Indira Ghose's "A Defence of Pretence"

Indira Ghose is emeritus professor of English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is the author of Women Travellers in Colonial India, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History, Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Writing, and Shakespeare in Jest.

Ghose applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Defence of Pretence: Civility and the Theatre in Early Modern England, and shared the following:

For a thumbnail idea of the book, page 99 is a bit of a mixed bag. It is part of a chapter on city comedy, a satirical type of drama very much in vogue at the turn of the seventeenth century, teeming with prodigals, con artists, and social aspirants. Plays set in London were a novelty, and offered the audience a frisson of excitement at seeing their own lives displayed onstage. The most resourceful characters were often the prostitutes, canny businesswomen with an eye to the ultimate prize: marrying rich. The way to achieve this goal was to adopt the manners, deportment, and style of a gentlewoman. Everyone in these plays is playacting, faking it until they make it. The plays catered to the fantasies of self-reinvention and social climbing that had the entire society in its grip.

Civility is, however, much more than about acquiring cultural capital. It relates to both manners and citizenship. The book as a whole looks at the radically divergent ways civility has been pressed into service: in the pursuit of social distinction and as a tool to entrench hierarchies by excluding others from the club, or to forge a community with a shared purpose, reminding us that we all have a stake in society. Manners are simply a repertoire of conventional words and gestures that we use to demonstrate mutual esteem. Civility is an art of performance. The drama of Shakespeare's time is deeply vested in exploring the way our lives are shaped by dissembling—and suggests that human beings are always playing roles. Pretence might be an inescapable part of social life. In an ideal world, sincere sentiments of reciprocity would be desirable. In a polarized society, how we really feel about other members of society might be irrelevant. What matters is the purpose our pretence serves—rampant self-interest or the interests of the wider community.

Learn more about A Defence of Pretence at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue