This is an erudite and enjoyable exploration of the relationship
between domesticity and the state in European drama and painting
from the late 16th to the late 17th centuries. Drawing analogies
among the work of Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Vermeer, Lope de
Vega, Moliere and Diderot, Helgerson describes not only the growing
importance of non-aristocratic homes as a focus for artists, but
how such homes have been invaded by sexually predatory intruders
from the state, be they rampant soldiers, rapacious aristocrats or
randy kings. The shift in cultural values that gives more emphasis
to the role of the home in relation to the state is perhaps no more
clearly demonstrated than in the chapter devoted to Jane Shore.
Mistress to both Edward IV and Richard III, this tragic heroine was
to become, 200 years after her death, the subject of a play by
Nicolas Rowe, who portrayed her as a tragic figure, ill-used by
both monarchs while she remained emotionally loyal to her husband
Matthew. The considerable research Helgerson has devoted to this
study shines through each chapter with a wealth of detail, and he
elucidates the polemic of the home versus state dichotomy with
great clarity. (Kirkus UK)
Shakespeare, Vermeer, Lope de Vega, Moliere, and Diderot don't
usually keep company with one another. This new book-Richard
Helgerson's first since the highly acclaimed "Forms of
Nationhood"-shows that each contributed to a common project of
enormous significance: the artistic promotion of the middle-class
home. In a study that stretches over two centuries and four
countries, Helgerson unearths the shared preoccupations of European
domestic drama and painting. The result is an unexpected prehistory
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cult of domesticity.
"Adulterous Alliances" focuses on English, Spanish, and French
drama from the 1590s through the late eighteenth century and on
seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Helgerson finds that these
plays and paintings register not only a new interest in
nonaristocratic homes, but also an attention to the relation
between those homes and the monarchic state. Domestic drama and
painting emerged, he argues, as a by-product of early modern state
formation, and defined themselves by their difference from the
newly invented or revived genres of state: history painting,
tragedy, historical drama, and history itself.
Again and again, as Helgerson shows, the home and the marriage on
which it is based are disrupted by a sexually predatory
intruder-one who comes most often from the sphere of the state: a
soldier, a courtier, a leading aristocrat, or even the king
himself. And almost as often, the state intervenes to resolve the
problem that it or its agents create. But whether savior or
perpetrator, the state is always outshone by the home through which
it expresses its power. The nonaristocratic home emerges not simply
as an adjunct of statepower, but as an alternative to it-a space
that by the late eighteenth century would make its own claim as the
ground for a revolutionary new order.
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