In her monograph, Johnson poses two big questions, which are useful to teachers and researchers alike. First, to what extent does a male-female binary map onto a soul-body opposition in the early modern period? Second, what might this potential mapping suggest about period conceptions of hierarchy and subversion, as well as gender? Johnson tackles these questions by reading a series of Jacobean dramatic works. In plays, puppet motions, and masques, she argues, female characters are often aligned with a negatively coded physicality — affirming the frequent link between the male-female and soul-body correspondences. At the same time, though, the staged physicality of female characters (and, particularly, staged portrayals of the soul) can become a means of resistance. In some cases, Johnson argues, these performances “collapse the idea of a hierarchical divide between soul and body” (25) and therefore critique “the patriarchal ideal of female subordination” (26). These assertions lead to Johnson’s main argument: that the unstable alignment of men with soul and women with body in the period can actually open up a space for alternative perspectives in drama, enabling characters to push against the assumptions that govern both the male-female and soul-body paradigms. (One of Johnson’s most helpful interventions is thus to signal the importance of the soul for early moderns, in a critical landscape that has focused much attention on the materiality of the body alone.)

While all of this might seem to oversimplify complicated topics — positing a unified patriarchy or group of women, for example — Johnson successfully avoids this level of generalization. In sculpting her approach to the male-female, body-soul analogy, Johnson is careful to point out moments when the correspondences seem to collapse: Donne’s description of a feminized soul, for example, or the staged portrayal of a female ghost. To reflect the complexity of Jacobean thought, as it explores multifaceted links between male and female, flesh and spirit, Johnson develops the concept of a “soul-body dynamic” (as opposed to a hierarchy), capturing the flexibility of the correspondences while also emphasizing their frequently binarized nature (18). Using the term “dynamic” allows Johnson to underscore the cultural give-and-take involved in creating the oppositions, even as she frames that give-and-take as central to the project of critiquing dominant androcentric views.

For Johnson, the soul-body dynamic manifests in four sets of gendered, staged relationships, each of which governs a chapter in the study. These relationships include puppeteer and puppet (as represented in The Revenger’s Tragedy and Bartholomew Fair), tamer and tamed (in The Tamer Tamed), ghost and haunted (in The Lady’s Tragedy), and observer and spectacle (in Jonson’s masques for Anna of Denmark). While the emphasis on staged drama seems to be a potential drawback for a work examining body-soul relationships, it actually turns out to be rich and compelling, because it highlights the cross-pollination between processes of acting, staging, and reading — each of which can make a new comment on the interplay between inside and outside, flesh and thought.

Within the chapters themselves, Johnson operates by staking a series of interlocking claims. These claims will often explain the workings of a particular relationship from a number of angles, before interrogating its potential for deconstruction from within. For example, in her trenchant chapter on The Tamer Tamed, Johnson claims not only that the protagonist Maria appropriates her misogynist husband’s rhetorical strategies, but that this appropriation could be either protofeminist (exposing the rhetorical, constructed nature of arguments subordinating women) or backlash inspiring (exposing the emotional, potentially effeminate roots of rhetoric itself) (72). Other chapters share a similar structure, in which interlocking claims acknowledge multiple, potentially paradoxical sides of an issue. For example, chapter 1 posits that puppets and puppeted corpses are effective teachers because of their sheer materiality. At the same time, as Johnson points out, this efficacy can never be completely controlled — potentially undermining the puppets’ didactic status as speakers on behalf of subordinated women. The complexity of this analysis aptly reflects a period that reveled in paradox, even as it confirms the cultural centrality of the soul-body dynamic itself.