For those of us who find Tudor moralities flatly pious, Moral Play and Counterpublic restores dramatic struggle to the plays. Murakami makes them urgent by arguing that the moral genre allowed humanist writers to expose the operations of the protocapitalist economy. For scholars caught in the twenty-first-century corporatization of higher education, this study of Tudor humanist writers’ responses to economic change invites us to listen carefully to our humanist predecessors.
Reexamining selected moralities from Mankind to Jonson's use of the genre in Every Man In, Murakami argues that the plays produce “counterpublics” that criticize market changes, from enclosures of peasant landholdings, the creation of a new class of bullying county administrators, to the commodification of labor for university graduates. Her Marxian argument is valuably situated in the history of the protocapitalist market. Her book, which follows the trajectory of Bevington's foundational study, From Mankind to Marlowe, respectfully diverges from his investigation of the formation of morality conventions. Her method, instead of focusing on the obedience to authority endemic to conclusions of Tudor plays, attends to internal criticism of economic and bureaucratic practices. She sees such criticism as signaled by shifts in the comic plots and handling of the Vice in eight plays. She argues that such shifts alert audiences of the middling sort to dissenting material and allows the formation of counterpublics.Counterpublic is a term developed by Michael Warren, who built on the work of Nancy Fraser in “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” Fraser extended Habermas's analysis of the formation of the bourgeois liberal public sphere into analysis of twentieth-century democracy. (The elision of Fraser is surprising in a book that offers a layer of contemporary intellectual theory from Agamben to Žižek.) Peter Lake and Steven Pincus then deployed the concept in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2007). The application of the word counterpublic, one used initially to describe feminist and queer dissenting communities to moments of social criticism in early modern interludes, suggests a more sustained unit of political dissent than may be created by temporary laughter at the clowns. Generously, Murakami reclaims William Wager, condemned by some as incompetent, as a playwright capable of producing a counterpublic, one critical of the ways that humanist education could “lend the appearance of moral rectitude” for exploitation of the illiterate (53).
She describes a culture of humanist historiography in her chapter on Cambises and Horestes. She contrasts the treatment of the tyrant in Preston's Cambises with that in Horestes by Pickering, now firmly identified as John Puckering. In her reading she only glances at the topical issues in Horestes that point toward Mary Queen of Scots and her involvement in the murder of Darnley and that press the intervention of a king into the affairs of another state. Skimming over the extensive pamphlet debates over obedience to tyrants that would be pertinent to Inns of Court students, Murakami instead contrasts Puckering's deliberate inversions of comic moments in Cambises to shape a conservative resolution that sees amity as descending from the court.
She ends with chapters on Marlowe and Jonson, who display explicit reactions to market realities. She makes the insightful suggestion that Marlowe's sacrilegious adaptation of the genre of the saint's life for the treatment of Barabas accounts for the peculiar effects of sympathy and horror in The Jew of Malta. She examines the “counter-phobic dynamic” of the satire of the theater public in Jonson's work. Murakami uses Kristeva's psychoanalytic insight that the biter who fears being bitten bites even more vigorously to argue for the presence of a counterpublic that elicits Jonson's outrage at the necessity for pleasing it.
Thick with such fascinating interpretations, this is a challenging book. Murakami shows a bold willingness to draw on authors’ biographies and performance conditions when relevant, and succeeds in conveying the social critique embedded in the plays. Unfortunately, this is a difficult book to read. Some scene descriptions are swept to appendices and sometimes the arguments seem uneasily split between text and footnote. What begins energetically as a historicist Marxian analysis becomes clotted with allusions to contemporary theory. Despite this further layer of elaboration, this is a useful book for scholars and graduate students of Tudor drama, with a generous bibliography that provides a guide to recent work on Tudor moralities.
