Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny.

Challenging some recent critical assessments of the transvestite of the English Renaissance stage, Grace Tiffany focuses on the age-old Western rivalry between androgynous and anti-androgynous stances, a rivalry that was to be continued centuries later with the "mythic" comedies of Shakespeare and the "satiric" comedies of Jonson. For Tiffany, a particularly disturbing assumption of much recent scholarship i.e., that "patriarchal norms held universal sway over Renaissance minds" (17) - wrongly gives precedence to the misogynistic, anti-androgynous stance of satire, which urges an isolating and entrenching of male identity. Conversely, Tiffany shows, many originary myths of Western culture posit that human identity can be positively "re-formed" by an erotic return to its double-gendered beginnings.

Chapter 1 develops distinctions between the mythic and satiric formulations of androgyny as found in Plato, Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Apuleius, Aristophanes, Martial, and Juvenal and later in Elizabethan plays and pamphlets. Where mythic androgyny presents the beast-androgyne figure itself as a symbol of transcendence and communal wholeness, satiric androgyny casts the relinquishing of gender roles as beastly and culturally destructive. And where the mythic stance employs a fluid, dialectically open style, the satiric favors the "manly" and self-contained declamatory style.

Subsequent chapters focus almost exclusively on Shakespeare and Jonson's revival of the "androgyny dispute" initiated by Euripides and Aristophanes. In Shakespearean comedy, key images and metaphors - water, horses and riders, monsters, dreams, mazes - as well as transvestite characters, dialogic modes of speech, and a general resistance to closure all combine to characterize the shifting identities and power dynamics necessary to an erotic relationship. To this end, for instance, Shakespeare repudiates the solipsistic, non-dialectical discourse of Petrarchan lovers while celebrating witty, stichomythic exchanges. The "cuckoldry obsession" in Shakespeare emerges not as misogynistic bent but as sustained exploration of the human "beast's" legitimate, inescapable fear of entering (horns and all) into the irrational realm of eros.

Jonson's satirical humors comedies, Tiffany asserts, are akin to most classical satire in presenting eroticism in terms of a masculine pursuit for sexual dominance, not symbiosis, and in defining masculine selfhood "by its stand against the feminizing pull of the Other" (107). Jonson's dim-witted, effeminate fops and courtiers lose all claims to masculine identity while his cynical, detached, and self-sufficient men remain "separate and whole" (114). For Shakespeare, water symbolizes possibilities for meeting and interchanging gendered selves, while for Jonson water tends to represent the drowning of the masculine by the feminine.

The final chapters focus intriguingly on how Shakespeare and Jonson both mock and experiment with each other's ways of rendering androgyny. Shakespeare tries out satiric androgyny with The Merry Wives of Windsor but compromises by giving "comic control" to women. Jonson creates a powerful, artistically generative woman with Bartholomew Fair's Ursula (a kind of "cross-dressed male-female Falstaff compounded with a feminized version of Jonson himself" [157]), and yet Ursula's status as mythic androgyne is also compromised by Jonson's emphasis on her unattractiveness to men.

At times Tiffany seems unsure of just how strongly to claim the importance of Shakespeare and Jonson's dispute over androgyny. Arguing at one point that the two "became their artistically polarized selves largely by means of this fight" (169), she later asserts that in the midst of Jonson's many stage-mockings of other satirists there is but a "curiously interwoven . . . thread of awareness of the alternative principle of mythic comedy" practiced mainly by Shakespeare (198). Still, there is much in this book that will be of value to scholars as well as to students new to Shakespeare and Jonson.

LORI SCHROEDER HASLEM Knox College