Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage. By Karen Bamford. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. x + 237. $45.

Karen Bamford's Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage is the first book-length study to consider the pervasive representation of rape in early seventeenth-century English drama, and it gives a comprehensive treatment of the subject. Backed by an impressive range of textual evidence from nearly twenty plays, Bamford situates the prevalence of sexual violence in "a time of social crisis" (p. 6) to suggest that the depiction of rape and attempted rape reveals widespread, heightened anxiety about patriarchal rule. Bamford presents a convincing argument that rape both signifies and disavows the penetrability of the female body as a way of solidifying male authority and male homosocial bonds. Whether heroines triumphantly resist assault, die of shame and dishonor, or marry their aggressors to retrieve the legitimate status of wife, rape plots foreground the problematic of female chastity to work through more generalized, but also deeply gendered, cultural fears of "disorder" and "chaos" (p. 20).

Susannah B. Mintz
Skidmore College