Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England.

Eric S. Mallin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xii + 276 pp. $40. ISBN: 0-520-08623-6.

Inscribing the Time, a recent volume in the New Historicist series from California, provides a cultural focus on the last years of Elizabeth's reign in order to place three contemporaneous plays by Shakespeare into referential contexts. These contexts turn out to be predominantly political, with secondary attention to the sociological, and tertiary allusion to the psychological - usually homoerotic - influences at work on the texts. In the initiatory apologia to his own text, Mallin places his work firmly in the new cultural historical context of scholarly criticism, but admits his own anchoring in the political-historical texts of late Elizabethan England.

At the beginning of his book, Mallin posits a theory of "inscription," and to understand this "idea that history is, and is susceptible of, representation in texts - we must accept that there are points at which text, history, and authorial intention work in concert, points where they clash, and yet other points where they conspire to create ambiguous impressions" (8). These tenets of modern psycho-sociological criticism can often lead to a cultural free-for-all, yet Mallin is self-reflexive enough to realize the limits looming on the critical horizon. While he is tempted to push his cultural and historical allegory to its extremes, he sometimes attempts to recognize the fragility of the exercise.

Chapters cover Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, with the most attention being given to Hamlet. In Troilus and Cressida, Mallin compares the fear and faction found in the Trojan War with the trepidation found in the factious late Elizabethan society fearful of succession. He explores the rhetoric of contagion in the Elizabethan-Jacobean context of the plague; and the dramatic contortions of emulation and chivalry in the play are analogized in the envious skirmishes of the Elizabethan court. These analogies are then extended to Hamlet, where the plague becomes the controlling dramatic metaphor, linguistic influence, and historic referent: "the language and action of contagion so infect the play that narrative coherence continually breaks down" (137). The argument is persuasive but complicated by the textual variations of the play through two quartos and the Folio; nevertheless, the ubiquitous occurrence of contagion so completely fragments the play that Shakespeare is viewed as a virtual nihilist. In a more calm and orthodox final chapter, Mallin connects Twelfth Night with history made two decades prior to its performance concerning the Anjou/Simier wooing of Elizabeth and her problems with Puritans.

This volume inscribes itself into the New Historicist canon quite effectively, and the arguments are appealing if prolix. Most chapters show a stylistic brilliance rather than lucidity; however, the last chapter on Twelfth Night reveals a less scintillating mode closer in its older historical attachments to the subjects' dissertational origins. Inscribing the Time is rewarding for its fresh insights into the creational environments of the plays and the complexity of intra-cultural forces at work on the Elizabethan playwright.

A. ROBIN BOWERS Plymouth State College