This well-researched, insightful monograph sets out to refute what has long been held to be a central feature of the early modern sex/gender system, namely, the purported cultural bias against remarrying widows, perhaps most famously expressed by the Player Queen in Hamlet: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If, once a widow, ever I be wife!” (3.2.208–9). Panek proposes that scholars have tended to assume this sentiment was widespread in England, as it was on the Continent, due to their privileging of tragedy over comedy, Shakespeare over his contemporaries, and continental over native English sources. Protestant England, Panek claims, far from following suit with the Catholic doctrinal view expressed in such well-known, continental treatises as Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman, not only sanctioned but actively promoted remarriage for widows, who were highly sought commodities on the marriage market. Surveying an impressive array of evidence, including “comedies of remarriage” (by George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and others), popular pamphlets, ballads, sermons, and occasional court records, Panek argues strenuously that the stereotype of the “lusty widow” was intended as an incentive, rather than a disincentive, to remarriage—a convenient ideological tool deployed to disarm the (wealthy) widow's threatening financial independence by rendering her susceptible (within the cultural imaginary at least) to sexual subjection. While this argument represents a welcome revision of the assumption that widowed chastity was the (rather than a) cultural ideal in early modern England, its attempt to refute the existence of that ideal entirely at times strains too hard to explain away contradictory evidence. At such moments the author, methinks, protests too much.

The book's introduction heralds its new historicist approach in beginning anecdotally: “On the night of the nineteenth of November in 1628, a young widow by the name of Elizabeth Bennett … ” (1), and so forth.The ensuing discussion of Widows and Suitors’ subject and methodology defines its focus as follows: “to explore the ideological work that th[e] stereotype [of the lusty widow] performed for the men who constructed it,” and thereby to gain new insight into “early modern constructions of masculinity” (4). This is not, in other words, a book about what representations of widows, sexually active or otherwise, might tell us about early modern constructions of femininity, much less about early modern women. The feminist implications of the book remain implicit, and at times, blurred. Panek states, moreover, that she is not interested in how “dramatic fantasies … measure up to real-life situations” (4), but rather in the cultural history of the widow's representation in urban, middle-class, English dramatic comedies of the early seventeenth century. The book's generic focus, its privileging of prescriptive over descriptive forms of evidence, and its defining of the lusty widow solely as a male construct, thus produces an account that tells us little about poor or elite widows, or about what widows of any stripe “actually did” (4). These limitations result in an account of cultural history that is at times overly homogenized, and that explicitly privileges the perspective of the dominant over the subordinate: the figure of the lusty widow, in Panek's view, functions solely to dispel male anxiety over widows’ wealth, independence, and domestic governance. The book thus subscribes to a new historicist tendency to view literature in functionalist, or even starkly utilitarian, terms: plays are said to deploy the lusty widow stereotype to assuage male anxiety and thereby to “enable remarriage” (109). This argument is most persuasive in the book's account of Thomas Dekker, John Webster, William Rowley, and John Ford's lost play, Keep the Widow Waking (1624) (the plot of which Panek reconstructs from an extant ballad), a fascinating (though hardly exemplary) case of a play based on a legal dispute regarding a widow's second marriage, in which the widow's suitor is accused of collaborating with the playwrights in the creation of a play favorable to his side of the controversy. The final chapter on Middleton offers a welcome complication of the functionalist argument in exploring the ways in which Middleton's comedies “expose,” rather than bolster, the fantasy of “sexually mastering a rich widow” (158).

The argument of Widows and Suitors seems more reductive, and consequently less persuasive, however, in its tendency to minimize, or explain away (rather than explain) ideological contradiction, a tendency that results in an overly monolithic and univocal view of what the book terms “early modern ideology,” which turns out to be synonymous with “the patriarchal order” (45). The patriarchy, for Panek, encompasses both base and superstructure, which together form a kind of self-perpetuating feedback loop; she speaks of the lusty widow stereotype as enabled “by a culture with a material interest in the recirculation of the widow's wealth back into the (male) economy” (83), and as deployed within “a stage-play world constructed wholly by men and frequently for men” (185). While this approach allows for an admirable teasing out of the myriad forms of male anxiety/fantasy surrounding widows in early modern English comedy, it avoids consideration of the significant role widows played in the networks of commerce and credit that surrounded and supported the commercial theaters (e.g., as patrons, investors, moneylenders, pawnbrokers, secondhand clothing dealers, vendors, crafts- and tradeswomen, and paying customers in and around the “stage-play world”), or about how that role may have influenced their representation onstage.