Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama.

Ivo Kamps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv + 255 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0521-56155-8.

These two books take on very large topics, subjectivity and history, in very different ways. Both seek to incorporate postmodern conceptions of their topics with early modern models and representations of each, with varying degrees of success.

Richard Hillman's interests are in the shifting theories of subjectivity in English drama from the middle ages up until the closing of the theaters in 1642. His specific focus is on self-speaking, that is soliloquies, but also "monologues, asides, and even silences" (1). Hillman distances himself from both New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, the two theoretical orientations that have had the most to say about subjectivity in early modern drama, by, first, maintaining that the socio-historical subject can be discussed separately from its representation, and, second, holding to the unfashionable notion that texts can be considered "objects, even aesthetic objects, worthy of attention and interest in themselves" (6). His theoretical bent is heavily Lacanian and this leads him to "approach the soliloquy and its discursive analogues as involving, not merely self-reflection, as in mystical meditation, but a wide variety of forms of 'mirror-talking'" (23). This leads to some interesting insights, especially regarding early drama in which Hillman finds evidence for a self-awareness in representations of God. It also leads him out of strictly dramatic texts into quasi-dramatic works like Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid, Foxe's Acts and Monuments, The Mirror for Magistrates, and Marie de Gournay's "Preface" to Montaigne's Essays, all works that offer stimulating contrasts with the dramatic model of the soliloquy. The center of this book is Hamlet, though Hillman resists endorsing the text as an "epistemological watershed." Rather he places it in the context of dramatic evolution that runs from the Cycle dramas up until the Jacobean period.

Hillman's approach to his subject has two drawbacks. First, while the sweep of material he covers in the book is impressive, it is at times exhausting. A narrower focus, say on the texts in which "self-speaking" is the most obviously important (Hamlet, of course, but also Dr. Faustus), might have made the book more manageable. It would also have forestalled certain inaccuracies and generalizations that creep into the work. To give an example of each: Hillman argues that the Mirror for Magistrates is politically conservative (78). Clearly the state censors did not think so or they would not have stopped the first run of that book at the press. And the assertion that the mainspring of the action in John Webster's plays is sexual desire (177) should also be nuanced. The Duchess of Malfi may be largely about sex, but it cannot be reduced to it. Second, Hillman finds mirror images everywhere and those mirror images are always significant in his Lacanian semiotics. Surely a mirror is sometimes only a mirror.

Ivo Kamps takes a much more restricted approach to his large topic. He looks at Stuart historical drama in the context of contemporaneous movements in historiography. This is a sound and fruitful approach. If nothing else, it offers a rebuttal to the many critics who have dismissed Stuart history plays in favour of their better known Elizabethan counterparts, while offering a compelling explanation for the declining production of history plays during the Stuart period.

Calling heavily on the theoretical work of Hayden White and the historical work of D. R. Woolf, Hillman reminds us of just how complicated the matter of history became in the Stuart age. James I, seeking to solidify what was really a rather tenuous claim to the throne and promulgate his absolutist view of monarchy, used history as an ideological tool at exactly the moment that historiography was emerging as a contentious intellectual field that threatened to destabilize the entire notion of a unified, stable history. Dramatists reacted to this tension, in part, by simply opting out of the form; history plays notoriously went out of favour beginning in the Jacobean period. Those dramatists who continued to write history plays created works that are sites of complex historiographical contention.

Kamps begins with an introduction to Renaissance historiography, giving an overview by breaking it into three primary movements: medieval, humanist, and antiquarian. That takes him up to the end of the sixteenth century and into a chapter that uses John Bale's King John as an example of a Tudor historical drama. Kamps then moves onto Stuart drama, focussing on Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, Shakespeare's and Fletcher's Henry VIII, Massinger and Fletcher's The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavell, and finally John Ford's Perkin Warbeck. This is a judicious selection of plays, calling on the well-known and the obscure, and representing plays that deal with both the distant and the very near past.

The argument that Kamps forms from this material is that "forms of historiography developed in the sixteenth century became part of the content of pre-Civil War Stuart historical drama" (2), dramatizing the inadequacy of received historical teleologies. In practice, this meant both questioning of the "great man" narrative of history and the Tudor model of unified, providential history. For Kamps, the watershed moment in the development towards an historically self-aware drama comes in Shakespeare's Henry V when, before the battle of Agincourt, Henry finds himself debating a common soldier, Michael Williams. The conversation leads Henry to the awareness that he is a "bearer (and not just the creator or controller) of the ideological structure named kingship" (100), a product, not a producer, of history. This is a convincing argument that makes good sense of not only Shakespeare, but also of those few dramatists who followed him in exploring the increasingly complicated field of historical representation into the Stuart period.

PAUL BUDRA Simon Fraser University