ÌÇÐÄVlog

One of the several complementary aims of this book is to invert Natalie Zemon Davis's project of finding "fiction in the archives" so as to find "archives in the fiction". Lena Cowen Orlin's principal fictions are those plays of the English Renaissance grouped under the heading of domestic tragedy, and these are the basis for her discussion of developing ideas of private life. But Orlin's book aims to do much more. It is "a cultural history of the house" that focuses on early modern preoccupations with the ownership and control of household property - including wives, as well as the steadily increasing clutter of material goods - and connects these preoccupations with masculine anxieties about social, political, and economic change. To achieve this, Orlin undertakes an eclectic study that will be of interest to historians as well as those working in the fields of cultural studies and Renaissance drama.

Her first chapter is effectively social history. Using detailed archival research, she reconstructs (detective story fashion) the murder of Thomas Arden, on which the seminal English domestic tragedy, Arden of Feversham, is based. Orlin not only succeeds here in turning a mass of factual detail into a good read but in showing that there were motives other than domestic, suspects other than Thomas's wife Alice, she also demonstrates quite convincingly the process whereby extradomestic anxieties, particularly about Tudor "new men", were displaced on to the domestic. This is followed by a discussion of the interdependences of domestic and political patriarchy that treads familiar ground but offers interesting readings of three further domestic tragedies that seem to challenge the orthodoxy of patriarchy in both its private and political forms. Much fresher is a chapter that hypothesises a shift from classical notions of virtue and friendship to a recognisably modern domestic (self-) interest.

The final chapter on "domestic abdications" examines both factual and fictionalised instances of domestic patriarchs breaking down under the weight of their authority and responsibility. This chapter is perhaps the best of the book for its reading of Othello in relation to economic prescription and in terms of the "mythical" meanings of place, including the house.

In Orlin's quest to mine the archive of dramatic fiction to write cultural history, she may sometimes be too eager to mark certain texts as defining cultural events or pivots. But her claims remain thought-provoking. One of the most interesting is the suggestion that the eventual feminisation of the household, although a consequence of domestic patriarchy, might have threatened men: women becoming the inhabiting spirits of a place, the control of which had been a bastion of male selfhood.

Sylvia Brown is assistant professor of English, University of Alberta, Canada.