Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue & Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies.

Eileen Allman, Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue

Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999. 2l2 pp. $36.50. ISBN: 0-87413-698-9.

Philippa Berry, Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies

(Feminist Readings of Shakespeare, 3.) London and New York: Routledge, 1999. xiv + 197 pp. $24.99. ISBN: 0-415-06895-9.

These two books illustrate how greatly feminist approaches to literary criticism can differ. Both authors look at Jacobean tragedy through a feminist lens, seeing in it a deep reflection and analysis of cultural and therefore of gender issues, but their procedures, and the kinds of insight that result, are strikingly diverse.

Allman's Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue argues that the character configuration of revenge tragedy in the Jacobean period mirrors and contributes to the political debate over the nature of monarchical authority that was sparked by James I's power struggle with Parliament. She focuses on four plays -- The Maid's Tragedy, The Second Maid's Tragedy, Valentinian, and The Duchess of Malfi -- written and performed between 1610-1613, a particularly rancorous period of public debate about tyranny and anxiety over James's assertions of absolutism. Devoting a chapter each to the stage tyrant, the revenger, the androgynous hero, and the authoritative heroine, Allman works through each of these roles in the three plays first mentioned, and then culminates in a reading of The Duchess of Malfi as a play that transcends the genre of revenge tragedy, yet confirms her analysis of the genre's cultural significance. Allman's analysis is sensitive and convincing on the gender implications of these roles, as well as on the self-reflexive quality of the genre, in which actors play characters who self-consciously play roles and attempt to create a social script in which their political and moral agenda prevails.

Allman argues persuasively that the relationship between the tyrant and his male subjects is a homosocial one. The tyrant represents an extreme of misogyny, asserting his power by casting his subjects in subordinate and therefore feminized roles: "The tyrant's power over his male subjects relies, in fact, on their mutual misogyny in understanding signifiers of femaleness as degrading to men" (41). The fear of tyranny sparked by James's absolutist pronouncements and his power struggle with Parliament is enacted in this figure, who represents not so much the reality of James's rule but what his opponents feared it might become. The revenger, in this analysis, counters this threat to his masculinity by creating a second persona for himself covered by deception, that challenges and seeks to overthrow the tyrant. As rival to the power that writes the dominant social script and chief manipulator of the play/s action, he becomes a figure of the author. But by setting himself up as the opposite of the tyrant, the re venger accepts his misogynist terms of authority. Allman characterizes the revenger's career as "a pathological retreat from the female, an attempt, like the tyrant he opposes, to control the sexual Other through strategies of domination and appropriation" (85). Revenger and tyrant remain locked in the homosocial rivalry for masculine control over the reviled feminine.

The two characters who offer a way out of this impasse are the androgynous hero and the heroine who gains a measure of autonomy from male control. Androgynous heroes are the male characters who "avoid replicating the tyrant they oppose by rejecting the terms of his rivalry; refuting the seemingly natural polarity between male authority and female submission to support and even obey the authority of women" (102). Their authority derives from that of the heroine they choose to support in lieu of the tyrant. And the authority of such heroines as the Lady in The Second Maid's Tragedy, Eudoxa and Lucina in Valeneinian, and ultimately the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi is a spiritual self-affirmation that transcends the political and physical authority claimed by the tyrant. While heroine affirms patriarchal authority in the social realm, this spiritual self-affirmation allows her to escape (albeit at great cost, sometimes of life) the role of mere text or counter that the tyrant and revenger strive to create for her. In Allman's view, the analysis of Jacobean misogynistic politics in these four revenge tragedies is deep and telling, but need not be read as an affirmation of those politics, offering just as easily a point of view from which to critique them.

A great strength of Allman's book is its combination of theoretical sophistication with clear, relatively jargon-free prose. Her early chapters provide a useful, concise account of the way Elizabethan and Stuart dynastic politics served to confuse the standard alignment of the male gender with familial and political power: Elizabeth's patrilineal claim to power was complicated by her female gender, and James's authoritarian politics and misogynistic social policy were complicated by his matrilineal claim to power and his notorious homosocial tendencies. But this broad perspective is not carried through; and while Allman's focus on 1610-1613 provides a sharp focus, it begs the question of how broadly her insights and conclusions can be extended to the Jacobean period in general and the genre of revenge tragedy as a whole. Nevertheless, this suggestive and clearly written study should be very valuable to a broad range of both scholars and students.

Philippa Berry's Shakespeare's Feminine Endings, by contrast, is aimed at a much narrower audience of fellow literary critics. It is a densely written look into the cultural and psychological depths of Shakespeare's tragedies, deconstructing the patriarchal discourse of the plays and finding in successive layers of imagery and cultural reference the echoes of the suppressed feminine that "resonate" or "reverberate" behind its cultural affirmations. Berry's deconstructionist and cultural materialist analysis of death in Shakespearean tragedy is compelling and suggestive, but as a piece of reading it is tough going. Determined readers will find a complex meditation that tries to represent the discourse the plays (and their culture) have repressed, a discourse which exists therefore only by figural or punning implication. And what Berry finds repressed above all in the discourse of Shakespearean tragedy is the female body -- both as female physical experience (female sexuality) and as representative of a general repression of the material world.

Berry's early chapter on "Double Dying and Other Tragic Inversions," is representative of her approach. In it she explores the "inversion of death" implied in the flowery fertility rite of Ophelia's death, in Desdemona's repeated crossing of the border between life and death at the end of her life, and in Juliet's life-in-death in the tomb. Focusing in particular on Juliet, she goes on to place these deaths in the context of Counter-Reformation saint imagery, the philosophical concept of the animus mundi, medieval popular festival, and astrology. The analysis is rich, but so complex it can be hard to follow. Berry is convincing in her demonstration that the familiar connection of death with sexuality and the complex of imagery surrounding the heroines' deaths undercuts death's finality, with it the privileging of spirit over body. Less convincing, perhaps, is her rather sketchy delineation of a homoerotic preoccupation with the female backside or arse in the sexual imagery that surrounds the heroines.

In each of the following chapters -- on Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear respectively -- Berry performs a similar operation of teasing out wordplay, unearthing half-buried imagery, uncovering layers of imagery, and bolstering her findings with connections made to a broad range of Renaissance cultural movements and works of art, pulled with seeming effortlessness out of an impressive erudition. According to Berry, Shakespeare's tragedies are quintessential works of the "liminal" Renaissance period between the medieval "animist" view of death and the modern rationalized one. As such, they provide a glimpse into a period of unstable transition that allowed for an upsurge of repressed cultural values. The advantage of Berry's approach is that it demonstrates very clearly the ways in which dominant cultural values, by dominating, distort or "disfigure" the competing values they oppress. Yet as much as Berry's reading works to deconstruct the monolithic patriarchal order that Shakepeare's texts affirm on the surface, and have been traditionally celebrated for affirming, at the same time it paradoxically confirms the traditional privileging of Shakespeare in the canon of Renaissance writers, and of the tragedies in the rest of the Shakespeare canon. Here again, as with All-man's book, I found myself wondering about the implications of this analysis to the broader range of literary works of the period. Would other texts -- say of Webster, or of Elizabeth Gary -- yield similar results if subjected to the same level of analysis? Or does Shakespeare remain the special case, the quintessential work of literature, to whose level all others aspire?

Nevertheless, and while some of the connections Berry teases out can seem farfetched, the great advantage of her approach is that it brings alive the complexity and open-endedness of the Shakespearean text and its permeability with the larger culture in which it participates, including the repressed aspects of that culture. Berry's Shakespeare is inexhaustibly rich, endlessly fascinating, always with more to tell us about ourselves as culturally produced and culture-producing creatures. This is a colder view of humanity than we get in Allman's look at the passionate attempt to shape political culture in the revenge tragedy of 1610-1613. Both views are valuable; Allman's will reach a wider audience.