Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England.

Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England, by Pamela Allen Brown. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 263. Cloth $ 49.95. Paper $ 19.95.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that women have no sense of humor. Like Bob Dole, they just can't laugh. Irony is an unknown quantity in their lives. Indeed, even some feminists frown on laughter, claiming that a world awash with misogynist humor is no place for women to crack jokes in. In this lively and engaging book, Pamela Allen Brown energetically refutes a stance of this kind as "dangerously defeatist" (29). It is to her lasting credit that she offers a glimpse of early modern society as a world resounding with women's laughter. But women were not just avid consumers of humor purveyed in the new mass media of cheap print and the stage. They were actively involved in a wide range of activity that spurred laughter--such as skimmingtons, horn fairs, Hocktide binding, riddling, rhyming mock verses, and even performing in jigs. Within these social performances or dramas of everyday life, women were often the winners in battles of wits with men, and the ones who got the laugh.

Brown combines a look at phenomena of popular culture with an analysis of an impressive variety of texts, including jest books and drama, coining the term "jesting literature" to encompass the entire field of laughter. For Brown, women's culture of jest was a source of social power and resistance to the constraints of patriarchal society. One important factor that bolsters her argument is the truism that laughter is always a communal affair. It was the social network of women in the village or the neighborhood that provided a vital support for early modern women, particularly in the case of domestic violence. Close communal surveillance has often been described in negative terms by cultural historians, but Brown points to the measure of power women gained as regulators of neighborhood behaviour. This power could be deployed for disciplinary purposes that were both oppressive and benign, she argues. She draws on the plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor to demonstrate how an alliance of women might create a protective safety net for women of horn-mad husbands--such as Master Ford. In a culture dominated by a moral double standard and where the threat of sexual slander made it imperative for women to defend their reputation with the greatest possible zeal, women's gossips were indispensable support groups. As she points out, the Windsor wives instigate a charivari against the lecherous knight Falstaff precisely in order to deflect shaming away from women.

Another arena where women cultivated their networks of gossips was the alehouse. Brown challenges the mainstream view of early modern social historians who claim that alehouses were essentially a male preserve. (1) While admitting that from the 1590s alehouses run by alewives faced increasing competition from breweries, Brown uncovers a far greater participation of women in this site of popular recreation than has been noted hitherto. In a fascinating discussion of the satiric print Tittle-Tattle: Or, the several Branches of Gossipping (1600) she points out that antifeminist satire might set out to mock the gossipy ways of women, but at the same time it offers eloquent testimony to a flourishing female subculture that centered around women's mobility and social ties. Brown is particularly good at reading conventionally misogynist images of women against the grain and teasing out their feminist implications. A gossip, she notes, is not only a chief relayer of news, but also a social arbiter. The farcical figure of Uxor, Noah's shrewish wife, in medieval religious drama has usually been read as a parody of unruly women. Brown draws attention to the fact that Uxor did not merely provide women spectators with a star comic entertainer, but also embodied a well-loved tradition of virago figures who defended the weak against the strong. The jest book persona Long Meg of Westminster--later subject of an anonymous play--belongs in this tradition of strong female roles, as does the legendary alewife Mother Bunch.

In her discussion of the motif of cuckoldry, Brown points out that what has been read predominantly in terms of male anxiety might have had a completely different valency for women. Most critics are exercised about the issue why men would laugh at the thing they feared. The usual response is a recourse to Freud's notion of laughter. In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) Freud set out a hydraulic theory of laughter, which defined laughter as the relieving of nervous energy. Joking brings pleasure because it saves the psychic energy of inhibiting emotions such as aggression or sexuality. The saved energy is expended in laughter. To her credit, Brown eschews such a reductive approach to humor, and indeed lays the blame for the notion of women as the unlaughing other in male scenarios of humor squarely at Freud's feet. Instead, she shifts the focus of inquiry to what stake women might have had in cuckoldry humor. She taps into a rich vein of female mockery of male obsessions with honor and status, particularly in the figure of the pathologically jealous husband. As in Othello, it is male fantasies as much as marital deception that is the object of ridicule. At this point, however, a slight flaw begins to creep into the book. Brown displays a tendency to equate the workings of humor with the real-life interests of the consumers of a jest--she seems to assume that women always identify with female interests and men with male interests. Humor is a funny business, however. It is marked by the entry into a separate realm of fantasy. Sociologists speak of a special humorous mode, a frame of expectation that is voluntarily entered--with the proviso that the humorous situation be a temporary one that is clearly defined as nonserious. (2) A helpful analogy might be that of play--entering the world of humor is similar to joining a game. A focus purely on the content of jests might be misplaced. Cuckoldry jokes are a staple of the jest book genre--cuckoldry served as a reliable cue to trigger laughter. This is not to deny that during this era male honor was, indeed, an vexed issue for men. But the main function of laughter lies in creating a community that includes the laughers and marks the nonparticipants as outsiders. In other words: however much anxiety the obsession with cuckoldry might evoke in early modern man, in jests about cuckolds he would, of course, be laughing about other cuckolds. Cuckolds are always other people.

A similar point might be raised in connection with a discussion of shrews. As Brown notes, shaming rituals were sometimes directed against wife beaters--although this predominantly became the case only in the seventeenth century--and shrewish behavior was a mode of female self-defense that was by no means always viewed critically. In The Taming of the Shrew Kate prefigures a later model of conjugal ideology by disdaining the assistance of a network of gossips in her struggle against a violent husband--one linked to the emerging ideal of the nuclear household. By contrast, John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (1611) clearly endorses the practice of recruiting an army of gossips in the battle against transgressive husbands. Even ballads largely condemn abusive husbands, and rationalize women's shrewish behavior as a natural consequence of domestic violence. Indeed, Brown takes the marvelous title of her book directly from a ballad that she claims is directed as much at female consumers as at a male audience. Brown persuasively argues that ballads might have provided women with argumentative tools in defence of self-assertive behavior. However, by no means would all women react in the same way. Even what might appear to us as crudely misogynist humor may well have found approval with many women addressees. A notorious example is the jest A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morrel's Skin, thought to be a possible source for The Taming of the Shrew. (3) The jest describes the strategem of taming a shrew by whipping her and wrapping her in a hide soaked with salt. Incredible as it might seem to modern sensibilities, virtuous women may well have been ready to join in laughter about other women from whom they might wish to distance themselves. (4) Shrews are always other people.

In the last section of her book, Brown offers a close reading of two clusters of texts recruiting women's mockery that played an influential role in popular culture. The first example concerns a brace of crime pamphlets and describes the exploits of a female coney-catcher, Doll Philips. Based on true incidents, these pamphlets recount with relish how a female trickster managed to cheat and rob both a rich widow and a rich farmer. As Brown shows, in the print narrative of the events the female rogue is glamorized while the deluded victims are relentlessly mocked. Critics have traced echoes of this real-life scenario to both the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the shaming of Titania, and the character of Dol Common in The Alchemist. In her treatment of the celebrated figure of the patient Griselda, Brown uncovers an abundance of voices critical of wifely submission, which are articulated even in narratives that overtly espouse the Christian model of Griselda. One example she cites is the play by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, The Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissill (1599). Another is A Winter's Tale, which invokes the Griselda story only to have Paulina deride the idea of Griselda as a virtuous role model. Even many early modern husbands may well have preferred strong, energetic wives as helpmeets rather than passive martyrs--shrews rather than sheep.

It is in connection with the former narrative, in the rogue pamphlets about the female coney-catcher, that once again a quibble springs to mind. To make her point about female ridicule Brown tends to downplay the fact that often women themselves are the laughingstocks in other women's mockery. In the case of the rich widow, an independent trader in the tripe business, Brown has recourse to class-based arguments about resentment against privileged traders in the food market. This cannot quite gloss over the fact that the humour in question has a decidedly misogynist streak. Similarly, one the of very first jests discussed in the book relates how a wife manages to reveal the affair her husband is having with a maid and have her sacked. As Brown rightly remarks, the jest features the motif of the foolish husband and his exposure to mockery by a group of women. However, somewhere along the line there is a loser, who is a woman, too. The point is that jests are notoriously slippery to pin down as to content--they cut both ways. Perhaps more than any other mode, humor thrives on ambiguity. Brown is careful to point out that her claims go no further than the idea that jests offer "cultural scripts that women could use as prompts for their own performances" (31), but the fact remains that these are highly unstable scripts. Brown herself notes that even misogynist jests that circulate the view of women as inherently deceitful at the same time demonstrate their wit and their skill at turning every situation into a winner. Contradictory meanings are endorsed as simultaneously valid. In addition, humorous texts contain an inbuilt disclaimer defusing the implications of the humorous situation by announcing that they were meant in jest, not in earnest. A society that took such delight in jokes about rogueries might lead us to see the early modern world as suffused with a genial, amused tolerance toward criminals--something that we know from other sources is clearly not the case. Instead of seeking the true meaning of a jest in its content, it might be more productive to look at the effect produced by humor. Laughter promotes a sense of intimacy that is established through a shared response--it creates "a community of amusement." (5) Individuals are welded together into a community through laughter. And this is precisely what Brown's delightful survey demonstrates in the case of women. She shows us an early modern world in which women were actively and enthusiastically engaged in a culture of jesting, forging strong social bonds and articulating their pleasure in mocking laughter.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (Harlow, 1983).

2. Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge, 1987).

3. See Frances E. Dolan, ed., The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston, 1996).

4. See Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, 1982), 111.

5. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago, 1999), 29.

Reviewer: INDIRA GHOSE