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Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible. By CELIA R. DAILEADER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 194, $59.95 cloth.
Reviewed by MARIO DiGANGI
An enticingly cryptic opening-"The trouble began when I noticed a hole in the text"(1)-sets the tone for Celia Daileader's study of the mysteries of erotic representation on the early modern stage. The "hole in the text," it turns out, refers to an episode of offstage sex in Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women: an episode that happens (in the plot of the play) without actually happening (either onstage or offstage) and involving a female body that is not really there (since boys played women's roles). As Daileader recounts, pondering this particular hole drew her into a deeper investigation of the epistemological vertigo or"boundary confusion" represented by that offstage space (6). Women, sex, God: all were banished from the public stage in post-Reformation England. Through the "'magic' of theatrical practice," however, the stage also became the "primary locus" in this culture for the exploration of "the female body, or rather female subjectivity (with its most perplexing manifestation, sexual appetite)," which in an age of paradigm-shattering discoveries "became the last frontier in the quest for total knowledge" of the world (21 and 11). Citing Foucault, Daileader asserts that"at some point during the seventeenth century, sex replaced God as the supreme sign fled" (20); consequently, the female body and its desires remained, for the Renaissance mind, the ultimate mystery.
Such bold claims would appear to defy demonstration. Daileader offers as evidence the secularization of the post-Reformation English stage, as manifested in the gradual disappearance of the Corpus Christi plays and the resulting emergence, in the early seventeenth...