The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality, and Power.

In applying feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical approaches to English Renaissance drama, critics have analyzed the texts as embattled sites of cultural and gender politics, and shown as well how the dramas' Renaissance and modern reception informs their meanings. The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama advances a detailed historical and feminist reading about the uses of the dramatic convention of the bed-trick - a sexual encounter in which at least one partner is unaware of the other partner's true identity - to both challenge critical assumptions about its staging in the Renaissance, and examine the modern reader's response to this convention in regard to issues of sexuality and gender politics in the Renaissance and in the present. Critical studies of this convention have focused on bedtricks in three plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and The Changeling. This wide-ranging and well-researched study investigates the use of the convention in over two hundred and fifty plays, including forty-four English Renaissance dramas, whose bed-tricks are also catalogued in an appendix following the conclusion. Locating the convention in two contexts, Desens first examines its uses in nondramatic literature and thereafter discusses dramatic conventions that deal with nonsexual partner substitution. In the subsequent chapters, she analyzes the staging of the bed-trick in Renaissance comedies, tragicomedies, and tragedies in the context of marriage and then in reference to sexual fantasies and the desire for mastery by male characters who disturbingly remain unpunished. Finally, in a discussion that decenters the dominant patriarchal response to the convention's uses, she considers its association with violent sexual assaults often motivated by revenge in the plays.

The strengths of Desens's text include the effective balancing of plot descriptions with analyses of their dynamics, the illuminating connections drawn between the plays, the account of the theatrical history and staging of the bed-tricks, and the application of a feminist perspective to the study of the convention - strengths that make this book a valuable contribution to scholarship on Renaissance drama and feminist literary criticism. However, the insights that we gain "into the life of the society that produced this drama" (139) are limited in this book because the author glosses over the complex inter-connections between theatricality and "reality" and only offers intermittent glimpses of how reader response and larger cultural conditions informed the representation of gender politics in the texts. Moreover, Desens presents no extended analysis of the "cultural context" of the convention to enable an investigation of the "concerns and tensions English society was experiencing at that time" (19) or of the convention's reinforcement or critique of dominant ideologies about gender relations in Renaissance England.

The concluding observations in the book briefly, though importantly, invite an exploration of "our own social attitudes about gender, sexuality, and . . . power" (142), an exploration that needs to be developed to be brought into a constructive tension with these concerns in Renaissance drama and with cultural and social issues of the period. Finally, while Desens does not situate her investigation in a specific theoretical framework or in any of the various sociopolitical, relational, and hierarchical contexts analyzed by some of the more influential cultural and feminist critics of English Renaissance drama and society, such as Greenblatt, Kahn, Stallybrass, or Erickson, The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama by offering an insightful historical examination of this individual dramatic convention will allow "more theoretical discussions to be argued on the basis of accurate information" (139).

ELIZABETH SAUER Brock University