Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England by Pamela Allen Brown (review)

778 Reviews things, practices, and honours to the life- and light-filled utterances and experiences that made up their testimony, one might reasonably expect that something more distinctive could be said about the Quaker response to death. A less excusable omission is that ofCalvinist predestinarian theology, which receives not even a gesture. So many of the deathbed accounts and posthumous publications discussed in this book issued from Puritan or Nonconformist women and their ministers . Becker writes again and again of the pressure to perform well on the deathbed, to leave a 'lasting image' of a 'good death'. But the picture is incomplete without an understanding that the early modern deathbed, especially for Calvinists, was under? stood not so much as a place of image-making as of reading. The intense scrutiny and posthumous rehearsal of the details of the deathbed were part of the interpretative hunt for signs of election. For the godly, this final reading was, moreover, the culmination of a lifelong process of self- and collective scrutiny, so that to understand the Calvinist deathbed necessitates a broader context, an understanding of the lives and communities of those whose deaths were written up for edification. This book is a version of the author's doctoral thesis. Becker modestly ends with a listing of what the book could have and did not do: it did not consider manuscript sources, it did not compare female and male deathbeds, it could have taken more account of religious difference. Like most theses, it shows the limitations ofthe genre, including heavy dependence on the original research of others, omissions, and factual errors. In the current academic climate, there is intense pressure to publish one's thesis as soon as one can. We ought to be thinking harder, though, whether this is a good thing. University of Alberta Sylvia Brown Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women,Drama, and the Culture ofjest in Early Modern England. By Pamela Allen Brown. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell Univer? sity Press. 2003. xii + 263pp. $49.95 (pbk $19.95). ISBN 0-8014-4024-6 (pbk 0-8014-8836-2). The title of this book challenges received notions about early modern culture in two respects: firstly,in that it appears to recommend awkwardness above obedience as a model forfemale behaviour; and secondly, in that it comes from a proverb. As Brown points out, proverbs and popular literature are often assumed by critics to have been 'generically antifeminist' (p. 2), part of a cultural apparatus meant to keep women in their place. Instances of female cleverness or success in jest literature have usually been read either as 'male-authored satire against women's unchaste tongues' (p. 6) or, at best, as temporary subversion designed to be contained. Brown, however, argues that women's importance as consumers and retailers of jests (in which she includes jest books, plays, ballads, tales, and woodcuts) meant thatjest-writershad to anticipate women's possible reactions to their product: 'As judging spectators who could grant or withhold laughter, women wielded a small but palpable form of social power' (p. 32). Furthermore, the mobility ofjests, and their susceptibility to retelling and reshaping, could have worked to subvert their ostensible antifeminism: 'The meaning of a jest is never fully encompassed by its content or the teller's intentions' (p. 18). Brown begins by stressing the importance of the neighbourhood as an arena in which jest literature was read, heard, and repeated, where gossip was circulated, and where women passed judgement on their neighbours' behaviour. Plays such as The Merry Wives of Windsor exploit the theatrical potential of this 'shared space' (p. 55) in a manner that Brown suggests would have appealed to female audiences. Alehouses offered women another space in which to observe or participate in the MLR, 100.3, 2005 779 drama of neighbourhood life; although their clientele is often assumed to have been predominantly male, Brown finds evidence in plays, ballads, and the popularity of folk heroines such as Mother Bunch to support a view of alehouses as more sexually mixed environments. In the three chapters that follow, she considers jests featuring cuckoldry, jests that show women retaliating against male violence, and examples of female rogue...

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