168 New England Theatre Journal

Bial would concur, book reviews (like performance reviews) may also be
considered performative acts which shape our own views of difference;
hence, all reviewers and critics should be self-refiexive of their subject
positions and subjugated knowledges, as well as the "differences" that their
engagements make in "reinventing and reimagining" the works under
scrutiny. That said, I believe that the book will be immensely helpful to
historians and graduate students interested in the application of cultural
studies and post-stmctural theories to performance.
Hongwei Bao
University of Sydney

Shakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception

David Mann
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 293 pp $90 cloth
Shakespeare's Women positions itself as a foreeflil response to the heyday
of early modem gender studies, arguing against some of the most important
critical interventions of the last thirty years. In the wake of claims that the
"boy actress" was most likely a pre-pubescent child laboring in the shadow
of his older, sexually demanding colleagues (chapter 1), that the early
modem stage was awash in homoerotic activity (chapter 2), or that the
breeches role inevitably deconstmcts binary gender norms (chapter 7),
Mann marshals a vast quantity of contrary evidence culled from 205 extant
plays, and pays close attention to the theatrical dimensions of the Elizabeth-
an playhouse. This historical approach allows him to refute, often quite
effectively, the arguments of earlier scholars grounded in a largely literary
tradition. These plaudits aside, Shakespeare's Women is fundamentally
ungenerous toward the critical tradition to which it owes its intellectual
debt, which creates some serious problems.
Mann shreds the work of his predecessors, taking a particular joy, it
seems, in repeatedly attacking Jean Howard, Lisa Jardine, and to a lesser
extent, Stephen Greenblatt. Curiously, given the historical framework of
Mann's investigations, Shakespeare's Women often appears to operate in
a historical vacuum: Mann has no problem accounting for Elizabethan stage
history, but he undermines the strength of his arguments when he fails to
historicize thoroughly his own position and those of his scholarly fellow
travelers. He dismisses the work of cultural materialist pioneers, calling
"feminist," "gay," and "homophilic critics" "hostile" to the discipline as a
whole (15), then argues that their work has served only to shut up all con-
trary thinkers. This claim is, of course, unfair (Mann is a contrary thinker;
his book has been published by Cambridge University Press) and certainly
up for debate (i.e., did the political turn of the 1980s generate positive
Books in Review 169

change or fresh hegemony?). Yet, no debate seems possible here. Accord-

ing to Mann, the "Marxist, feminist, materialist credo" of Howard, et al.,
has strangled the discipline, "dismissing those who attempt objectivity as
mere mouthpieces of the mling hegemony" (18, my emphasis). Mann
would, I imagine, dismiss me as one of the pack of lefty liberals to whom
Shakespeare's Women responds; if this is tme, I regret it seriously. Like so
many of the critics Mann sees fit to fiame, I genuinely enjoy books that
rock my world. And there is much here to rock me, plenty of valuable
insight into the ordinary stage practicalities that may well have informed
plot and character decisions about which feminist and queer scholars have
obsessed, I suspect, far too much. By the end of Mann's introduction, how-
ever, I was already stmggling to stay with him; would he had recognized
that his angry approach might have this effect on the very constituency he
apparently wishes to reach.
My second major concem with the book is once again historical: the
majority of Mann's sources are out of date. A book that aims to rethink
conventional readings of the Elizabethan cross-dress tradition must engage
Jardine, Howard, Greenblatt, and the host of critics who waded into the
debate about the boy actress in the 1980s, but Mann tums surprisingly
frequently to books and articles that predate that period, especially when
he is on the attack. A survey of his bibliography reveals that perhaps ten
percent of his sources date from 1990; often, he cites critics from the 1950s
to the 1970s as though their works were much more recent. Meanwhile, a
number of scholars I would expect to see are missing, in particular feminist
historians (Laura Gowing; Karen Bamford; Frances Dolan) whose work is
broadly in sympathy with Mann's. Finally, considering the careñil attention
Mann pays to redressing psychologically-driven character readings, I was
surprised at his extensive usage of both close reading (his final four chap-
ters consist largely of pocket readings of a host of plays amidst little real
historical context) and broad generalizations that risk undermining some of
his most exciting material. Chapter 2 ("Erotic Ambience") challenges the
still-common notion that the Elizabethan theatre was a homosexual hotbed,
arguing to the contrary that the cross-dress tradition generated "open admi-
ration of male beauty" and "the expression of same-sex affection," but in
a manner "consistent with a taboo on its physical, or at least penetrative,
expression" (99). This entirely sensible claim is, of course, very different
from claiming that there were no homosexuals on the Elizabethan stage—
and yet Mann, oddly, seems to stmggle to make the latter case. Reading the
critical consensus of what exactly constituted sodomy and how rife it may
have been in the period, he proffers as "the simpler tmth" that "only those
rare individuals who did not believe in God would dare commit sodomy"
 170 New England Theatre Journal

(IS)—an extraordinary eritical leap given the evidence he cites. Later, he

states that "Modem lesbianism . . . is often less an erotic preference than
a political reaction against the status of women" (81)—a troubling claim
that borders on the homophobic.
I cannot deny that this book changed my mind (perhaps even rocked my
world) in more than one instance—but it also drove me thoroughly crazy.
It's a mess of contradictions: a feminist history devoid of contemporary
feminist history; an anti-feminist screed that, nonetheless, makes an impor-
tant contribution to early modem gender studies; a comprehensive scholarly
text that lacks care-in-proofing to an extent I rarely see (i.e., substantial
quotation without proper citation). I will certainly keep and cite this book,
but when I recommend it to students, I will do so with caution.
Kim Solga
University of Westem Ontario

Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard

Attilio Favorini
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 336 pp $74.95 cloth
To write about plays and memory is a prodigious undertaking. Without
memory there would be no dramatic action. Would we have the Oresteia
if Clytemnestra did not remember the sacrifice of Iphigenia? Would
Oedipus have taken out his eyes and Jocasta killed herself if the shepherd
did not remember abandoning the infant on the top of the mountain? The
challenge of a book like this is to define a set of parameters that will cir-
cumscribe a field that is comprehensive without becoming overly general.
It is to Favorini's credit that he accomplishes this task as clearly and
adroitly as he does. His focus is the "memory play," a genre that Favorini
sees developing during the late nineteenth century, but which emerged in
full bloom during the last half of the twentieth.
A memory play, by my definition, is one in which the intention to
remember and/or forget comes prominently to the fore, with or
without the aid of a remembering narrator; in which the phenomenon
of memory is a distinct and central area of the drama's attention; in
which memory is presented as a way of knowing the past different
from, though not necessarily opposed to, history; or in which
memory or forgetting serves as a crucial factor in self-formation
and/or self-destruction. (138)

From this definition Favorini distills three basic themes: memory and the
self, memory and the mind, and memory and the world. Each of the last
three chapters is dedicated to one of these issues.
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