Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England.

Daryl Palmer, building on historian Felicity Heal's Hospitality in Early Modern England (1990), seeks "to define hospitality in dynamic relation to the age's ideology and theatre" (2) by comparing reports of practices, prescriptive pamphlet material and diaries, and a wide range of theatrical performances. Palmer situates his argument in a New Historicist framework relying particularly upon Michel de Certeau's insights on "tactics and strategies," Stephen Greenblatt's notion of "the circulation of social energy," and Leah Marcus' emphasis on "local readings"; he also calls upon Bakhtin's analysis of "speech genres" and recent reception theory in his complex theoretical framework. Palmer moves from the linguistic instability of the word "host" (which etymologically and in Renaissance usage referred to both "host" and "guest" [3]) to an exploration of vulnerabilities both within and between social classes. His readings include no fewer than thirty-five works from Shakespeare's most discussed plays to Will Kemp's Kemp's Nine Days Wonder to George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale.

Some of these readings are more compelling than others. I found particularly interesting Palmer's discussion of how hospitality functions in the representation of power relations within social classes. This works for Palmer on at least two levels - that of theme, and that of audience reception. For example, in his discussion of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, Palmer notes that the representation of the hospitable act of welcoming can arouse sexual desires in one aristocrat (the guest) that can undermine the authority of the other (the host) in, for example, Much Ado About Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter's Tale. At the same time, whether or not an "aristocrat" in the Renaissance audience experiences the endings of these plays as "aristocratic triumphs" or not depends upon with which of the aristocratic characters that particular audience member identifies (for example, whether with Don Pedro, on the one hand, or Leontes, on the other, in Much Ado [61]).

Palmer's discussion of hospitality in plebeian literary forms centers on the plebeian comedy as a "contest between versions of local authority" (110) and on the authorized texts as well as the usurpations of the pageant form as a means by which the lower orders, using an aristocratic form of hospitality, accrue power unto themselves. Here, Palmer provocatively argues for raising "the carnivalesque" to the status of genre in order to recognize and theorize "the concrete victories of ordinary folk" (133). Finally, for Palmer the representation of hospitality "stages vulnerability" in Renaissance tragedy. In his wonderfully interesting, if overstated, reading, King Lear is a tragedy arising out of the king's "fetishizing" of hospitality: the pamphlet ideal would have encouraged Lear to believe that "only by giving up his kingdom and dividing it among his daughters could he multiply himself as a guest on constant progress" (159).

Palmer's intellectually complex study will be of considerable interest to scholars of Renaissance social formations and to theorists of genre. However, his book would have been easier to read had the author relied more on his own voice to carry the argument along, more often relegating theorists and other critics to the footnotes. Also, too many of Palmer's sentences are logical conundrums - vague in regard to agent, object, and effect. He writes, "My . . . goal is to locate, say, at the intersection of a heterodox nobility and the genre of romantic comedy, successful and failed attempts at appropriation, moments when a representation of hospitality becomes useful, strategically and tactically, for a narrowly defined class interest which either succeeds or fails at turning [appropriating] that representation for its own ends" (25-26; emphasis Palmer's). I wish Palmer had served up his fresh and sophisticated insights in a simpler, more direct language.

Amy Lechter-Siegel UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK