Keele University Press Ryburn Renaissance Texts and Studies series

Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill. Eds. 1996. Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Keele: Keele University Press. 208 pp. ISBN 1-85331-108-1. £35.00.

Lady Mary Wroth. 1996. Poems: A Modernized Edition. Edited by R.E. Pritchard. Keele: Keele University Press. 224 pp. ISBN 1-85331-169-3. £25.00.

Elizabeth Cary. 1996. The Tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry. Edited by Stephanie Wright. Keele: Keele University Press. 128 pp. ISBN 1-85331-104-9. £25.00 hb. £10.95 pb.

Richard Dutton. Ed. 1996. Jacobean Civic Pageants. Keele: Keele University Press. 189 pp. ISBN 1-85331-107. £35.00.

1. The collection of essays in Voicing Women grew out of a fondly remembered conference of the same name at the University of Liverpool in April, 1992 (participants stayed, wonderfully, just opposite Penny Lane). The essays bear very strongly the marks of this origin. The three organisers, now the editors of this volume (two of whom have their own essays included here) were then postgraduates, and both their essays and a number of other pieces show clear signs of the thesis. I do not say this to disparage--rather the opposite. Postgraduate appraisals may sometimes be limited in their awareness of overall contexts, but at their best--and several of the essays here represent that best--they can also possess a quality of intense engagement with their chosen text, and a depth of familiarity and involvement which can produce readings virtually unrivalled for their intricacy and for their sustained enthusiasm. Co-editor Suzanne Trill, for instance, in her 'Engendering Penitence: Nicholas Breton and "the Countesse of Penbrooke"', traces in fascinating detail Breton's appropriations of Pembroke's voice and their meaning within contemporary theories of repentance and gender, and Danielle Clarke offers a compelling reading of 'The Iconography of the Blush: Marian Literature of the 1630s', which no-one with an interest in the writing of this period should miss. Work of this quality makes one wish for more people fresh from their research to be able to publish fast.

2. Nicholas Breton, of course, was not a woman, and the editors have avowedly aimed to include essays dealing not only with literary women but also with less studied men, and also with women's voices which are produced in ways that are not central to the literary canon. Thus essays on the more usual suspects such as Aemilia Lanier, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn are supplemented by pieces on John Knox and John Bunyan, by Katharine Hodgkin's interesting account of Dionys Fitzherbert and Sue Wiseman's of Quaker women's travel narratives, and by Maureen Bell's study of Restoration women publishers of oppositional literature. Kate Chedgzoy's introduction also uses some of the work of Anna Trapnel as a way of examining the issues surrounding the 'recovery' of women's writing. Crucial to many participants in these debates is the question of literary value, and many of the contributors here raise associated issues about the motives and experiences of feminist readers of Renaissance women writers. There is, for instance, Helen Hackett's caution about anachronicity in her response to Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, while at the other extreme is Stephanie Wright's castigation of an approach 'which is predominantly historical and consequently devalues the very text which it is trying to promote', and her suggestion that we might need to choose between The Tragedy of Mariam and Othello. For the most part, however, these essays do not offer a doctrinaire insistence on recognition for the neglected writers they examine; rather they treat them with such informed and critically alert enthusiasm that they can hardly help but infect their readers with it.

3. Two of the authors covered in this volume, Lady Mary Wroth and Elizabeth Cary, are also the subject of separate editions in the Renaissance Texts and Studies series. The question of literary value is certainly one which has concerned Ron Pritchard in his edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth. He is acutely sensitive to the technical deficiences of some of Wroth's verse, and also seems to feel rather queasy about the question of her 'adulterous affair' with her cousin William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Additionally, he does not like Petrarchan poetry, which he finds masochistic and neurotic, so one feels for his sufferings at the points when Wroth is at her most flamboyantly Petrarchan. Fortunately, however, her poetry also has marked points of resemblance with that of the Metaphysicals, and here Pritchard is at his most assured and his notes at their most useful. He prefaces his introduction with an epigraph from Donne's 'Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day' which, he suggests, 'seems to sum up most powerfully and effectively the paradoxical experience of the poetry of Lady Mary Wroth', and thereafter he highlights numerous similarities of diction, phrasing and thought which would indeed make Lady Mary's poems interesting to set alongside Donne's. In some ways, though, the most apposite comparison is not with Donne but with Herbert, who was a distant cousin of Lady Mary's and bore the same name as her lover. Her language and cadences often come close to Herbert's verse, but with one notable difference--her God is Cupid, who features in many of her poems.

4. Pritchard's notes, then, help to situate Lady Mary's poems within the wider poetic scene; but for many of her poems he has not felt the need to provide any notes at all, and the result is one of the most extraordinary features of this book--acres of blank space. Each poem has a page to itself; if it overruns--even if only by a few lines--those few lines get a separate page. The majority of Lady Mary's poems are sonnets, albeit--perhaps because of the rather unorthodox rhyme schemes she favours--laid out in two stanzas of four lines each and two more of three each; each one thus takes up a little over half a page, with blank space below. The authors of these Keele volumes had initially hoped that they would be issued in paperback, to be affordable as teaching texts; surely such extraordinary disregard for paper can only have pushed the price up still higher.

5. I have similar niggles about Stephanie Wright's edition of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, though this time it is the standard of the proof-reading which is disappointing--'Babas' sons' for 'Baba's', 'let he be beheaded' for 'let her', 'aagainst', 'Phasaelus great worth', 'your choler have I born', 'amitie' when everything else is in modern spelling, and a comma where none is needed in the line 'That thou beginst to doubt, undoubted truth'. There would, too, be an argument for more annotation--I am not confident that a modern reader would automatically understand why Salome calls Arabia 'happy', and the direct echo of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the line 'By her that fled to have him hold the chase' could profitably have been pointed out, particularly since the context is a discussion of Cleopatra.

6. The thing that distinguishes Stephanie Wright's edition from the current proliferation of Mariams, however, is that she has directed the only production of the play to date, and the perspective derived from performance is of obvious use and interest in her comments on the play. She has strong views, particularly on the viability and attractiveness of the society seen before Herod returns, and on not seeing it purely as closet drama--an issue made especially interesting by the fact that the first line of the play is Mariam's own 'How oft have I, with public voice run on'. Her longstanding commitment to Cary thus means that here, too, work originally done at postgraduate level manifests both vigour and intensity of engagement.

7. Richard Dutton's edition of Jacobean Civic Pageants commands attention for his chosen texts for a rather different reason: in an introduction which is a masterpiece of lucidity and economy, he points out, quite simply, that these pieces, variable in quality as they undoubtedly are, 'represent the one form of drama which we know must have been familiar to all the citizens of London, and thus an important key to our understanding of those times and of the place of dramatic spectacle in early modern negotiations of national, civic and personal identity'. As this sentence indicates, throughout Dutton's comments and notes an alert awareness of theoretical approaches is consistently married with a more traditional scholarship with an impressively wide range. The texts Dutton includes here are The Magnificent Entertainment, on which Ben Jonson and Dekker reluctantly collaborated, Munday's The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia (which, as he points out, sheds interesting light on King Lear), Middleton's The Triumphs of Truth and Webster's nostalgic Monuments of Honour--works, in however marginal a genre, by some of the most centrally canonical of Renaissance playwrights, which, as Dutton so powerfully argues, do indeed deserve more critical attention than they normally receive.