Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England.

Natasha Korda. Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 286 pp. + 11 b/w pls. index. illus. $49.95. ISBN: 0-8122-3663-7.

This valuable study draws on recent social historians to argue that despite the legal principle of coverture, "many wives retained various forms of separate property, secured through marriage settlements that were defensible in equity courts" (40); shows "the gendered division of labor within the home" modulating towards "a division between male activity and female inactivity" (29); explores the resort to pawnshops by housewives and theatrical managers, with pawned goods circulating through households and theaters and back again. Korda argues that The Merry Wives of Windsor "mobilize[s], in order to dispel, cultural anxieties surrounding the housewife's unsupervised supervision of the household" (92); explores Measure for Measure as a play full of endangered single women, shrewdly analyzing single women's loss of place in Renaissance society; and suggests that Petruchio educates Kate "as a manipulator of status objects": "in marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Petruchio exposes his frugal household economy to the threat of superfluous expenditure" (57, 64). (Though she makes a good case for The Taming of the Shrew, Korda ignores other plays in which the gentle classes are extravagant spenders, the merchant classes frugal and cautious to a fault).

The introduction is solidly historicized, though I am uneasy about "the housewife's emerging role as a keeper and caretaker of household stuff" (12). Emerging? True, there was more "stuff" available than before, and Korda persuasively argues that more of it comprised "luxury goods" (21) and that beyond simple use-value, household stuff served a "civilizing function" (19). But was this really a new, or merely an expanded, role for women? Can we easily imagine a medieval housewife not looking after "household stuff?" The change seems likelier to have been quantitative than qualitative. The problem of newness also arises when Korda argues, "The redefinition of the household as a receptacle or repository of goods had a profound impact on the gendered division of labor within the home" (26). Suggesting that designation of housework as a woman's role was an innovation (the word "house-keeper" now began to refer exclusively to women), Korda on the same page traces this gendered division back to Xenophon (26). Korda's use of "housework theory," which posits that "domestic work under capitalism is not considered 'real' work because 'women's productive labor is confined to use-values while men produce for exchange" (54) seems anachronistic, neglecting the "putting-out" system for textiles: it was precisely household weavers exchanging their products for money who initiated English proto-capitalism. And one more cavil: Korda takes Thomas Rymer's "clutter," in the phrase "to raise ... all this clutter and turmoil" to refer to a clutter of material objects (10); but "raise" and "turmoil" suggest a likelier meaning: "noisy turmoil or disturbance,... clatter" (OED, clutter, n., 4).

All cavils evaporate, however, in the light of the brilliant central chapter on Othello, which explores stigmatization of women and "primitive" non-Europeans for excessive or wrong headed attachment to material objects (113). Women's supposed passion for luxury objects and Africans supposed veneration of fetishes meet in the fancywork handkerchief, the perfect prop for Iago's conflation of stereotypical female desire for luxury imports with the thirst for novelty that allegedly leads Desdemona to desire an exotic man. In this generally strong book, this chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

LINDA WOODBRIDGE

Pennsylvania State University