1. Engendering a Nation's co-authors have already made major contributions to our understanding of the early modern history play, most notably in Phyllis Rackin's ground-breaking Stages of History (1990), and Jean Howard's The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994). Engendering a Nation, though it confines itself to nine of Shakespeare's histories, returns to the same cultural-historical territory as the authors' earlier work. For them, the most important aspect of the plays from a feminist perspective is not the images of women they construct, but their impact upon the 'ways we imagine gender and sexual difference, the institution of marriage, and the gulf between "public" and "private" life' (20). The book, as most of its reviews have already pointed out, is full of provocative, perceptive and well-argued points. Ironically, however, these tend to be literary-critical rather than cultural-historical, as the authors' ambitious attempt to provide a general feminist theory of the project and importance of Shakespeare's histories runs into the same kind of problems as Tillyard's or Campbell's now-discredited grand narratives. Whilst the book can be recommended, for reasons other reviewers have already indicated, and works extremely well with undergraduates, it is on these problems that I will focus, particularly those arising from the book's conceptions of cultural history and the scope of the terms 'theatrical' and 'theatricality'.

2. Firstly, it should be noted that the acknowledgements page unfortunately does not indicate the extent to which the book recycles previously published work. According to my 1997 copy, previously published material appears in chapters two and three. This is clearly a typographical error, as this material does not only turn up in chapters two and three, which are part of a first section of four chapters dealing with the history play, feminism, and the theatre as an institution. It is a substantial presence in sections two and three, which contain eight chapters on the plays themselves, most notably in the chapter in King John, which is reprinted almost verbatim from Stages in History. As many of the same people who bought Rackin's earlier book will buy this one, a clearer indication of the relationship between the two is in order. Other, more minor, mistakes occur at page 74, where a speech is first correctly attributed to Eleanor Cobham and then incorrectly to Margaret of Anjou, and at page 55, which incorrectly has the messenger interrupting Henry V's funeral with the news that seven French cities are lost, rather than the eight correctly noted two pages previously.

3. Poetry may make nothing happen, but for Rackin and Howard Shakespeare's plays have 'helped' engineer major changes in Western culture. Though they point out that criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has moved on from the position that these plays 'helped to produce the modern ideological construction of heterosexual passion as the basis for the ideal nuclear family' (43), they bluntly state that Shakespeare's history plays 'helped to effect ... the transition to modernity' (38) (or rather, oddly, that they 'feel' they did). Elsewhere, less hesitantly, they state that 'the history plays Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s helped produce what are now regarded as "traditional" gender relations and the divisions between what we now call the public and private domains' (10) and that the book's concern is with 'how, in helping to fashion a nation, they also helped to fashion the regimes of gender and sexuality that we still inhabit today' (26). The key, and distinctly unhelpful, word here is 'helped', which in these quotations does nothing to illuminate the relationship between Shakespeare's plays and our modernity which the authors present as the main focus of their work. Elsewhere, the authors appear to take the line that there is no such thing as an unhelpful text, in the sense of one discrete from the 'gendered matrix' composed of economic and political systems as well as cultural productions. Shakespeare's influence on cultural change thus operates via the butterfly effect, with the first performance of, say, 1 Henry VI 'helping produce' modern patriarchy, but only in the same way that many other texts have. Like many Shakespeareans, the authors make sweeping claims about the cultural pre-eminence of the Bard, who here is 'in the popular imagination ... the leading historian of England's past', because 'Shakespeare's representations of England's medieval past ... have done more to shape popular conceptions of English history than the work of any professional historian' (10). I would argue that - at least on this side of the water - the medieval in 'the popular imagination' is Robin Hood and High Catholicism, neither of which feature heavily in the plays under discussion.

4. The problem lies not with the relationship between Shakespeare and modernity but the authors' assertion that the former in some sense 'produced' the latter. The book is not interested in the material nuts and bolts of such a production. Statements claiming that Shakespeare's histories 'helped to invent new ideas of both monarch and nation' and so 'alter [monarchy's] nature, anatomizing and transforming both royal power and thus the England in which such power is exerted' (38) simply assert that representations alter the represented. The sliding between tenses in these two quotations (three sentences apart in the book) signifies a lack of interest in distinguishing what happens in the fictional world (which is always present tense) and what happened in the world of which fictions are a part (in which Shakespeare's plays 'helped to produce' such only-partly-fictional things as gender relations).

5. The book clearly does not regard this distinction as important, focusing instead on pointing out the ways in which Shakespeare's history plays and modernity resemble each other.The procedure reads as a scaled-down variant of classic liberal humanist criticism: there is a resemblance between (say) these values and ours not because they are universal, but because they are modern, like us. 'Modernity' here is effectively universality for people who don't like classical antiquity or Christianity. This resemblance between Shakespeare's plays and 'our' modernity poses a problem for critics sceptical of liberal humanist ideologies of the creative genius who anticipates, or even writes, us. One strategy is to write of the plays the way earlier generations wrote of the writer. For example, the book asserts that Henry V 'thoroughly ... anticipates the terms in which we have come to think out sexuality and its relationship to male and female identities' (215), or that Shakespeare's histories, 'by insisting upon the performative nature of "modern" kingship', 'finally reveal the radical contingency of monarchial authority' (37).

6. Positing that these plays in some sense 'helped produce' our modernity, rather than that they 'represent universal truths', or even that they simply represent 'modernity', has the virtue of avoiding a crypto-humanist focus on the originating writer. But for this reader, it is vitiated as a claim worth making by its woolliness, something which is plainer when the same kind of claim is made negatively. What kind of text would help retard the production of modernity? And how does 'helping produce' modernity encompass the un-modern elements the authors find in Shakespeare's histories (for example, the association of lust with effeminacy)?

7. This kind of woolliness crops up elsewhere in sentences to the extent that it is sometimes difficult to understand just what point is being made. For example, in Henry V, 'Quickly's domestication implies an effort to contain the threat represented by her economic independence' (206). Economic independence is not simply a threat, but represents one (otherwise, why not simply say it is a threat?). What is significant about representing, rather than being, a threat? Is the threat contained, or not? Does 'effort' signify strain, or simply 'attempt'? Whose effort is it? And what is the significance of the indirection of this effort (it is only 'implied')? Unfortunately, the book will not win prizes for its prose, in which networks are unravelled, faultlines threaten to undermine narratives, and 'female authority is always absent in Shakespeare's histories, but it hovers at the edges of the stage, a repressed knowledge that escapes the historiographic narrative' (45-6).

8. Many of the book's problematic areas can be traced back to the authors' attempt to impose a grand narrative on these nine plays. One of the most problematic is its omission of Henry VIII (just as Tillyard and Campbell did) because it is 'distant in time of composition', ' a product of authorial collaboration' and 'distinct ... in form and style' (216). The collaboration point indicates that it is important that the writer Shakespeare is considered to fully own the plays under consideration, that the book really is concerned with 'Shakespeare' helping to produce modernity (rather than, say, the London theatre more generally). The distinctiveness of Henry VIII can be overemphasised: as Paul Dean showed nearly twenty years ago in Shakespeare Quarterly, the earlier histories too have affinities with the romance genre, and there are interesting comparisons available between, for example, Shakespeare's last history play and 2 Henry VI or Richard III. 'Distant in time of composition' is perhaps the most revealing reason for the later play's omission, for one of the book's main points is that the play-world of the second tetralogy is more 'modern' than the first, despite dealing with earlier historical subject matter. At the end of the second tetralogy, gendered distinctions are 'fully in place', and 'personal performance displaces patrilineal genealogy as the basis for male authority' (215). The point, implicitly, is not simply that it is important that there is a relationship between some of Shakespeare's work and modernity, but that this relationship becomes stronger over time (the book orders its discussion of the plays in presumed order of their composition). The movement toward a greater modernity is linked to the movement toward maturity of the writer. Eastcheap is the truly, anachronistically, contemporary. Add in Henry VIII, however, and the neat temporal progression is disrupted, for that play is much less easy to fit into the version of modernity the authors see the Hal plays as arriving at. And of course, the very progression that the authors argue for would be likely to be only problematically available to all kinds of people - readers of the first and subsequent folios, readers of the early quartos, anybody seeing revivals of the plays out of the 'original' sequence, partakers of succeeding centuries' un-modern attitudes towards the provenance, adaptability and stageability of many of the plays, and anybody imagining the project of the plays as nostalgic (a reading enabled by the last words of Rackin and Howard's 'last' Shakespearean history).

9. Ironically, for a book claiming to focus upon culture as well as text, some parts of the authors' sense of Tudor culture appears to date from around 1965, before writers like French, Sanders, and Kelly showed the inadequacy of Tillyard's model of early modern culture. There is 'official history', 'the clear, univocal voice of unquestioned tradition' (59), 'the official Tudor version of England's medieval past' (119), and 'Richard III retrospectively imposes a tidy ending on the first tetralogy: old crimes are punished, every chicken comes home to roost, and the moral account books are neatly balanced to provide a providential warrant for the accession of Henry VII' (119). 1 Shakespeare's departure from this 'official history' is front-page news. Elsewhere, Lawrence Stone's 1977 book still rules the roost as the account of the family, sex, and marriage. A student wishing to research further would be particularly handicapped by the omission of more recent work by David Cressy, Ralph Houlbrooke, Martin Ingram, and (perhaps especially) Susan Amussen from the bibliography.

10. Holding on to an earlier model of Tudor historiography is part of one of the book's central strategies, the use of binary oppositions. Many of the book's most insightful passages begin from basic oppositions, most obviously between masculinity and femininity, and from the relationships between such oppositions, for example, between femininity, theatricality and subversion. The limitations of this basic structuralism are, firstly, that it is most useful when working with clearly delineated boundaries between two opposites, and, secondly, that it downplays the diachronic, or dynamic, aspect of character and plot. For example, the book posits 'continence' as 'male' and 'lust' as 'female', a question-begging characterisation to begin with, especially in the light of Heywood's claim in The Apology for Actors that the Countess of Salisbury (who appears in Edward III) is an example of the 'women likewise that are chaste, [who] are by us extolled, and encouraged in their vertues' and Jane Shore (appearing in both Edward IV plays, amongst others) is one of those 'unchaste ... by us shewed their errors'. The book then goes on to place characters as more-or-less masculine according to their lust quotient.

    Falstaff's identification with the feminine is not mitigated but confirmed by his womanizing; Mortimer loses his manhood in heteroerotic sensuality, and Hal's association with "unrestrained loose companions" in the stews makes him seem like an "effeminate boy" ... his manhood and royalty are revealed when he emulates Hotspur's chivalry at the Battle of Shrewsbury (188)

    This kind of criticism is enabled by an overly schematic attitude toward early modern culture, typically signalled by the use of the passive voice ('in early modern culture, children were assumed to belong to their fathers', 85, or 'men's bodies opened and wounded were gendered feminine', 102). It is Jesuitical historicism: these statements are not untrue, but they equivocate. Who gendered which men's bodies? When and where? How and why? The book's synecdochic (and synchronic) approach to culture assumes implicitly that the whole can be read through the part, so that elsewhere antitheatrical writers' association of certain vices with the theatre metamorphoses into 'the vices that were associated with theatrical performance' (55) (my italics). The book's focus upon binary oppositions is thus bought at the cost of a high level of generalisation about early modern culture (which is then revitalised by the plays' demonstration that, really, things aren't that simple). Moreover, it requires a certain crudity when defining one's oppositions, so that, for example, masculinity and lust are incompatible, then as (implicitly) now. And the book has a tendency to assume theatricality, subversion, and femininity are syllogistically interchangeable. Some female characters are subversive of lineal patriarchy, so such subversion, wherever it is located, is feminine. Patriarchal history is the masculine project, so the theatricality which supposedly opposes it is feminine, even when the character in question (like the Bastard in King John) is a man.

11. In fact, the most problematic terms employed in the book are 'theatricality' and 'theatrical'. Theatricality is taken as subsuming all other forms of display: 'disguise' (54), 'assumption of clothes and symbols of royalty' (75), 'self-display' (75), 'spectacle' (77), 'role-player' (79), Richard III's 'pursuit of power' (92), 'trials and executions' (107), 'energy' (129), 'display' (154), 'performance' (162), and 'sixteenth-century urban life' (175) are all explicitly identified as 'theatrical' or having 'theatricality'. Just what is specifically theatrical about, for example, Cade's role playing, as opposed to the implied alternative of non-theatrical role-playing, is not discussed, though elsewhere theatricality is linked to 'vivid particularity', 'energy' and 'animated and distinctive characters' (129). Assuming that we all know what theatricality is (and, more importantly, what its employment might signify) is problematic. Theatricality itself, the authors show, meant different things to different people. At one point, they state that theatricality has an 'inevitable attraction for a theater audience' (152), at another that the foregrounding of many men marching in the king's coats at Shrewsbury 'draws on antitheatrical sentiment to offer an implicit critique of Henry's reliance upon theatrical performance to secure his authority' (162).

12. The weaknesses in this approach to theatricality can be best demonstrated by considering Joan of Arc in 1 Henry VI, who is 'insistently theatrical' (52), possessing 'the vivid theatrical presence that makes her the most memorable character in the play' (54). Joan's words have an 'earthy iconoclasm that threatens to discredit the traditional notions of chivalric glory invoked by English heroes' (58) (note the question-begging 'threatens'). She has a 'vivid voice and energetic theatrical presence'(58). Elsewhere the authors are content to take Nashe's discussion of the social functions of the English history play at face value, for example quoting his words on an audience's overwhelming emotional response to Talbot's death on page 18. Yet here, they argue, contra Nashe (and their own use of him earlier in the book), that an audience 'were likely to be disappointed by Talbot' (60), and state that Joan's reference to his corpse 'stinking and fly-blown' on the ground 'has an obvious appeal for an audience' (58). Yet if Nashe is relied upon, Talbot has a vivid theatrical presence (as if the personator were the man personated), 'disappointment' is an inadequate description of a degree of involvement with a character which can lead thousands to weep upon his death, and (implicitly) Joan's 'earthy iconoclasm' is likely to be the equivalent for a sixteenth-century audience of pissing on the Alamo. But Joan is a role-player, a disguiser, theatrical: therefore she appeals to a theatre audience, and Talbot, the embodiment of patriarchal historiography, does not.

13. As can perhaps be seen from the above paragraph, theatricality has an important place in the book's key binary oppositions, usually functioning to denote something subverting a 'univocal narrative', so that 'theatrical performance' is a source of 'transgressive power' (113), and 'theatrical power' is opposed to 'historical authority' (151), but associated, from Richard II onwards, with 'royal authority' (154). 'Modern' performative identity, especially gender identity, is at the root of this emphasis on the theatrical, as one of the 'modern' features of key characters in the plays is their 'theatricality'. But this performativity is gendered: as the authors present the female characters of the second tetralogy as being more 'modern' than their more theatrical predecessors in earlier plays (particularly Joan and Margaret), they seem to imply that modern femininity is not a matter of performance (or at least, the same kind of performance). Modern femininity is much more linked to a great domestic confinement, particularly prefigured in the fates of Quickly and Tearsheet at the end of 2 Henry IV. While the 'emergent masculinity' of Henry V is explicitly performative, Katherine's femininity is not.

14. Like many literary critics, the authors focus on the theatre intermittently, often mixing new-critical points with stage centred ones. For every 'Joan's subversive speech has an obvious appeal for an audience' (58) there is a 'the glimpses of a sense of French national identity ... are superseded by the insistent and explicit sense of hereditary entitlement' (55). In fact, the book is profoundly untheatrical in many places. It uses line counts as an index of 'the presence and prominence of female characters in the represented action' (23), and to support its claims that 1 Henry IV most marginalises women, even though in that play the action stops for several minutes when 'the lady sings a Welsh song'. It has a disturbing tendency to take characters' statements at face value and disguise this by recasting them in the passive, so that, for example, Winchester in 1 Henry VI is not called lewd, lascivious, wanton and a bastard to his face by his enemy Gloucester, but 'is identified as' these things by no named person (63). Similarly, the Countess in 1 Henry VI 'sees' Talbot as a child, dwarf and shrimp, rather than uses these terms to insult him (60). Characters are 'dehumanized' by the images others use to describe them (York in 2 Henry VI, 79, and Margaret in 3 Henry VI , 94). Henry VI 'is refigured as a lowly domestic animal and regendered as a bereaved - and helpless - mother' by his own words at 3:1 of 2 Henry VI (71). These are things, like Falstaff's 'effeminacy', that are counterbalanced in performance (which is where, after all, you find the theatrical) by the bodies of male actors, to an extent the authors do not acknowledge. Henry's gender does not change on stage because of a speech he makes, and even the most 'feminine' character in the plays was originally played by a boy, however 'unmanly'. The words on the page are not the words on the stage, a distinction the book does not make clearly or often enough.

STEVE LONGSTAFFE
ST MARTIN'S COLLEGE LANCASTER

Note

1. Those readers interested in the ways this does not happen should consult A. L. French. 1974 'The Mills of God and Shakespeare's Early History Plays.' English Studies 55: 313-24.