Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance.

Maus starts with Hamlet's soliloquy on the disparity between the external rituals of mourning and the inwardness of bitter anguish, a disparity of signs and what they signify. Truth is for Hamlet unspeakable, and any attempt to express it in the theater or elsewhere is doomed to failure as a devaluation of the inexpressible; the theater is too patently a place of illusion. Maus's question that follows upon this perception is to ask what to make of the gap "between an unexpressed interior and a theatricalized exterior" (2) in drama of the English Renaissance.

The distinction of exterior and interior is of course a familiar topic, one that (as in Hamlet) is usually there to privilege the interior and private. The result is a commonplace of alienation between the individual and other people, between the individual's private passions and what others make of such a person. How is one, then, to accurately read another human being? Deception can be both intentional and unintentional. How do we know what others are thinking? The question touches issues of religious faith as well. Renaissance religious culture privileged inwardness while also seeing it as elusive. Many writers of the period openly yearned for techniques of more incisive discovery of knowing the inside.

What is new about the Renaissance in dealing with this aged problem, Maus argues, is a sense of urgency and consequentiality in a time of religious and social conflict. Various parties contended over the significance of signs in human behavior, over how humans ought to comport themselves. They argued as to whether conscientious dissidents ought to conceal their true identities from suspicious authorities. Many chose to die rather than betray their inner selves by outward conformity. Hence the centrality of the issue of equivocation. Casuistry is manifestly at odds with modern speech-act theory. An elaborate espionage system under Walsingham drove dissidents of widely varying persuasions into deceptive stratagems. Urbanization added to the pressure by disorienting private life.

Maus sees herself as indebted to many recent critics like Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Goldberg, Peter Stallybrass, and Patricia Fumerton, while distancing herself from their preoccupation with the public and political spheres at the expense of the inner. Much New Historicism is suspicious of the self in any subjective, interiorized sense, and prefers to look at the self as a product of its relations. Maus nicely places herself in reference to this prevailing ideology. This has important consequences for Maus in terms of the interior spaces of women's bodies, among other matters, in that poets like Sidney and Milton tended to privilege the female as the locus of subjectivity, and to empty it out. She deals with two seemingly contradictory Renaissance fantasies: that the inner self is hidden and that it can be made fully manifest. Theatre is a key to such a problem since it deals in disguising. Her approach makes Maus especially keen to techniques of audience-response analysis.

Maus's project is thus well set out. The critical language is clear, engaging, well organized; the argument is easy to follow. And it is an important argument. Maus deals with complex and central issues of inner and outer that offer revealing insights into the texts she explores. Her learning is evident: in traditional scholarship, in postmodern criticism, and in primary texts. Maus's work is careful and accurate. The tone is gracious, serious, and argumentative in the best sense of having a through-line of inquiry but not one needlessly contentious or ever snide. Her persona comes across as fairminded, well informed, serious. She occupies a moderate ground in critical terms, responsive to those doing more radical work (like Goldberg) but not singularly won over to a revisionist position. One senses a fine judiciousness that is persuasive and engaging. She uses anecdote well, and illustrates convincingly from the texts she is reading.

The book makes wise choices about the amount of material covered. It focuses on Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and Measure for Measure in the Shakespearean canon, along with The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2, Doctor Faustus, Volpone, Epicoene, and Milton's Comus, though of course other texts are discussed as well. The book is ambitious in its scheme but restrained in its choice of representative texts, so that it is able to offer truly fresh and important readings of each. The book as a whole is substantial but not too long; my interest remained keen to the end. It should appeal to teachers and students alike interested in Renaissance drama, Renaissance poetry, New Historicist methods of contextualizing literature, the interrelation of literature and law, and feminist issues of the female body and dialogue about gender. The book is so wall written that it could also reach an audience outside the academy of those interested in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. My hope and expectation is that it will do very well.

DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago