaggerated view it presents of the singularity of its approach, the first chapter effectively sets the table for later chapters' detailed analyses of craftsmanship and artisanal identity in a number of early modern comedies. Kendrick explains the choice to focus exclusively on comedy in terms of its carnivalesque potential and ability to "defamiliarize relations of exploitation between classes so that social relations can be reimagined" (xvii). Accordingly, chapter 2, on Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho!, argues that city comedies imagine a vital role for traditional conceptions of "craft" and "skill"; the laborer's artisanal abilities translate into a social and economic facility that even his social betters are inspired to emulate. Chapter 3 applies the same logic to apprentices in Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle; here, the argument is that the theatre supplied an attractive alternative to a transforming guild structure that was offering far fewer opportunities for aspiring workers. Together, the two chapters make a solid case for reading the city comedies as sites not solely for citizen satire but also, and perhaps even more profoundly, for the voicing of an oppositional working-class subjectivity.

Chapter 4, "Thinking with the Feet in Dekker's The Shoemakers Holiday and Rowley's A Shoemaker, A Gentleman," is the book's centerpiece, developing most fully the argument that English plays dramatized and "subjectivized" laboring perspectives. Kendrick finds strong evidence in the two shoemaking plays that labor did indeed "speak on its own behalf" (95) and that the values attributed to people and objects in the play resist being reduced to capitalist exchange. For example, he argues that the shoes that the journeyman Ralph fashions for his wife, Jane, are not simply commodities; rather, "the value that the shoes possess is not monetary and abstract but communal and tangible, signifying a lived community of labor rather than an external market system" (111). "Thinking with the feet" is an apt description of the sentience that Kendrick attributes to the shoemaker's working body. This chapter substantially enriches the book's perspective on Marx's labor relations before the age of industrialization.

The final chapter attempts to seal the argument by proposing that A Midsummer Night's Dream "represent[s] the artisanal dimension of the professional theater as a nostalgic touchstone or criterion of communal value capable of pushing against the reifying logic of the market" while "The Tempest ... more confidently embraces the laboring aspects of theatrical production" (130). Because these two plays are already among those most frequently discussed by critics focusing on work and labor, the bar is quite high for making an original set of claims, and it is not clear that Kendrick's argument succeeds in clearing it. There are also some missteps in the readings offered. The interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream depends on Bottom and his fellow mechanicals instantiating a fixed set of values that resist capitalist flux. In response to the obvious point that Bottom is translated--into an ass, Kendrick counters that Bottom's self-perception never changes. But this view radically understates the degree to which it is the perception of others that governs attributions of value in the world of the play. The larger point, which the book sometimes seems to miss, is that laboring identities may be every bit as constructed as other methods of identity formation. Tom Rutter, in his study of work on the early modern stage, suggests that work is "shifting and contingent rather than immutable or universal" (Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage, Cambridge University Press, 2011; 4), but for Kendrick labor amounts to something much narrower: physical, embodied craftsmanship, a definition that constrains the conclusions he draws. It is difficult in the end to see the mechanicals as immune from the incessant exchanges that govern relationships in the play. By insisting that labor is "foundational," a rock in the chaotic sea of capitalism, Kendrick risks essentializing labor, whether in the theatre or outside it.

This chapter also confirms that the book's concept of the laboring body remains normatively native, white, urban, and male: Kendrick has little to say about how Caliban's status as slave affects his relationship to labor. Throughout, there is scant attention to the ways in which women's labor might be reflected on the stage or how global influences like foreign trade, the beginnings of the slave trade, or colonial settlement in the Americas might complicate or even undermine the dignity that Kendrick wants to attribute to the laboring body.

At Work recovers its strengths in the "Afterword: Performing Laboring Subjectivity," where Kendrick theorizes most fully his defense of the laborers creative surplus. He aligns his approach with Marxist autonomism, which suggests that the subjectivity of the working classes constitutes "the vital force which is at once necessary for capital and the obstacle to its continued existence" (166). This intriguing implication demonstrates that Kendrick is willing to go farther and be more explicit in his Marxist analysis than has been typical of scholars writing on similar topics. Though this study is not the first to argue that the early modern period is more than simply a precursor to the development of oppositional classes during the industrial era, it makes a particularly thoughtful and often refreshingly polemical case that the absence of a fully formed bourgeoisie and proletariat during the period should not be confused with laborers' passivity to the commodification and alienation of their labor.

ELIZABETH RIVLIN

Clemson University