Ellerbeck, Erin. Cures for Chance: Adoptive Relations in Shakespeare and Middleton Jonathan Locke Hart

Adoption is the theme of Erin Ellerbeck's intriguing book.She argues that adoption allows families to make changes and examines how early modern English theatre, with a focus here on the plays of Shakespeare and Middleton, called into question the biological family and represented alternatives in familial structure, inheritance, gender, and ideas of kinship and nature.These plays stage families, characters, and familial relations, and Ellerbeck analyzes them in relation to social, economic, political, historical, and cultural factors in the context of literary works, treatises on horticulture and natural history, and household and conduct manuals.For Ellerbeck, the plays test ideas of the family, which becomes a social construction rather than a biological imperative thereby changing nature.Speaking about adoption, Ellerbeck begins with grafting plants (3).The English garden came from deforestation.Horticultural treatises reveal much about the relation between nature and nurture.Ellerbeck says: " 'Adoption' derives from the Latin adoptio, which refers both to the practice of incorporating a person into a family and to the practice of grafting" (4).This is the heart of the matter.The connection between grafting and family and adoption was not widespread in Renaissance England, although Shakespeare explores it in All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, which Ellerbeck notes, although she sees that the "success" of the link "is partly due to the strangeness of the rhetorical figure" (5).Ellerbeck maintains that genre affected the representation of adoption and that Shakespeare's romances may have the most adopted characters, the convention of families divided then reunited after the children are "incorporated into adoptive families temporarily, " as in The Winter's Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest (7).Moreover, she asserts that in comedies and tragicomedies, "heirship and financial considerations often determine how adoptive families are formed" (8).For instance, Thomas Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's represents a wealthy child that a wet nurse exchanges for an indigent one (8).Adoption also happens to allow for a "confusion of identities, " but "some characters seek urgently to take in children and to raise them as their own" (8) as in the case of the competition

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