Book Review
The Enclosure Act: Property, Sexuality,
and Culture in Early Modern England.
By Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds.
(New York: Cornell UP, 1994, pages. ISBN 0-8014-2745-2)
Renee Schlueter
Department of English
Saint Louis University
In The Enclosure Act: Property, Sexuality, and Culture in Early Modern England, editors Richard Burt and John Michael Archer bring together fourteen essays which explore in different, but related ways, new dimensions for the study of early modern culture. Well-established Renaissance critics in their own right, Burt and Archer address in this volume of essays the discourse of enclosure, closure, and containment in sixteenth and seventeenth century texts. By foregrounding acknowledged but neglected aspects of gender, class, and power, each essay participates in the ongoing critique of early modern culture, while also challenging the social and historical assumptions located in Foucault, Kristeva, and Dollimore s studies. Readers interested in the way rituals and symbols in early Modern England reveal and shape its literary texts will find that many of these New Historicist, Cultural Studies, and Feminist readings facilitate further discussion on literary texts and social practices in early modern England. In the interest of providing an overview of the methods and approaches characteristic of the essays in this text, I have chosen to review more closely three of the more readable and insightful critiques. Part I opens with a discussion of agricultural enclosure in sixteenth century England. Using Shakespeare s Henry V as a primary text central to claims for and against property, Jack Simeon, William Carroll, and Thomas Cartelli comment, respectively, on the scene in which the rebel Jack Cade invades Alexander Iden s garden. Carroll s The Nursery of Beggary: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period begins with Hytholoday s attack on enclosure in Book 1 of Thomas More s Utopia, using his speech as a central interpretive paradigm by which to understand the social and economic implications within the sixteenth-century enclosure movement. Despite the fact that More s pastoral communism has been read as a response to unbearable economic and political situations, and there is considerable consensus among literary critics (including Simeon and Cartelli) that enclosure is invariably a negative, Carroll points to historical evidence which suggests the social views on enclosure to be at once complex and contradictory. Henry V, for example, dramatizes both a discourse against enclosure and a counterdiscourse arguing its positive values. Though Jack Cade serves as the mouthpiece for the righteous grievances of the masterless man, and the fear of rebellion on behalf of sturdy beggars played upon the imagination of Tudor England, Cade s ideology, as Carroll ably demonstrates, is undercut through excess and ridicule. Pointing to similar ambiguity in the social and legal texts of the age (Parliamentary acts for and against enclosure, for example, were passed simultaneously), Carroll argues convincingly against the notion of a homogeneous view of enclosure. Following these introductory essays, the studies of Phyllis Rackin, Richard Wilson, Juliet Fleming and Deborah Willis move the text beyond the more immediate social ramifications of enclosure and focus on its psychological and gender implications. Willis s thought-provoking Shakespeare and the English Witch-hunts, for instance, traces through Shakespearean works the politics informing witchcraft trials. Arguing first that the stigmatization of motherhood and its secret powers provides a psychological link between maternity and witchcraft, Willis later locates within this deeply embedded private and public fear of maternal power a compelling explanation as to why women were overwhelmingly the victims of witchcraft accusations. Readers familiar with earlier witchcraft studies, such as Alan McFarlane s seminal Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which argues that the notion of a 'war between the sexes can be discounted as an element in the hunts merely because a majority of the accusers were women, will find refreshing the new psychological and gender perspectives Willis brings to the study of witchcraft hunts. Among these is Willis s contention that witchcraft trials not only offered a consoling ritual for common folks who wished to expunge the witch from their society, but also for males of the prosecuting class coping with feminization and struggling to differentiate themselves from their mothers.
Of the final three essays in part I, Boose s The 1599 Bishop s ban, Elizabethan Porno-graphy and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage is also worth mentioning. Boose argues that the consensus among earlier literary critics who read the Bishop s ban as an attempt to repress Juvenalian satire is problematic given the wide censorship of texts with little satiric, but much salacious, content. For example, works by John Marston and Pietro Aretino the latter of whom she calls the father of modern pornography form a monstrously hybrid creature, combining the erotic with the violent, misogynistic excoriations of the Juvenalian satiric speaker. Boose s claim that while the ban succeeded in politicizing censorship in that the print medium became the contestatory site for censorship battles, writers subverted state authority in turning their energies to drama where the most gratifying form of publication was instant, ephemeral, and constituted within performance perhaps is her most significant point. Plots of fratricide, violent assaults on the social and political body, and eroticism, rather than being eradicated from texts, were reconstituted in drama despite stage censorship under the Master of Revels.
Taken as a whole, there is much to praise and little to criticize
in this volume of essays. Both individually and collectively,
these works do indeed forward Burt and Archer s claim, that there
was no simple opposition between enclosing orthodoxy and transgressive
heterodoxy during the English Renaissance. Though enclosure is
broadly interpreted and applied to essays in which this metaphor
is less central to the argument being made, and the textual divisions
appear to be somewhat arbitrarily assigned, these well-researched
studies place themselves in the context of earlier critiques of
modern culture while providing new directions for the study of
early modern culture. As a final note, readers interested in linguistic
theory will find Juliet Fleming s Dictionary English and the Female
Tongue a fascinating explanation of how standardizing the English
language into rules for common usage underlined class divisions,
separating the linguistic community into those whose speech was
deemed correct, and others, such as women and foreigners, located
outside the linguistic pale.
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