Peter Herman. Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature. London: Routledge, 2024. 164 pp. ISBN 9781032293660. $49.99 paperback.

Peter Herman’s Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature foregrounds voices which challenged structures of misogyny, racism, and atheism in the early modern period. The book opens by glancing at a range of critical race studies by influential scholars in the field. Herman briefly reflects on work by critics including Kim F. Hall, Kimberly Coles, Ayanna Thompson, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Nedda Mehdizadeh, and Arthur Little, Jr., before suggesting that their view of the early modern period as fundamentally marked by pervasive strategies of race-making is an unnecessarily narrow viewpoint: one which could be widened by paying attention to additional forms of difference. Herman then swiftly transitions to a wider argument that encompasses systemic structures of discrimination along lines of race, gender, status, and religion, arguing that there are voices of dissent found across early modern literature that challenged contemporary prejudices and biases. Herman’s pithy summation of this compact book is that “somebody always pushed back” (4), and this motto guides his multiple avenues of enquiry. He classifies six different kinds of “Others” in early modern England to demonstrate the ways in which certain writers worked against hegemonic discourses of discrimination, using works by writers including Sir Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger as touchstones for interpretation. Pointing out the commercial popularity of such texts in print or/and in the theatres, Herman claims that these works were successful precisely because they spoke to widespread concerns around identity and power. Herman argues that “for every ‘-ism’ in early modern English culture, there was an ‘anti-ism’ pushing back against it” (12), advancing a view of early modern literature and culture that is complex, contradictory, and marked by dialogic dissonance.

In chapter one, “Who’s That in the Mirror? More’s Utopia and the New World,” Herman argues definitively that Utopia (1516) functions as a vehicle for social criticism, and this includes a critique of colonialism. Herman helpfully spends time situating the production of Utopia both globally and locally, first highlighting the emergent European discourses of Spanish cruelty in their exploitation of indigenous and African enslaved peoples in their colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century, before moving to the interest in colonization and narratives of conquest that entered More’s household. By examining the text’s commendatory letters in tandem with the description of utopian society given by Raphael Hythloday, More’s fictional traveler, Herman joins previous scholars in suggesting that More assesses what can be thought of as a colonial logic in Utopia. Specifically, Herman argues that More problematizes the European presence in the Americas by suggesting that the activities of colonial endeavor, such as the introduction of Western technology and religious conversion, may have disruptive and potentially destructive effects.

The second chapter “‘I am no child, no babe’: The Shrew Plays” examines a trio of shrew plays which enter into dialogue with the gendered taming narrative which was entrenched in early modern culture across folklore, ballads, proverbs, conduct books, and social customs. The chapter repositions “The Homily on Matrimony” (1562) as a text concerned with toxic masculinity and domestic violence, complicating a well-established critical reading that has seen this homiletic text as a statement of women’s physical and intellectual inferiority. Herman’s analysis then considers the anonymous play, The Taming of A Shrew (1594), William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590-4), and John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed; Or, The Woman’s Prize (1610) in chronological succession. Herman identifies a linear progression in which the critique of misogyny sharpens with each play. In the chapter’s close analysis of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Herman acknowledges the interpretive ambiguity coded into the play which led Jean Howard to state that one could come to a definitive interpretation of The Shrew only if you “ignore or suppress aspects of the play” (see 117) that do not fit your thesis.¹ Herman then argues that “Shakespeare gives every indication that the audience is meant to be repulsed by Katharina’s taming” (49). The chapter did not fully expand on the nature of these indications, before concluding that one “would guess that the extremity of Katherina’s subordination turned audiences off” (50). The chapter’s range across three shrew plays offered much to think about, but the chronological argument could be further complicated or enriched by reflecting on later taming narratives that appeared onstage. For example, John Fletcher’s later play Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624) marks a conservative step backwards from the taming narrative he had precociously upended in The Tamer Tamed a decade earlier.

Chapter three, “‘That’s More Than We Know’: The Crisis of the 1590s in Deloney, Dekker, and Shakespeare” considers issues of status and social inequality in the context of food crises and the perceived government negligence in the 1590s. Using William Harrison’s categorization of social structures in his Description of England (1577/1587) as an interpretative guide, Herman focuses on “the fourth sort of men” who, in Herman’s conceptualization, “have no voice, have no value, and their duty is to obey what their betters tell them” (56). This capacious definition of a social group that ranged across day laborers, merchants, and artisans could usefully be put in dialogue with the work of the “Middling Culture” research project (2019-2022), which considers some of the occupations listed by Herman as belonging to the “middling sort,” placed above a wage laborer or the dependent poor.² Such individuals did in fact hold some economic, cultural, and social cache, and negotiated a relational position within a particular social and economic fabric. With Herman’s broad social categorization(s), the chapter moved across Thomas Deloney’s prose fiction Jack of Newbury (c. 1597), Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), and Henry V (c. 1599) to suggest that each text offers alternative visions to a hierarchical society, providing a voice to this “fourth sort”.

The next two chapters consider issues of religious alterity. Chapter four, “The Circulation of Atheism in Early Modern England: Marlowe, Greene, and Shakespeare” argues that the stage was a crucible for concerns around atheism. Bringing together another dramatic trio, Herman focuses on the atheistic energies that circulate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, parts 1 and 2 (1587/8); Robert Greene’s Selimus (1594) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). Chapter five “The religious ‘Other’ in Early Modern England: The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, and The Renegado” explores how religious prejudices were problematized in the theatres. Herman argues that the Jewish protagonists Barabas and Shylock are deeply humanized while Christian moral systems are held up for condemnation. The short examination of The Renegado argues both for a positively nuanced treatment of Catholicism and identifies an imaginative sympathy with the Islamic in the play. Herman then concludes that “The Renegado, in sum, was an enormous success, which suggests that even at a time of pervasive anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic sentiment, a large, paying audience was receptive to the play’s message” (112). Across the book, the relationship between texts’ identified popularity and a market or audience receptive to a proposed “anti-ism” message was a provocation that could be taken further in a longer scholarly work.

The final chapter of the book turns to racism, focusing primarily on the plays of Shakespeare that have already received much attention within critical race studies over the last four decades, namely Titus Andronicus (1594), Othello (1606), and The Merchant of Venice (1596). The chapter begins by critiquing Kim Hall’s landmark reading of the language of “fairness” as a philological site of racial identification and formation, before highlighting moments across early modern texts that apparently work against chromatic strategies of race-making.³ Herman concludes that “‘black’ is not predominantly negative and ‘white’ predominantly positive, but these terms encompassed a wide range of meanings, sometimes good and sometimes bad” (119). Herman’s attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of Black characters encourages the reader to think that “racism existed, but it was not universal or systemic […] Shakespeare designs his play to raise questions about racist bias” (124). From the book’s contextualization of the racist slurs as just one instance “among a litany of silly insults” (124) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), to the devaluing of Brabantio’s credibility in Othello, which means that “Shakespeare undermines racism by putting racist sentiments in the mouths of characters the audience is primed to reject” (128), Herman pushes for a reading that sees these plays as dramatizing the costs of racism, rather than functioning as inherently racist texts.

This compact yet wide-ranging book is fundamentally concerned with how early modern literature is inherently dialogic, and Herman is invested in the ways in which issues of gender, race, religion, and status are always in a continual process of negotiation both in and beyond the theatres. The book is remarkable in terms of the inverse relationship between the text’s size and the topics it attempts to cover. The reference to “others” or “otherness” throughout the book could have been more clearly defined or attended to more critically: the term assumes an Anglo-centric or white male perspective from which alterity is coded, and, as this book admits, denigrated. The charting of several “isms” betrays the same critical tendency, and it is a surprise to see that an intersectional analysis is not considered or mentioned by the book, given the substantive scholarship that has considered the imbrications of race, religion, gender, and class which constitute interlocking systems of oppression. This, in the end, is an ambitious book that makes us conscious of the perils of a univocal reading of literature, and which ultimately provides a very different voice in the context of current critical debates in higher education and academic scholarship around issues of racism, identity, prejudice, and discrimination.

Bethan Davies

University of Roehampton