Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies ed. by Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck

REVIEWS WORK CITED Belsey, Catherine. Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construc­ tion of Family Values in Early Modem Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. CHRISTINE LUCKYJ / Dalhousie University Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck, eds. Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999. 324. $47.50 (U.S.) cloth. This collection of critical essays, as its title suggests, continues the work of expanding the literary canon of the early modern period. The anthology, which had its genesis at a conference in 1994, does not take up the theoretical debates of the early 1990s concerning the canon, but rather describes itself “as a series of historically specific readings of social relationships, understood from the point of view of marginalized or neglected sources” (9). Its thirteen essays are gathered into three sections: Readerly Direction, Countering Received History, and Articulating Female Voices. Throughout, as the authors argue for the lit­ erary potential of ignored early modern texts, these texts are intriguingly and usefully related either to established canonical works or to the rich and complex social culture of the time. The first section begins with David Linton’s suggestive ex­ ploration of the numerous documents that serve as devices to guide or control readerly interpretation of early modern texts, including government decrees, treatises shaping political opin­ ion, promotional material, and literary criticism; these doc­ uments are considered so that “by clarifying the boundary­ making process we might better understand the character of the canon itself” (41). Judith Deitch foregrounds the popular but largely dismissed genre of Elizabethan dialogue when she il­ luminates the various ways in which alterity may be configured: to mark boundaries between subjects and traitors, nobility and ignobility, righteous Protestantism and the terrors of popery, 509 ESC 28, 2002 or to present the culturally distant as a foil that encourages the formation of true English subjectivity. John H. Astington demonstrates how a series of engravings representing the four ages of man in London’s annual Lord Mayor’s procession may be seen as “satirical of bourgeois pretensions” (79). Finally, Philip Collington analyzes the extent to which Thomas Middleton in­ corporated emblem conventions into his plays as he reveals the emblem’s potential “as a kind of interactive game that doubled as moral instruction” (123). The second section investigates several portrayals of history that did not participate in the emerging historiography of ra­ tional causality as prompted by Bacon, portrayals that arose out of more traditional and nationalistic sources. In a forcefully argued essay, Jean E. Howard asserts that Thomas Heywood’s popular two-part play Edward IV does important ideological work by highlighting the burgher class, rebuking the enemies of the burghers, peripheralizing the aristocracy, emptying kingship of power and majesty, and viewing wives as useful, valued, and loved as long as they remained selfless, sexless, and house­ bound. Although Shakespeare, in contrast, focussed on dynas­ tic monarchial histories, he could also be seen to be linked with Heywood in that his plays also record social change because his dramatized kings “no longer rule by genealogical right” but now act as “bourgeois entrepreneurs, buying and selling themselves in the marketplace of public opinion” (150). Louise Nichols sug­ gests that the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry V, partly as a result of its deployment of metatheatrical tech­ niques, should be understood as a satiric treatment of the king’s well-known history, a treatment that thereby “sniggers at the highly moral slant given the events of Henry’s life by chronicle historians” (172). According to Joan Parks, in Elizabeth Cary’s retelling of the history of Edward II, Cary shifts the focus away from a political situation involving envious barons to a domes­ tic situation in which Edward’s wife Isabel plays a crucial role; specifically, we see a wife, subject, sister, and daughter neglected by her superiors, a situation that implies that a monarch’s pow­ ers need to be reciprocal and regulated. The section concludes with Sandra Bell’s examination of the controversy surround­ ing James Vi’s failed attempt to convince his Scottish subjects 510 REVIEWS that his poem...