Felicity Dunworth's contribution to the rich scholarship on the maternal in early modern England surveys drama in many genres, among them morality play, history, domestic tragedy, comedy in many forms, and romance. She reaches back as well to dramatic and nondramatic material from classical and late medieval sources and discourses, among them midwifery manuals, Marian devotion, mothers' legacies, religious prose, monarchs' writings, and conduct books, as she gathers meanings, conventions, and stereotypes that saturate discourses of maternity. This gathering of meanings is what Dunworth means by “typology,” and it is typology that drama puts to use in elucidating complex meaning, as they play dynamically off one another in the many dramatized mothers discussed in the book: “The meanings engendered by motherhood focus the mother figure as a constellation of ideas and points of reference” (5).

Dunworth's method is a provocative one insofar as it addresses scholarship on the maternal. She eschews subjectivity and subject formation in favor of dramatic function. She takes pains to admit no tinge of psychoanalytic or even psychological discourse. Issues of emotion, affect, sympathy, or empathy concern less the specific dramatized mother and more “the interface between audience and performance” (10), where the cultural meanings of a particular mother figure can evoke complex feeling and cognition in the audience. Thus in the first chapter's treatment of representations of Mary the mother of Jesus, she emphasizes “the significance of Mary's maternity rather than her experience of it” (112). Of William Alabaster's 1592 play, Roxana, she argues for the “unique pleasure” it offers the audience: “a pleasure produced by the pathos located at the disjunction between the meanings which Roxana embodies. The potential for containing contradiction, always present in representations of maternity, is turned to dramatic advantage through a resort to fetishism, where the irreconcilability of the multiple meanings carried by the mother in this play produces simultaneous horror and pleasure” (64). The mother figure is polysemous, “her meaning endlessly modified and challenged in response to the rapidly changing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean society and politics” (10); the dramatized mother complicates, destabilizes, and mediates meanings (2). Dunworth favors formulations in which the relationship between meaning and interpretation stays open and loose. She observes that the body of the dramatized mother is “associated with suffering and violence as well as boundless love and nurture” or that an audience's contemplation of the mother's physical body “creates pleasures and anxieties” (111), without battening down that meaning for any particular audience. “In drama, this [being untrammeled by subjectivity] frees up meaning” (5). The book thus counters earlier, forceful arguments for the hegemony of patriarchy in the period and in the plays. Dunworth even reads claims of this kind about the steamroller of patriarchy as an invitation to openness: when Kathryn Schwarz argues (in “Mother Love: Clichés and Amazons in Early Modern England,” in Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period [Aldershot, 2000], 294) that “women's reproductive bodies become metonyms for the ways in which patriarchy works,” Dunworth hears in the phrase “the ways in which patriarchy works” “unbounded possibilities for the mother figure: a limitless set of potential meanings” (5). I was startled to read this, and perhaps Kathryn Schwarz would be too.

Nonetheless, Dunworth's stance for the significance of the dramatized mother as embodying flexibility, complexity, and mobility of meaning is a welcome supplement to the powerful and influential readings grounded in feminist-cum-psychoanalytic work on maternity from which she distinguishes herself. It's a focus that works well with Dunworth's project of discussing canonical as well as little-known plays, Alabaster as well as Shakespeare, John Phillip as well as Thomas Dekker with their plays of Patient Griselda, a dozen plays by the popular Anon. as well as works by familiar names like Christopher Marlowe or John Webster. The book's inclination toward discussion of so many plays does rattle my sense of proportion and scale—The Spanish Tragedy is dispatched in just a couple of pages—yet it's also true that the brisk itinerary through so many plays, genres, and cultural significances on the move may induct the reader who welcomes that mobility of that polysemy into a sense of productive turbulence, as the kaleidoscopic elements of meanings form new constellations.

Dunworth's insistence on openness of relation between a meaning and its interpretation yields complicated claims about audiences, nowhere more clearly than in Dunworth's discussion of one of those Patient Griselda stories we love to hate. John Phillip's The Commodye of pacient and meeke Grissill (ca. 1599) sits us down precisely in a tangle of pleasure, knowledge, and feeling, in Dunworth's analysis. “Grissil's direct appeal to the audience creates a tension between an emotional sympathetic reaction to her plight and collusion with the onlooking Vice, with whom the audience shares the spectacle of [her] surrender and outpouring of grief” (123). Yet it's also true that the “pleasure and power [marshaled against Grissel] are controlled and contextualised by the morality framework that ensures that both husband and wife are understood as victims of a wider conflict between good and evil, orchestrated by the Vice” (134). The gradual enlargement here of the sphere of action is a lovely gesture, as is Dunworth's subsequent turn to cognition and ethics: “Both the select audience who would have seen this play, and the children acting, knew how they were supposed to interpret both the narrative and the pathos: it was wrong of the Vice to arrange for Grissil's torture, but it was right for her to submit to it. . . . The threat that maternity, with its visceral, emotional, overwhelming aspects always in tension with its idealisation and potential as pleasure, might erupt to destroy what is right, is thwarted” (123–24). This book should provoke discussion for some time, both in its vision of complexity and in its challenging assumptions about what audiences can be said to know.