Jonson's Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation.

Ian Donaldson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. viii + 240. $65. ISBN: 01-981839-1

In 1991, Paul Yachnin published what remains the most important essay on early modern drama to have appeared in the last decade. This essay, titled "The Powerless Theater," forms the first, and organizing, chapter of his book. That Stage-Wrights is more than an elaboration of this essay stands as testament to Yachnin's continuing interest in a variety of critical issues. That this book deals skillfully, often brilliantly, with the three major playwrights of the era shows a critical intelligence worthy of special attention.

Yachnin argues in "The Powerless Theater" that, from the late 1580s through the mid-1620s, the playhouses of early modern England were politically "weightless," lacking direct consequences for the world outside their walls. In contrast to now-familiar claims about the theater's radical nature, Yachnin describes a theater oriented strongly toward its own interests - primary among which was the legitimation of playing and the writing of plays. Thus the plays written for this theater tell us more about the theater, and about the playwrights who wrote them, than they do about the culture of early modern England.

These playwrights "had somehow to change how theater meant; they had to reinscribe dramatic discourse in some interpretive field or in terms of some foundational value different from the interpretive field and the valuelessness or cultural weightlessness of the powerless theater" (62). This is also, of course, a good description of Yachnin's project, which is to reinscribe the theater in terms of values different from the radical powerfulness that first-wave new historicists and cultural materialists held it to possess. Yet it is to the credit of Stage-Wrights that the playwrights he examines differ from us, as well as from each other. And one of this book's many virtues is its portrait of these three dramatists' idiosyncratic ways of representing the charged interrelations of public and private, theater and world, and male and female.

The description of Shakespeare here is of a somewhat metaphysical playwright who "placed dramatic discourse in the field of the private," emptying, as he did so, the space of the public - in Yachnin's words, a "teeming but empty scene" (63). Shakespeare authorizes his apolitical theatrical discourse by appropriating the language of gender difference. Along with "transcendent" female characters (such as Portia, Hermione, and Miranda), Yachnin argues, Shakespeare's plays offer an account of theatrical discourse which is licensed precisely through its ventriloquized nature, by its suggestion that artistic power is, at base, feminized. Jonson, in contrast, labored to re-politicize the early modern theater, to "place drama back in the public field that Shakespeare was working to reveal as a mere theatrical scene" (63). Jonson's efforts included an attempt to stabilize the felt relations between theater and world - to replace the plug, one could say, in the Shakespearean drain down which the public scene whirled toward the unknowable private world. Jonson's women, like Middleton's, and unlike Shakespeare's, take part in a public world where gender is not only non-transcendental but often less important, to the playwrights, than other topics.

Middleton is here an heir of sorts to Marlowe, a characterization in which Yachnin follows Lars Engle. Middleton's dramatic practice, Yachnin argues, is ultimately parodic; his style developed from the "recursive, self-consuming" nature of the boys companies at the turn of the century (64). The resulting dramatic world is therefore less distinct than that of Shakespeare or Jonson, and translates into a certain messiness on the level of character. In contrast to the profound "mystery" of Shakespeare's tragedic characters, and the sometimes wearing publicness of Jonson's, many of Middleton's major characters are awkwardly disjunct, making them seem doltish about the big picture of which they are a part. Where a Macbeth or a Sejanus might meditate on experiential contradictions, a Middleton character such as The Changeling's Beatrice-Joanna or Women Beware Women's Duke embodies them, betraying not a construction of subjectivity "but rather a processive making and unmaking of previous constructions" (99).

My primary reservation with this study concerns Yachnin's belief that legitimation must have been of central importance to these writers. To be sure, writing plays was often scorned as trivial or even base labor. But it is not clear that writers so regularly engaged with the theater - and, in the case of Shakespeare (and, more briefly, Jonson), with playing - could not have taken their sense of worth from venues other than the field of representation itself. In however meager quantities, money, celebrity, and readership were doubtless attractive commodities, then as now. And, as Meredith Skura has recently argued, the theater has always drawn individuals for whom standard forms of legitimation are less important than the special energy associated with the production of fantasy.

There is much more to this dazzling book than can be conveyed in such a brief account. Each page of Stage-Wrights contains a provocative insight about the early modern theater, its playwrights, or its dramatic works. It offers a major revision of our understanding of the early modern playhouse and its relation to the surrounding culture. Written in accessible prose, it might well be a part of seminar reading lists concerning early modern drama. It will doubtless be one of the most talked about books on its topic in the coming decade.

Ian Donaldson's collection of essays on Jonson features eleven pieces written from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, nine of which have been published elsewhere. Taken together, these essays involve the relations among Jonson, his writing, and critical traditions interested in aligning an ostensibly biographical author with his work. In part because Donaldson continually strives to modify our understanding of these relations, Jonson's Magic Houses is more unified and successful than most collections of its sort.

Donaldson holds that criticism and literary biography alike have given us a simplified Jonson, and have done so by simplifying the relation between the author and his works. Donaldson's desire to give us a more complex Jonson thus involves an argument about methodology best described by the collection's subtitle, Essays in Interpretation. To Donaldson, reading Jonson's works asks for more interpretation than they commonly receive, a word which seems synonymous with "care" and "subtlety" throughout this book. Jonson's works can appear to offer unambiguous material for critics and biographers, but readers need to contextualize such material carefully. The Jonson which a cautious interpretation of his works may give us, Donaldson suggests, is "more humorous, more flexible, more self-critical, less monolithic, and (in a word) less morose" than the two-dimensional caricature sketched by some conventional approaches (42).

For convenience we may divide the chapters of this book into two general kinds. The first involves chapters which focus on issues of Jonson's biography, and his place in literary history. We might see these chapters to involve the space between Jonson and posterity. Among the best of such pieces are chapter 3, "Gathering and Losing the Self: Jonson and Biography," chapter 8, "Politic Picklocks: Reading Jonson Historically," and chapter 11, "'Not of an Age': Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of Posterity." This first essay expands on insights that Donaldson offered in the introduction to his edition of Jonson for "The Oxford Authors" series, delineating the dangers of extrapolating a personal Jonson from works which are themselves strongly derived from other works. I found "Politic Picklocks" perhaps the strongest in the collection, as its call for a reconsideration of topicality in early modern works is balanced with a plea for a deeper understanding of what topicality itself was - including "adventitious topicality" outside the author's intention and control (137). In "'Not of an Age'," Donaldson argues that the longstanding pairing of Jonson with Shakespeare has been not only invidious but misleading, for it produces a falsely transcendental Shakespeare and a time-bound Jonson that likewise bears little resemblance to the actual playwright and his works.

The second kind of essay in this collection focuses primarily on the space between Jonson and his literary works. These essays include chapter 5, "Jonson's Magic Houses," chapter 6, "Clockwork Comedy: Time and The Alchemist," and chapter 7, "Unknown Ends: Volpone."

The first of these, the essay from which the collection takes its title, explores the nuances of "magic" houses in Jonson's works. Donaldson describes these houses as "magic" in that, like the imagined places of The Alchemist, "they lack a basis in reality, existing principally in the hopes and fantasies and perceptions of the characters themselves" (82). Donaldson's next chapter, "Clockwork Comedy", examines the centrality, as both agent and topic, of time in The Alchemist. And in his chapter on Volpone, Donaldson argues for a deep relation between the structural anomalies of Jonsonian comedic plots - especially that of Volpone - and "the mental, psychological, and moral state" of their characters (110).

This book makes a needed statement about Jonson, perhaps the most undervalued of the major authors of his time. It also offers a cogent brief for a cautionary approach to issues of topicality and biography relating to the early modern era. Elegantly written and gracefully argued, Donaldson's essays bode well for his forthcoming biography of Jonson.

DOUGLAS BRUSTER University of Texas, Austin