Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (review)

Reviewed by: Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England Ivan Cañadas Kendrick, Christopher, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004; cloth; pp. vii, 382; 6 b/w illustrations; RRP US $85; ISBN 0802089364. Kendrick's book is a compelling, extensive and thoroughly researched study of the utopian genre in relation to concepts of carnival and commonwealth ideology in the Renaissance and after, as represented in a range of political and literary works. Kendrick engages with nineteenth-century responses to the utopian ideal, as addressed, for instance, by Marx in Grundrisse and in The Communist Manifesto. From there, he provides a detailed account of scholarly work in the subject, before exploring the development of the utopian genre, primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The range of material addressed seems, at times, formidable. From Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Rabelais' 'Abbey of Theleme' episode in Gargantua – which is examined as a carnivalesque refutation of the former – and from the political treatises of Thomas Starkey and Sir Thomas Smith to the literary works of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Nashe, Kendrick traces the development of an model of idealized social organization, an ideal subject to a diverse orientations. He attributes this divergence to the instabilities in the period, which saw the rise of centralized monarchies, and to the effect of such developments on the 'class [End Page 267] of smallholder' to which writers most commonly owed their roots, though their allegiances did not necessarily reflect this. Vividly examined by Kendrick in relation to the historical backdrop of the East Anglian Rebellion, the polyphonic response in Sir Thomas Smith's A Discourse of the Commonweal (1549) to the issue of whether to foster the crafts – at the 'risk' of strengthening such craft organizations as the Clothiers Guild, and hence their capacity for political agitation – is a case-in-point. Bypassing oppositions between utopia and dystopia, Kendrick focus on alternate instead on alternate utopian forms – different models of utopia, characterized, on the one hand, by commonwealth interests, and defined, on the other, by the festive tradition. In these terms, and in opposition to the carnivalesque vision or ethos as particularly proper to the poor, the utopian-commonwealth figure, Kendrick argues, was the prerogative of the 'smallholding class'; for '(t)he people to whose interests Utopian utilitarianism most closely answered … were not people with nothing to lose' (p. 83). Later chapters on Marlowe and Shakespeare address both the authors' social status and their relationship to the elite, as well as providing interesting readings of such plays as Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and Henry IV, Part I. These readings, in turn, lead to further comparisons with Thomas Nashe's mode of writing in Lenten Stuffe (1599), and specifically to discussion of Nashe's 'mode of address', which Kendrick describes as 'animated by oral-performative conventions, or loosely speaking, by carnivalesque and collective principles' (pp. 240-1). Further, though he argues that Marlowe ultimately chose to 'throw his lot … with the underclass' (pp. 225-6), Kendrick contrasts these carnivalesque aspects in Nashe's writing to the work of Marlowe', whose heroes, typified as 'Great Upstarts' lose their social specificity 'with their being made so representative [of the universal human subject]' (p. 245). Kendrick's study is compellingly argued, well-researched and impressively broad contribution to the fields of history, literary studies and political science, a study certain to make a long-term impression in Early Modern studies. Ivan Cañadas Department of English Hallym University Copyright © 2005 the author

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