Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience.

Mark Thornton Burnett, (Early Modern Literature in History Series.) London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin's, 1997. xii + 225 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-333-69457-0.

These two books traverse the same rocky terrain, the question of how relations defined by strict official notions of hierarchy and status were represented in drama and played out in social practice in the English Renaissance. Each carries out its project with much credit; taken together, they suggest a comparison between two current methodologies and mindsets. Burnett, a late heir of New Historicism, seeks a fresh approach to questions of authority and obedience by focussing on non-canonical dramatic texts, setting them in the context of popular culture and social practice through archival research, and prioritizing "the servant's voice" (5-6). In contrast, Jordan works with the most canonized author of all, focusses on the hero-kings of the four romances, and views them through the lens of political theories developed by the learned elite. Burnett argues that "Partly through their participation in popular culture and their access to developing cultural networks, subordinated groups could be empowered and even contest existing hierarchical arrangements" (8), while Jordan skeptically declares, "The suggestive heterodoxies common to many playtexts have left no clear record of their translation into forms of social practice" (9). It's a nice question which of these books carries out its program of research and interpretation with a better informed, more convincing or stimulating historical awareness.

What did it mean to be a servant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Rank in service wasn't always congruent with social rank, for apprentices might be better born than their masters, and gentlemen served as stewards in noble households. Servants ranged in status from the courtier who waited at his own expense in expectation of title, land, or office, down to the lowly, unskilled groom or chambermaid. Burnett devotes chapters to apprentices, journeymen, male and female domestic servants, and stewards and gentlemen-ushers as represented in plays, narratives, and a rich variety of other texts: letters, wills, household accounts, court records, ballads, jest-books, petitions, libels, satires, prayers, among others. With varying degrees of argumentative bite, in each chapter he emphasizes the types of social unrest and mobility, the anxieties about order and status, and the institutional and political change that master-servant relations engage. For example, in the late sixteenth century, apprentices rallied against the gentlemen who demeaned them, but by the early seventeenth century, apprentices themselves might be represented as gallants. Carnivalesque images of the male "servant on top" encoded wide-ranging social critique of "place" in every sense, and the mistress's bond with her female servant might feel threatening to the master. The type character of the unscrupulous steward refracted aristocratic anxieties about keeping up the estate and the line.

Burnett makes effective use of extra-dramatic documents to explain how such representations illuminate various crises in the practice and perception of service. For example, in a 1595 petition complaining that foreign artisans "[kept] Apprentices and Loomes twyce or thryce as many as they ought," and "opened and discovered the secretes of our Occupac[i]on," the weavers' guild declared, "By this meanes many a poore English man is . . . brought to . . . miserye" (60). Such language helps make sense of the nationalism in Deloney's ballads or Dekker's plays. Yet just as often, Burnett interprets the representation of social tensions so even-handedly and cautiously that it is hard to see just what ideological work is being performed. For example, he states that constructions of unrest and violence among apprentices "articulated anxieties in an effort to consign them to silence, but suppressed them in such a way as to grant them a forceful voice" (28). Such equivocal formulations perhaps derive from Burnett's scrupulous attention to diverse sources and social causes; rather than tidying up the inherent messiness of social history, he tends to over-generalize in an attempt to accommodate it.

Pericles, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Prospero, the heroes of Shakespeare's romances, are all rulers who abuse their rule. Thus Jordan's book, a striking departure from prevailing psychological and mythical interpretations, has evident warrant for her claim that "like the histories, the romances speak the language of politics" (12). The author draws on a deep, fine-tuned understanding of political theory from Aristotle to Edward Coke to embed each play in contemporary debates swirling around the nature of monarchy. James's view in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) that the king's will is law, his subjects "being but his vassals" (15), clashed with the older idea of the mixed monarchy, kingly rule in concert with the people's rights and liberties. The contradictions inherent in mixed monarchy were exacerbated not only by James's absolutism, but also by constitutionalism. "Action in the romances," claims Jordan, "reflects the unsettled character that these various 'isms' possessed" (33).

In superbly poised chapters on the four plays, she searchingly interprets each hero's particular strain of absolutist-style misrule, bringing it into dialogue with concepts and controversies of monarchy. In the chapter on Cymbeline, for example, she argues that an idea of contract, central to anti- absolutist thought, informs both the marriage/wager plot and the matter of tribute to Rome. Noting that the play is set during the pax augustana coincident with the birth of Christ, she shows how the Christian idea of conscience informs contract, interpreted by Coke in the Slade case as a promise to keep faith that rests not on tangible evidence but rather on thoughts and intentions. Posthumus's wager with Iachimo "effectively breaks the terms of [his] earlier contract of betrothal with its promise of spousal trust and fidelity" precisely because it is based on doubt of Imogen's fidelity (80). Jordan's analysis of the tribute issue offers perhaps the most richly-layered engagement with political discourse in the book, drawing on Scripture, Aquinas, Erasmus, James I, William Fulbecke, and Barnabe Barnes, as well as on a customs case in the court of Exchequer. Christ's well-known dictum, "Give . . . Cesar the things which are Cesar's, and give unto God those which are God's" (Matthew 22:19-21) made the Christian's conscience the determinant of whether a ruler's command had to be obeyed. And this Christian liberty "became bound up with the language of property, the liberties of the subject" (88). By the same token, tribute, traditionally the monarch's prerogative or absolute power exercised independently of Parliament and positive law, was in turn held conditional on the monarch's respect for the liberties of the subject (90-91), a matter of conscience. Thus when Cymbeline finally agrees to pay tribute to Caesar, he does so "under the aegis of the Word," a conscientious notion of contract and imperial rule as well, whereby the liberties Britons claim will be honored by Caesar, as by Cymbeline's heirs, rulers of the future British empire. Jordan's masterful explication of these doctrines is complemented by her subtle and imaginative readings of Shakespeare's text. Occasionally a reader might find the political discourses with which she aligns the romances somewhat tangential to the urgencies of the poetry and the characters. More often, this book re-connects the romances to the political urgencies of their historical moment.

COPPELIA KAHN Brown University