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Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. By ALISON FINDLAY. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 282. $79.95 cloth.
When I began to read this book, I worried that its premise would prove too predictable in today's critical environment. Bastards in Renaissance drama are sympathetic figures for us now: they challenge patriarchal authority; they exist on the margins of society; they help preside over the death of the author as a means of opening up the text; they question conventional structures. Alison Findlay's particular approach to this array of current commonplaces is to blend a new-historical interest in challenges to power with a feminist critique of Renaissance patriarchal structures.
I myself firmly believe in bringing into classroom discussion the new perspectives that these ideas represent, even if I am uneasy with the extent to which we now assume the all-encompassing presence and influence of a dominant patriarchal structure without the need for further demonstration in primary historical research. I was more worried, as I began to read, by a fear that the critical positioning of this book, and even some of its specific choices, could be posited from its ideological stance. We know who Shakespeare's bastards are: Edmund in King Lear, the Bastard in King John, Thersites (and, less importantly, Margarelon) in Troilus and Cressida, Caliban in The Tempest, Don John in Much Ado, etc. The idea that their illegitimacy challenges the authority of princes and even of the heavens, and that illegitimacy itself can be a potent metaphor for otherness, is a staple of today's critical perspective. In these terms, blending new-historical and feminist points of view, while admirable in building bridges between these often hostile critical methods, is not really new, since the point of the combined approach is to assault a patriarchy that has been on the ropes for some time.
In practical effect, I am happy to report, Findlay disarms these worries almost entirely. She broadens the topic of bastardy to include women: witches, those who are pregnant with or give birth to illegitimate children, transgressing women of all sorts. Here we move into...