Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music.

Seasoned, thoughtful, at times provocative, and inevitably astute, Wells imparts a truly interdisciplinary view of Renaissance thought in this collection of essays. Each of the three parts of Elizabethan Mythologies comprises three chapters, giving the reader a ready-made structure (like that of the liturgical petition Kyrie eleison) to which there is an introduction and coda. Part I focuses upon the Bower of Bliss episode in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the canticum novum of the Psalms and Revelation as well as music as metaphor for social harmony in Shakespeare's musical symbolism. Part II develops iconographic, rhetorical and musical themes in Elizabethan lute songs. Part III offers eloquent interpretation of the Tudor court lyric. Chapters 3 and 9, extended essays on music in The Tempest and Twelfth Night respectively, are completely new; chapters 1, 2, and 5 are revisions of published articles; and the remainder have appeared previously. In the center rests Wells' expanded essay on symbolic geometry in the Renaissance lute rose (chapter 5).

Wells acknowledges that no single thesis has been imposed on heterogeneous materials. Nevertheless, significant themes emerge from more than one chapter, among which are the mythological proto-musician Orpheus, the microcosmos as the reflection of Pythagorean order known through Boethius as musica mundana to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, musical harmony as metaphor for divine, natural or political harmony, and the social context(s) that molded Elizabethan thought and the relationship between words and music. As dissatisfied with the spongier elements of the New Historicism as with Tillyardian doctrinaire reductionism, Wells takes issue with the polarity of political collusion and resistance as a critical premise, affected renunciation of a privileged canonicity, and self-conscious appropriation of transhistorical totalities of intellectual and social processes, while he waives comprehensive philosophical critique to recent monographs. He succinctly states that his approach is informed by a vision of the past as "another country where they do things differently" (cf. L.P. Hartley) rather than an attempt "to remake its inhabitants in our own image" (115). His perceptions are robust, independent, and charismatic.

Amid a wealth of scholarly insight developed over many years, the author's restoration of the interplay between audience and performer of the lute song described as "fragments of a dialogue between singer and audience" in chapter seven and his view of the evidence for John Dowland's commitment to philosophical study as inconclusive are especially recommended. The structure of the volume is significant because ideas appear in apposition that might have been dialectically linked in a more discursive format. Most of the links in Well's exegetical chain are solid, while one or two may seem less convincing. That between the features of instruments such as the cittern and orpharion and the symbolism of the scallop shell is convincingly and lavishly illustrated with musical instruments, literary references, and paintings. That between the lute rose and the rose window of the Gothic cathedral requires a leap of faith, and Wells' use of iconographic evidence here provides less support than elsewhere. This link is intriguing and brilliant, but, given the cultural material and functional disparity between the two "roses," largely speculative.

A powerful collection delivered with style, deliberation, and intelligence, Elizabethan Mythologies may best serve scholars equally adept in Renaissance music, literature, and art. For some readers, the author's generous troping of his earlier essays on musical instruments will be most attractive. For others, the essays on Shakespeare's plays will prove most salient. Finally, many will find the rich array of iconographic evidence and the interpretive context brought to bear upon it the most rewarding.

SANDRA PINEGAR Ohio State University