James Bromley's investigation of male sartorial extravagance in London-based city comedy yields crucial insights about masculinity, desire, and materiality both in the early modern period and in the present. Of the plays featured in Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama, perhaps only The Roaring Girl will seem familiar terrain for queer exegesis; yet even here, Bromley deftly shifts our focus from a veritable queer icon in Moll Cutpurse to a figure heretofore obscured by scholarly work almost singularly concerned with the eponymous roaring girl's particular brand of queerness. Situating his reading of this and three further city comedies (i.e., Every Man in His Humour, Michaelmas Term, and Every Man Out of His Humour) within early modern discourse about men's proper conduct, Bromley uncovers alternative modes of embodiment and erotic attachment enacted on the public stage. What's more, “queer style,” defined as “forms of masculinity that were grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body” (5), is not consigned to plays’ original milieux, but rather endures on page and stage to destabilize dominant regimes of gender and sexuality in the present.

Beyond its elegant analyses of queer style, the book proposes concepts of “queer worldmaking” and “cruisy historicism” (the latter developed in chapter 4) to enable new ways of understanding past and present articulations of embodiment and desire. If previous work on early modern fashion has focused on constructions of interiorized selfhood, considerations of “queer worldmaking” build on the premise that “extravagant clothes are also sites of profound, often estranging, fantasies about making the world other than it is” (15). This worldmaking potential of city comedy, in the present and future as much as the past, is elucidated through a queer lens shaped by leading theoretical work on disability, materiality, and temporality.

The salient framework for tracing queer style and worldmaking, Bromley suggests, is a kind of “cruisy historicism” that reimagines history as a space repurposed for queer sexual counter publics and aims to “allow the pleasures of textual encounter to unsettle our histories, both showing their contingency and reactivating the possibilities left behind in the march toward modernity, so that the pleasures of the present might themselves be different” (170). Deploying this methodological approach makes Bromley particularly adept at challenging scholarly assumptions about, for example, the persistence of anxiety models for comprehending attitudes toward urbanization, masculinity, and sartorial extravagance in early modern London and, in queer criticism specifically, the legibility of period-specific and cross-temporal pleasures in nonnormative attachments to objects that undermine boundaries between human and nonhuman.

Each of the book's four chapters offers fresh a glimpse into queer style and worldmaking, often with compelling connections to contemporary politics, theoretical texts, and/or artifacts of popular culture. Chapter 1 explores (in)authentic expressions of selfhood and (non)standard modalities of masculine embodiment in Every Man in His Humour, arguing that Jonsonian inauthenticity exploits conventions of humors comedy to critique dominant ideology and promote further variations of masculine selfhood. Chapter 2's focus on the materiality of queer sexual knowledge in Michaelmas Term relates the sartorial and sexual pedagogy of the theater to the worldmaking possibilities of clothing and the cloth trade. In its performance of queer sexual pedagogy afforded by the city, Michaelmas Term demystifies the family and “keeps the foreclosure on queer urban subjectivity, sociability, and sexuality from being entirely successful” (110).

Placing Jack Dapper rather than Moll Cutpurse at the center of its analysis of The Roaring Girl, chapter 3 crystallizes the pleasures of superficial selfhood that emerge from reconceiving one's relationship to nonhuman matter. Jack's queer style further codes alternative sexual and social possibilities as ethical positions against the patriarchal social order. Rereading Every Man Out of His Humour, chapter 4 brings into view erotic possibilities for Paul's Walk, among other sites marked as non-erotic or heteroerotic, not to mention stratified public spaces. For critics, too, cruisy historicism exemplifies queer worldmaking as theory and praxis, politics and pedagogy, in constant negotiation of past and present articulations of (un)thinkable queer selves and collectivities. This template, as indeed the book as a whole, will doubtless prove indispensable for queer critics within and well beyond the field of early modern studies.