Wren's "Tracts" on Architecture and Other Writings. Lydia M. Soo
logue as part of the new "news" between 1640 and 1642, Wiseman sees the emergence of the "pamphlet playlet," a dramatic form circulating in print with special significance in the early years of the 1640s. These "pamphlet playlets" or "pamphlet dialogues" importantly conjoined the printed and the spoken spheres. Wiseman sees these pamphlet dialogues emerging in greatest number at times of political ferment — the 1640s to 1648 and again in the late 1650s (36). Such pamphlet dialogues served to critique contemporary politics as well as to reflect conflict, as Wiseman demonstrates in her second chapter. Dramatic forms, in short, were popular vehicles for staging political views, revealing the extent to which radical critique and dramatic forms converged in the 1630s and 1640s. Each chapter in Wiseman's study treats a different facet of the theater from the 1630s to the 1650s. Some chapters treat individual authors in some detail, including chapters on well-known figures such as Margaret Cavendish and William Davenant, and lesser known figures such as the playwright John Tatham. Others focus on dramatic genres such as opera and tragicomedy. Though the book moves chronologically from the 1630s to the 1650s, it is not proposing a "progress" or restoration of the drama as the restoration of the monarchy approaches. Instead, Wiseman maintains her purpose throughout: to demonstrate the wealth of theatrical texts and theatrical experiences in a period that richly deserves recognition and attention in its own right, and not merely as a proem to the effluence of drama after 1660. Not only does Wiseman firmly establish the prevalence of dramatic forms in the 1640s and 1650s, she also adds importantly to our understanding of the relationships between the period's politics and its literature. The ways in which drama and dramatic forms persisted during these decades, as Wiseman rightly argues, should alter our understanding of drama as a national form. Drama may in part be molded by monarchy, as so much new historicist criticism has suggested, but as Wiseman's book argues so elegantly, it must also be seen as conditioned by those events which "deposed the earlier Stuarts" (217). AMY BOESKY Boston College