Arthur E Kinney. Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth and the Cultural Moment.

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 341 pp. index. append. ISBN 0-1843-2965-9 (cl), 0-1843-2966-7 (pbk). n.p. ISBN: n/a.

Richard A. Levin. Shakespeare's Secret Schemers: The Study of an Early Modern Dramatic Device.

Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 171 pp. index, bibl. $35. ISBN 0-87413-737-3.

During the last two decades or so, Shakespeare criticism has focused increasingly on the cultural and historical contexts from which Shakespeare's work originated and to which it responded. Macbeth has been a key text in this process, since its links to the culture and politics of early modern England are unusually clear and compelling. Few scholars nowadays would doubt the relevance of the Gunpowder Plot, or of King James' interest in witchcraft, for a reading of Macbeth. In his new book, Arthur Kinney takes the scholarly interest in the contexts of literature to its extreme by situating Macbeth within an astonishingly diverse set of early modern cultural beliefs and practices. At the same time, he employs this diversity to formulate a new critical approach to contextualized literary analysis, described by him as "hypertextual criticism." As such, Lies Like Truth is both a reading of Macbeth and a methodological manifesto. It performs this double task brilliantly, rich in unexpected yet telling connections, and offering inspiring ideas and insights on virtually every page. Perhaps the key virtues of Lies Like Truth are its broad sense of literary scholarship and its willingness to address some of the pressing issues that face literary studies today, the many possibilities which it opens up for future literary scholarship, as well as for teachers of literature, and Kinney's determination to employ concepts taken from computer technology in order to enrich our understanding of literary texts. Kinney's book also provides a welcome antidote, therefore, to the cultural pessimism of those who lament the supposedly detrimental effects of computer technology on our reading habits (a pessimism which he addresses in one of the appendices to his book).

Kinney's hypertextual criticism proceeds from the notion that reading literature in relation to its original cultural circumstances does not put and end to interpretative indeterminacy. What Macbeth meant for theater audiences in 1606 was richly complicated and varied, and the question pursued by Kinney is how historical literary scholarship can accommodate this plurality of meaning. Kinney argues that in order to do so, it is necessary to stop thinking of literary texts as "harmonious, organic, and finally transcendentally singular in pattern, meaning, and effect" (30). If this may sound to some like a poststructuralist truism, Kinney seeks to turn it into a productive interpretative concept by combining it with the principles of hypertext. "Rather than setting out to establish large patterns," he writes, "the increasingly dominant practice of hypertext is nodal and relational" (34). Hypertextual reading enables us to move out of the text, into relevant contextual material, without seeing this material as part of the supposedly unified whole of the literary text. The point of hypertextual criticism is not to determine the relation of each contextual link to the whole of, say, Macbeth, but to follow the plural, simultaneous paths of contextual association that are set in motion at any nodal point in the play. Only in this way can we understand Macbeth in relation to the depth and complexity of its cultural moment, and grasp the receptive mental process of playgoers in 1606. Indeed, Kinney claims that there are essential affinities between hypertextual criticism and early modern mental habits. For example, Shakespeare and his contemporaries learned to compose "by combining bytes of data known as sententiae--loci or loci communes that, as useful phrases, were kept in individual commonplace books, stringing them into orations and even dialogue" (37). The emphasis lies on the role of the author as re-composer, as one who combines discrete bits of existing data. Hypertextual criticism, therefore, reenacts early modern understandings of the ways in which texts function.

The long second chapter of Lies Like Truth, entitled "Cultural Practices," is taken up by what Kinney terms "lexias," the strings of contextual data that inform, in this case, Macbeth. It is here that Kinney's prodigious, yet almost playful learning becomes most evident. The lexias discussed offer miniature tours through such various aspects of early modern English culture as witchcraft, economics, the family, medicine, eschatology, Roman Catholicism, and Puritanism. In his comments on these topics, Kinney points out highly specific and particularized historical resonances, yet also provides sometimes surprisingly basic information ("the King's Men uniquely owned their own playhouse" [70]). In the spirit of hypertextuality, he offers a range of historical data and insights to be employed and assembled by others, rather than finished readings. In this way, his observations provide useful "raw material" not only for other Renaissance scholars, but also for advanced students, who will find Lies Like Truth an inexhaustable source of cultural and historical information about early modern England. The material offered in the various lexias is perhaps ideally read according to Kinney's own hypertextual principles, and, on one level, Kinney seems almost to struggle with the limitations of the scholarly monograph format. Indeed, it seems likely that a CD-ROM or website would be ideally suited to the kind of scholarship practiced by Kinney.

More conventional in its scope and form is Richard A. Levins Shakespeare's Secret Schemers. Levin investigates Shakespeare's use of "scheming that is formulated and executed by characters who never disclose it either to the audience or to other characters and that goes unremarked within the plays" (15). If Kinney is interested in the broad cultural moment of a literary text, Levins analyses focus on the formal characteristics of playtexts themselves. He examines secret scheming as a plot device: the use of secret scheming invites playgoers to infer, in Maurice Morgann's famous phrase, "latent motives" and "policies not avowed" as the play unfolds. Levin pays close attention to textual details, teasing out possible meanings of phrases (there are numerous references to the OED), and weighing the implications of subtle twists and turns in the plot. Indeed, as Levins definition of secret scheming suggests, analyzing its use in plays is to a large extent a matter of making the unsaid explicit. Levin deals with four Shakespeare plays--Richard II, Hamlet, All's Well that Ends Well, and Antony and Cleopatra--and with Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Levin shows, among other things, how Gaunt in Richard II carefully plots his son Bolingbroke's rebellion against the king, and how questions about the extent to which Fortinbras follows a careful, secret plan in order to obtain the Danish throne are relevant for a reading of Hamlet. If Gaunt is in fact a secret schemer, Levin argues, this raises questions "as to whether the son is a match for his father in ambition and political acumen" (52). Similarly, Fortinbras' ambiguous role as secret schemer makes his eventual accession to the Danish throne "more disturbing than the critics have made it" (70).

As Levin makes clear, secret scheming is an intriguing aspect of early modern stagecraft. (It seems, in fact, especially appropriate for the theater, since it offers a way of exploring ambiguities in the relationship between actor and audience.) Yet, because of Levin's narrow choice of material, and his scant attention to historical and cultural context, Shakespeare's Secret Schemers does not live up fully to its potential. According to the book's subtitle, Levin aims to offer "the study of an early modern dramatic device," yet it is unclear whether the secret scheming in his five chosen plays adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. Also, Levin's comments on the cultural and historical dimension of secret scheming on the stage remain gestural. In the closing sentence of the book, he suggests that the early modern dramatist himself is "a secret schemer, boldly exploring but cautiously conveying the secrets of the modern world near the time of its birth" (131). What those secrets are remains a mystery. Similarly, the "shared concerns of the period" (111) explored in The Duchess of Malfi and Macbeth (a play which Levin examines briefly) remain curiously vague. Hopefully, because of its perceptive analyses of a number of important plays, Shakespeare's Secret Schemers will serve as a source of inspiration for studies in which the historical aspects of secret scheming on the stage--for example, its relation to early modern espionage--are explored in more detail.

JAN FRANS VAN DIJKHUIZEN

Leiden University