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Subversion or Collusion?: Revising Jacobean England

Flanked on one side by Elizabethan England, whose own precarious splendors have been particularly amenable to nostalgia from the Jacobean era to the present and, on the other, by the Civil War, whose strategically moralized discourse of courtly decadence has framed the predominant view of the Stuart court, Jacobean England has suffered from its historical position. Both of the books under review intend to reevaluate the culture of Jacobean England by focusing on arenas neglected by traditional historiography—the experience of women and the mental outlook of the Jacobean ruling elite. One book, then, considers what it might have been like to view the world through the lenses made available by the dominant ideology, while the other studies the creations of those theoretically disenfranchised by the dominant ideology. Writing Women is written by a literary scholar; The Mental World is a collection of essays by historians, literary scholars, and political theorists edited by a historian. Neither book could be called New Historicist, but both books inhabit that increasingly rich territory shared by literature and history that New Historicism has opened up. Together, these books show how useful historical and literary scholarship can be in disabusing us of the misconceptions that delimit our account of any historical period; but they also indicate areas where the analytical vocabularies of literary and historical studies have reached an impasse. Particularly striking in both books is the tendency of even the subtlest of analyses to force intricate issues of individual agency into a dichotomy between subversion of or collusion with a dominant culture. At the same time, the best moments in both books challenge the very notion of a single dominant culture and, instead, depict culture as a multiplicity of sites of competing signification.