Matthew Hunter. The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 280 pp. ISBN 9781316517468. $99.99 hardback.

In The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage, Matthew Hunter engages recent critical trends and traditional formalist criticism to demonstrate not only how the period’s concern with style extends to ways of speaking, but also how speech in early modern England was shaped by the theatre. He argues that the adoption and employment of certain kinds of talk were integral to the self-fashioning practices that have long been areas of interest to literary scholars in the field. Relying on the works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, and others to provide examples from the period’s drama, Hunter manages to show how this trend was formed and how it reflected the newness of public life in early modern England.

Hunter’s book establishes an innovative way of reading style on and around the early modern stage and, consequently, a new way of reading dramatic and historical interactions between London’s increasingly large and diverse public. This book may be of interest even to those working outside of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama in fields such as the philosophy of language and historical linguistics. The author calls upon standard theorists of language and speech acts, most often J.L. Austin, to argue that style gives form to talk and makes things happen within a speech act. He extends these ideas to show that “styles do more than reflect the situations that motivate them. They create new situations in turn” (14). In doing so, he places his work squarely in the recent critical return toward formalism. It makes sense, then, that much of his critical grounding can be found in the work of those scholars who have focused on the use of language and rhetoric in the early modern period; he cites Jeffrey Masten, Lynne Magnusson, Roland Green, and Valerie Traub. However, this book is also deeply interested in conversations about the early modern theatre’s relationship with performance, publicness, and urbanity, aligning it with recent works by Jean Howard, Adam Zucker, and Lawrence Manley. Hunter reads style both as a tool used to navigate a new publicness and the concomitant interactions with strangers that were part of London life in the early modern period, and as a tool used to construct that very same new public.

The Pursuit of Style is valuable because it reads its main subject in a new way. Hunter moves the critical trend of reading styles in behavior into new territory by applying a similar lens to language and form. In this way, the book is reminiscent of Amanda Bailey’s Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (2007), which laid the groundwork for focusing on the adoption of sartorial and behavioral style in communities of young men. Both books grapple with defining style while demonstrating the critical and social possibilities of allowing the term and idea to be malleable and ever-changing.

The book is comprised of a dense introduction and five chapters that focus on the stylistics of specific, situational styles of talk. The introductory chapter asks a lot of readers as it establishes a base understanding of the interplay between styles of dramatic language on stage and off stage. Hunter introduces metapragmatics into his study, which he explains is a concept from linguistic anthropology that emphasizes the importance of the “processes through which we regiment and give meaning to the indexical” (16). Ideas like these from Austin and other philosophers of language like Stanley Cavell help the author to establish a core tenet of his argument: that style not only is contextual, but that it also creates the context for speech. One of Hunter’s most useful distinctions is that made between how style is used by actors versus how style gets used in imitation of them in the real world. While he examines several different kinds of speech in varied contexts throughout the book, he grounds this analysis in style’s various iterations in relation to the scripted speech found in the period’s drama. He sees playscripts as not just “language for actors to reproduce as faithfully as they can but also as templates for how social interaction can be expected to unfold when a certain style of talk is imitated” (24). The chapters that follow his introduction focus on categories of “talk,” or the different ways in which the language first heard in the early modern theatre made its way into other kinds of texts and varied social interactions.

Chapter one, “Stage Talk,” examines the overwrought linguistic style of the late sixteenth-century stage, specifically as it is exemplified in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. He shows how the play’s “formal achievement is combination of formal achievements”, after listing the stylistic accomplishments within the tyrant’s speech (43) . Hunter moves well beyond the standard identification and influence of Marlowe’s “mighty line” to show that the elevated style of dramatic speech acts as a measure for most other styles of speech in the period. He asserts that stage talk “aesthetizes” language by providing a model. One of the more compelling points in this chapter is that “stage talk” often functions as a comic device; playwrights like Jonson and other, broader writers put it into the mouths of foolish characters who pointedly lack linguistic acumen. Essentially, Hunter shows that it often functions as a parody of itself.

The author remains focused on the aesthetic aspects of linguistic relationships in chapter two, “Love Talk.” Here, he uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to argue that theatrical love speech relies heavily on cliché, and therefore relies heavily on public circulation to create intimate relationships. By placing the play and its teenage lovers alongside conduct manuals and other non-dramatic texts he makes the claim that Romeo and Juliet not only provides examples of love speech to an audience, but also provides a blueprint for how to “cite” or mimic others’ styles of love language. His argument shines when he shows how the lovers push the limits of imitation to its boundaries in order to flout the insincerity of gallant lovers in other texts in the period.

In chapter three, Hunter tackles “Court Talk.” He turns to the kinds of imitative speech that reflect the public’s desire to be welcomed into the small circle of the court. He points out that courtly speech is aspirational in that it requires a speaker to believe that projecting oneself as an insider will indeed make one an insider. While he does rely on drama for examples here, Hunter also engages Lyly’s prose romances to provide context and examples of courtly speech and ambition. He discusses how stylistic devices like euphemism function to demonstrate a speaker’s knowledge of the boundaries of court speech, but also his ability to skirt them. Before focusing on Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, Hunter establishes a methodological consistency by grounding his ideas in the theatre, pointing out the functions of courtly speech in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Lyly’s own Gallathea.

Chapters four and five turn away from a focus on successful imitation of speech to highlight what happens when people are incapable of convincingly matching the high styles heard on stage. While discussions of publicity and publics are central to many of the claims made throughout the book, chapter four’s focus on “Tough Talk,” brings ideas about publicity into direct conversation with ideas about styles of speech. Here, Hunter most thoroughly engages with theories of abstraction and embodiment as laid out by Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner that have become essential when using publicness as a critical apparatus. He uses speech acts to decipher what publicity before the emergence of the public sphere might look like, and how subjects can simultaneously desire abstraction and embodiment at this cultural moment. Hunter argues that “tough talk,” or embittered and abusive proclamations, helped the early moderns to “resolve the resentment that comes with discovering oneself to be a nobody in a world where everyone is compelled to be a somebody” (156). He uses the social satires of Jonson, especially Every Man Out of His Humour, to point out the power of “tough talk” to separate those who are socially capable (somebodies) and those who are not (nobodies).

In the final chapter, Hunter writes of “Plain Talk.” He begins with a warning of sorts. He points out that plain style is the most familiar style—and one that was decidedly a product of the early modern sensibility to make previously inaccessible content more decipherable to the public—but that it also carries a “paradoxical stylessness” (195). He argues that while it seems to make the unfamiliar familiar, and therefore mitigate the strangeness of the new public life he discusses throughout the book, it is often misused. Like “tough talk,” the capability of a person to speak plainly is often used as a measure of their social intelligence. He relies on the period’s city comedies, and continues his discussion of Jonson’s Every Man Out, to show how “plain talk” can go wrong. Hunter smartly ties his analysis of speech to his chosen plays’ enduring concern with class. He also points out that the substantial body of work on this subgenre has largely ignored linguistic style, and posits that the “lowness” of the speech in them has led to the assumption that style simply does not matter. By ending with an explanation of “plain talk,” Hunter effectively, as he says, “animat[es] the concern of this book” because “it is a style that characters pursue, but only occasionally attain” (196). As in the other chapters, the author ties this pursual to the individual and collective desire to find a place in the new public of city.

This book is thorough in its discussion of the styles of early modern speech and enlightening in its analysis of their ties to English drama. Once he gets into the chapters and delves into the stylistic and formalistic aspects of language in specific texts, Hunter really shines. One of the most interesting aspects of his argument is that he finds instances in obscure works to effectively articulate the heavy influence concerns with style and form had on audiences, amateur playwrights, courtiers, etc., as well as on the period’s “heavy hitters.” Given his intense focus on theatrical style, Hunter may miss an opportunity here to discuss metatheatrical moments on the early modern stage; the mechanicals’ imitation of stage style in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream particularly comes to mind. However, he paves the way and leaves room for others to use speaking style for analyses of such instances and more. Overall, Hunter’s book successfully takes the discussion of early modern style and its relationship to the period’s theatrical culture in a fresh direction.

Jess Landis

Franklin Pierce University