Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. (Reviews).

Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 321 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-64075-X.

At its outset this book brings into question the line of criticism, stemming from David Bevington's magisterial From Mankind to Marlowe (1962), which tended to privilege the morality play tradition and other "popular" drama as the primary background for the vitality and power of Elizabethan theater. Cartwright objects to the way "the valorizing of morality drama . . . entailed the dismissal of humanist theatricality" (4), and promoted the idea that Humanist influence served to encourage only "arid, literary, elitist and rule-bound" dramatic forms (6). Cartwright is not interested in upending the binary, but in joining with other recent scholars to move criticism "away from the binarial model itself" (8); he wants to demonstrate a theatrical energy in Humanist-influenced plays "complementing or paralleling morality dramaturgy" (2) and participating along with it in "Tudor drama's . . . mingling, balancing and negotiating of sources and interests" (8).

Cartwright perceives a Humanist "affective dramaturgy" that engaged audiences' emotions, senses, and capacities for empathy as well as their intellects. His perception is grounded in a refreshing awareness that Humanist practice in general had this kind of dimension: "Renaissance humanism itself cannot be comprehended fully as ratiocinative system" (56). Erasmus makes the orator's feeling for his subject and his ability to communicate emotionally with his audience crucial to his success. Humanist pedagogical treatises (at least) call for alluring the pupil to the delights of learning, by contrast with the rote memorization held to be characteristic of Scholastic training. Humanist moral teaching and suasion emphasized moving men to emulation of exemplary figures, not just propounding rules. Cartwright effectively cites Erasmus, More, Vives, Elyot, Thomas Wilson, and others to show that Humanism might indeed encourage the kind of drama he describes.

Though the chapters are chronologically arranged, "they do not presume to demonstrate any step-by-step development of affective dramaturgy" (22). Rather, each discusses a play or plays mainly in terms of one or several theatrical qualities that can be seen as associated with Humanism. The book is a series of mutually reinforcing readings, not just of texts, but of their potentials for performance: one of Cartwright's distinctive strengths is his perceptiveness about possible stagings and their impacts. The plays dealt with are Heywood's The Foure PP (c. 1520s), Redford's Wit and Science (c. 1530-47), Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1553), drama of the 1560s including Gorboduc (1562), plays featuring notable women characters from Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1490) through romances of the 1570s, Lyly's Gallathea (c. 1584), Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I (c. 1587), and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589). The chapter on Wit and Science relates to Humanism such elements as the play's dramatization of learning as "vicissitudinous and kinetic" (72) and of identity as subject to ongoing formation and mutation -- while also recognizing the play's adaptation of morality and other structures, in keeping with Cartwright's over-all emphasis on "mingling." Other particularly strong chapters analyse the creation of empathy for Hodge in Gammer Gurton's Needle, suspense in the plays of the '60s, the sensual and emotional qualities of Gallathea (not just a "play of ideas"), and the experience of rhetoric in Tamburlaine (which Cartwright interestingly connects to Neo-Latin precursors). More problematic is the chapter about women in Humanist drama, in part because not all the plays discussed seem very Humanistic (Cartwright recognizes this problem of borders). On the other hand, this chapter directs valuable attention to the seldom discussed dramatic romances of the 1570s. Few examples of these survive, but they constituted a dominant genre in their time, and Cartwright proves their importance for Lyly and other later playwrights.

Cartwright's writing has the qualities he imputes to humanism, liveliness and the ability to communicate the author's pleasure in his subject. There is extensive engagement with recent criticism, especially via the endnotes. The book concentrates successfully on making sophisticated, venturesome arguments for humanistic traits in the plays it discusses, more than on grand synthesis. It leaves one agreeing with Cartwright's positive judgement about humanism's influence, glad to be able to read the plays in new ways, and with a yen to see many of them on stage.