Eleanor Decamp’s study of the dramatic representation of barbers and surgeons enters the worlds of both medical humanities and early modern drama with learning and insight. Her primary focus is on the ways that these practitioners, and the characters playing them on London stages, can allow us to see broad questions of “identity making and unmaking” (5). This book is not a smooth or easy ride, but there is a substantial payoff for those interested in medical history and the drama—especially the non-Shakespearean drama.

Decamp’s starting point is the histories of and distinctions among these various practitioners: barbers, surgeons, and hybrids of the two. She lays out the sociology of the medical world, and after a thorough historical introduction, moves into five chapters, each of which has a literary and a historical topic. “Prop,” “Performance,” “Sign,” “Sound,” and “Voice” point us toward the stage: we learn simultaneously about professional inventories, occupational role-playing, key professional symbols, central professional noises, and the occupation-specific concerns about language. At the heart of the book is the awareness that barbers, known for garrulousness and eclecticism, and with numerous connections to forms of sexuality, have a strong presence within Renaissance popular culture. Surgeons, whose work was harder to reproduce on stage, are more ambiguous and even absent in the period’s cultural history. Ultimately, the book does more with its treatment of barbers.

The book’s substantial virtues come when Decamp focuses on provocative details and patterns of early modern life. Rigorously evidenced, Civic and Medical Worlds gives us snapshot after snapshot of barbers at work and on the stage. In chapter 1 we get a couple of lists of “the barber’s necessaries” (31), and some of those items, such as the basin and the ear picker, make repeat appearances in the book, with great effect. The basin is central to the chapter on semiotics in the medical world, and Decamp provides interesting uses of this object, which bridges the divide between concern for appearances and threats to personal safety. The basin occurs again in the treatment of sound, where we hear of the wide range of uses for its ringing. Equally rich, and more surprising, is the discussion of the ear picker in the chapter on sounds. Decamp draws on recent work on what Bruce Smith calls “the acoustic world of early modern England” in order to describe—and effectively bring to life—“the barber’s shop as a sound market” (136). Ear pickers, ear wax, and earwigs move us from medical care to the sounds of the theater, where the pleasures and dangers of playgoing are connected to having one’s ears tickled or poisoned. The final chapter, on voice, gives a fascinating contrast between the loquaciousness of the barber’s world and the threatening silences of the surgeon. The varying symbolic natures of the two professions run through the book; at one point Decamp writes, “to play a surgeon is a diabolical act; to play with barbery is harmless foolery” (90). The constellations of stories about each profession point toward some of early modern London’s deepest fears—about presence and absence, and community and danger.

Throughout the book, Decamp gives strong close readings; in particular, this book has value for anyone working on John Lyly’s Midas, Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, King Lear (in the blinding of Gloucester), Titus Andronicus (for the use of the basin), Ben Jonson’s Epicene, and Thomas Middleton’s Anything for a Quiet Life. The book’s shortcomings are all connected to form and style. For this I blame the press, which clearly does not encourage the revision needed for the shift to postdissertation readers. The book is made unnecessarily dense through obscurities and unexplained terms—references that the dissertation committee surely had a context for, but with which an outside reader needs help. At certain points, reading this book is some kind of kin to waltzing through molasses. Despite that, the book has many winning moments and ideas. I will eagerly read the next thing Eleanor Decamp writes, because she is a scholar with many well-researched, provocative, and fruitful thoughts.