A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare.

Arguing from a position of total conviction, Rene Girard proposes that the complete works of Shakespeare - and, he tends to suggest, the very mind of the writer himself- can be explained, and can only be explained, in terms of the concept of "mimetic desire. " More often than not, the key relationships in the plays involve not mere love between two individuals, but love and envy between three or more.

Girard efficiently demonstrates a range of instances in which one individual falls in love with a second as a consequence of hearing that person admired by a third party, often a close friend. Desire is ignited by envy and is acted on in imitation of the friend. The pursued love object is often of less interest to the lover than is the mediating friend.

Taking his main evidence from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, julius Caesar, and A Winter's Tale, Girard legitimately concentrates his focus on sources which will answer his own purposes. But he is conspicuously weak when dismissing texts which, because he has not found mimetic desire" in them, do not interest him. The histories are dismissed as "rather meager works" which need not, therefore, be taken into account.

This is the kind oflofty criticism that requires few footnotes since it only rarely refers to other critics by name. Girard prefers to lump them all together as the mythological beast "traditional criticism, " which he attacks at every opportunity. To find out whom he means one has no alternative but to trawl through his inadequate footnotes to gauge the dates of his sources. In fewer than fifteen notes naming Shakespearean critics, the majority of the texts he refers to date from the Sixties, only one from the Seventies, and the remainder from the Fifties and earlier. On the other hand, there are no fewer than ten notes referring to non-Shakespearean works by a single writer: Rend Girard himself

The fact is that the book appears to be underresearched - not because Girard does not know his Shakespeare, but because he does not appear to know what he is talking about when he attacks "traditional" Shakespearean criticism. There are astonishing gaps in his research which start to make him look like a very traditional" - which is to say, out of date - critic himself. For example, at no point does he show signs of being aware of recent work like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire Columbia, 1985), the indispensable text on emotional triangulation in the literature of the modem world. Girard's chapter on the sonnets looks particularly flimsy in the shadow of this lapse.

These problems are irritatingly augmented by his habit of saying we" when he means "I", thereby imposing an invented consensus on even his weakest ideas. Although, when castigating politicized critics for bias, he argues that "undecidability is the rule in Shakespeare as in all great mimetic writers, " throughout the book he himself is preposterously decisive. His reading of any play is the "correct" one; others are "incorrect. " This is so reductive that it actually threatens damage to Shakespeare. The same applies to many of Girard's other decisive moments, as when he argues that parental authority plays no significant role in any play after A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The sustained attack on unnamed critics finally becomes laughable when Girard refers to them as the "academic establishment. " Surely an author who is listed as being Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization and Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University is M no position to make such silly remarks.

NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY Gregory Woods