Gaining Upon Certainty: Selected Literary Criticism.

Edited by two of the late Rene Fortin's colleagues at Providence College, Gaining upon Certainty is a labor of love, a memorial to a beloved friend and mentor. Fortin's colleague Brian Barbour wrote the introduction, and his colleague Rodney Delasanta helped him edit the collection of miscellaneous articles, most of which are concerned with Shakespeare. Roy Peter Clark, a former graduate student of Fortin, and Delasanta provide short memorials of the scholar and teacher who headed the Liberal Arts Honors program at Providence College. The essays, say the editors, indicate "a quick, penetrating, responsive, supple and generous mind." Readers of this collection will experience at least some of the excitement felt by Fortin's students, the kind of excitement that made him a legend as a teacher and as a conversationalist.

Fortin's critical method is eclectic: he is a close reader of the text, watching what words like misconstrue might mean throughout a play and how they might be associated with one character or another; he observes imagery, genres, and modes carefully; he is a sharp observer of human behavior in drama; and he is a theological and philosophical critic, looking for eschatology in tragedy. In Julius Caesar he finds a pattern of characters like Brutus being misunderstood or misconstrued by other characters, by audiences within the play, and by the audience of the play. "Audience" might also generously include early critics like Thomas Rymer and Samuel Coleridge, and later scholars like Dover Wilson (rightly or wrongly).

In Othello Fortin finds the patterns of the morality play or allegory, with Iago as Vice or devil, Desdemona as Cherubim or angel on earth, and Othello as Everyman in the middle; or he finds the folk patterns of the commedia dell'arte with Iago as Zanni and Othello as Pantalone. Fortin is not so much interested in performance criticism or in gender criticism (though he is sensitive to female characters and to Jungian criticism) as he is in the "Big Picture" - what the play might mean as measured against eternal truths. His theological bias, barely detectable, is Roman Catholic, so that when he discusses, say, confession in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, he understands the subject deeply.

Though most of the essays in this collection focus on Shakespeare, Fortin ranged quietly into Greek tragedy, Dr. Faustus, Paradise Regain'd, Dr. Zhivago, and Notes from Underground, the diversity of subjects possibly issuing from his involvement in the Development of Western Civilization Program at Providence College.

ROY FLANNAGAN Ohio University