Liturgy and Sequences of the Sainte-Chapelle: Music, Relics, and Sacral Kingship in Thirteenth-Century France by Yossi Maurey (review)

Abstract

explains, even this is inadequate to save the Empire from the general violence and opportunism that will lead to its downfall. Having dealt with the sources that Fletcher adapted in his Roman plays and his pessimistic depiction of the Empire, its leaders, and male subjects, in Chapter 3, Lovascio turns to Fletcher’s depiction of women. He argues that Fletcher conveys the female exemplum par excellence of the era—Lucretia’s suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius—as an inadequate ideal. Lovascio compares Fletcher’s representation of Roman women to non-Roman women (most notably, Bonduca and Cleopatra), and then to the women of the Fletcher canon more broadly. He finds that Fletcher is critical of Roman women’s reputation for ‘excessive passivity’ (p. 128), as they do not display the kinds of ‘masculine’ wit and fortitude as the plays’ non-Roman women and Fletcher’s female characters at large (Maria in The Tamer Tamed perhaps being the most famous example). Rather, Roman exempla for early modern women are, for Fletcher, ‘undependable and impractical’ (p. 128) and should not be followed. In the final chapter, Lovascio discusses Fletcher’s intertextual relationship with Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (Titus Andronicus, curiously, goes unmentioned). Lovascio explores how Fletcher ‘often puts Shakespeare’s Roman plays on the same level as the accounts of the classical historians’ (p. 135), which has the effect of giving characters a sense of themselves within a historical context and of future events. Lovascio suggests that Fletcher saw Shakespeare’s plays as alternative exempla, ones more fruitful than the Ancient Roman models. Throughout the chapter, Lovascio notes how Fletcher’s plays are generally full of linguistic imitation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. He suggests the possibility that Fletcher was tasked with editing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar for the preparation of the First Folio. This is an interesting and original hypothesis that I hope can be proven in subsequent studies. Ultimately, Lovascio demonstrates how Fletcher’s plays were taking part and contributing to broader cultural discourses about history, gender, education, stoicism, and misplaced nostalgia. John Fletcher’s Rome is a valuable contribution to the field of classical reception studies, but more importantly, it offers up future possibilities for literary readings of the veritable terra incognita that is the wider Fletcher canon. Gabriella Edelstein, The University of Newcastle