Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy.

Michael Neill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 25pls + xiii + 404 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-19-818386-0.

The publication of three new and stimulating discussions of tragedy in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries challenges readers to reconsider some traditional views and to explore new ones. Jonathan Baldo applies rhetorical terms to link Shakespeare's plays, especially the later ones, with concepts of political representation from Tudor and Stuart monarchies onward. Michael Neill draws from graphic representations of death in medieval art, literature, and cultural history, using the analogies of the early anatomic theaters to illuminate the early modern stage. Lorraine Helms, in a series of personal essays, traces her evolution from a classical philologist to a materialist feminist, interweaving scholarship and performance. All three engage theater with broader contexts without sacrificing the vital details one character or one speech often provides.

Baldo argues that Shakespeare's work "challenges its own era's dominant ideas about representation," particularly the assumption that the monarch represents the body politic (11). This conventional idea receives scrutiny in his discussion of increasing discrepancies between parts and wholes, generalizations and particulars, and words and things as James I succeeded Elizabeth. In plays including and following Hamlet, he finds increasing division in reflections of political representation preceding the English Civil War and its aftermath.

Following rhetorical tropes rather than chronology, he refers to many plays, his emphasis falling on the final tragedies. His initial discussion seeks to rehabilitate the synecdoche, using the concept to explore the interstices between political and theatrical forms of representation in Hamlet and Coriolanus. In the latter Baldo sees the incipient division leading eventually to the idea that a member of a political body represents a constituency rather than "standing for the whole." Because Coriolanus refuses to let his body speak in order to fuse the disparate elements of Rome into a united whole, the social fabric remains fragmented. In Hamlet, Baldo provides contexts in which characters identify themselves with an organically whole state but fail to find Denmark so represented. Baldo's discussion of Ophelia as a "court rhetorician," the character showing the greatest fidelity to tropes of integration, forms one of his strongest sections. As a whole the correlations between political systems and dramatic problems are most stimulating when they are most venturesome. Systems that are disjunctive in Hamlet, broken in Coriolanus, and levelled in Timon of Athens indeed imply the strain which exploded into the English Civil War. To continue into the Restoration and eighteenth century and to extend hints from Shakespeare's works into ideas of Locke and Godwin requires courage but provokes thought. What would we say, however, had Charles I and his supporters quelled the rebellion?

While Baldo's methodology is the most familiar of the three, relying on rhetorical figures and the history of ideas, he appeals to a wide audience. Some of the notes are splendid mini-essays. His tone is modest, and he is generous toward points of view other than his own.

Michael Neill, like Baldo, includes the apocalyptic vision of Shakespeare's tragedies but considers more plays and emphasizes more cultural artifacts. Examining plague narratives, art, and literature, he emphasizes the universal and indiscriminate arrival of death, represented in the figures of the Danse macabre and the Triumph of Death. His first section connects the "shameful openings" of the new theaters of anatomy and the drawings of Vesalius to metaphors of dissection in Othello and The Changeling. He next emphasizes the disorientation of individuals faced with visible figurations of Death as "the Antic, sardonic jester, grim summoner, and eldritch lover, the vivid self-exhibition of humanity" (5) in his discussion of apocalyptic figurations of the end in Hamlet. Finally, in Elizabethan funerary art and sculpture, Neill emphasizes the effort both to memorialize individuals and confirm family continuity. The parallel literary chapter discusses the monumental deaths of Cleopatra, the Duchess of Malfi, and Calantha in Ford's The Broken Heart.

Neill's initial section, "'Within all rottenness': Tragedy, Death, and Apocalypse" sets forth the dances and processions of death, drawing striking parallels with Marlowe's Tamburlaine 1 and 2 as theatrical pageants of the Triumph of Death, represented vividly in a series of plates within the text. The parallels continue with emphasis on Vesalius's Fabrica, linking his sketches of the human skeleton with figures in Death's pageant.

Using the anatomist's art figuratively, he examines dissection and self-confrontation in Othello and The Changeling. Continuing chapters in "'Making an End': Death's Arrest and the Shaping of Tragic Narration" represent the final step in opening a body: the apocalyptic unveiling of a corpse. In Hamlet Neill illustrates the uncertain boundaries of life and death and the confusion of individual "selves" in the sense in which Pyrrhus, for instance, may stand for either Claudius or Hamlet. His strongest discussion sets out Hamlet's refusal to "script" his own ending in defiance of death. His conclusion is worth citing: [Hamlet is . . .] "a revenge tragedy, at the deepest level, that is less about the ethics of the vendetta than it is about the murderous legacies of the past and the terrible power of memory" (244). Here and elsewhere Neill calls attention to the importance of Protestantism in removing purgatory, leaving a believer without a clear picture of orderly movement from one generation to the next.

"'Rue with a difference': Tragedy and the Funereal Arts" reflects the cultural and dramatic quest to find fitting memorials distinguishing individuals faced with the universal levelling of death. Drawing upon essays, visual arts, and Elizabethan protocols for heraldic funerals, Neill emphasizes the culture's concern with honorable mention of the dead and the funeral monument's place in genealogy and social history. His attention to the lists of properties belonging to acting companies verifies the presence of more than one tomb to be used in stage representations of funeral monuments. This continuity marks a transition to Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra's suicide becomes an act of affirmation. Neill continues his discussion of"monumental" affirmation into a group of Stuart tragedies including The Duchess of Malfi and Ford's The Broken Heart "in which political defeat is transformed into moral or aesthetic victory, as death becomes an occasion for triumphant self-definition" (313).

Neill's work is strong in its comprehensive learning, its clear structure, and his compelling style. Although he is not the first person to write about anatomy (Sawday and others) or maimed rites (Woodbridge), he gives the most complete consideration to death as subject. His study is a pioneering synthesis of drama and the cultural history of death and mourning in the period.

Lorraine Helms's personal essays, a series of "stories," define her major term in its classical context in which "argument" and "narration" are often synonymous. Her early chapters reflect the very close association of her interest in theater history and classical rhetoric in a closely reasoned discussion of the kinds of speech suitable for public and private performances related to the spaces of Elizabethan playhouses. Her experiences with the martial arts lead to discovering how the "rhetoric of violence," applies to women's sacrificial deaths, "Voluntary Wounds," and suitable marriages. Finally, she makes a valuable addition to understanding women in Shakespeare's histories through an examination of women's laments, using both past and present rituals for resources.

Helms's essays, readable as they are, draw her reader into a strenuous dialogue with her page, especially in her recollections of classical rhetoric, dialogues, and drama. The great majority of them also challenge the visual and auditory imagination. Her initial chapter, "Seneca by Candlelight," uses the classical Ars Rhetorica to make sense of the physical spaces of Elizabethan theaters. She returns to Greek and Latin discussions of rhetorical styles appropriate for moving large groups or for bringing aesthetic pleasure to smaller, more highly educated ones. Although these boundaries are still open to question, her extension of classical rhetorical forms into Augustine's City of God helps her reader see the links between early oratory and medieval styles of preaching. Connecting sermon literature with medieval drama provides a thoughtful context for sermons within early plays, such as the comments of the Chester expositor. Morality plays, especially Mankind, continue to address large groups.

Helms's discussion of the rhetoric of violence leads to some of the most provocative and original essays in the book. "Seneca in Durham," an account of the traditions and social history leading to the work of Jane Lumley, the first woman to translate a Greek tragedy, Euripides's Iphigeneia in Aulis, into colloquial English, gives an exceptional model of research where bits and pieces verify a woman's labor and fit the work into an adequate whole. Helms rightly attends to the biblical Jephtha in works by Christopherson and Buchanan in connection with Lumley's work. Although she does not say so, early commentators on Euripides did indeed link the two figures. Her discussion of fathers sacrificing daughters and the daughters' quests for rituals of mourning strengthen the wider sense of this play.

Helms is at her best when her own experience as a woman informs her readings. In "Voluntary Wounds," she combines her classical contexts with her own experience playing Brutus's Portia as a young actress and as a woman who has lived longer. Her strong discussion of lament in the early histories affirms the dramatic use of women's mourning rituals, an exploration which should encourage others to rethink the ways rituals intersect with dramatic literature.

The book is lively, witty, and learned. Even pedagogy receives its attention with suggestions for the use of classical forms of debate about issues the characters face. Although I disagree with Helms in her classification of Euripidean drama as "elitist" and in her separation of public and private spheres in feminist and other loci, I can hardly ask her to bend a splendid structure into another shape.

The three books together offer models for future research. Baldo's discussion of the disjunction of rhetoric and spectacle stimulates inquiry into other drama of the period or into dramatic poetry. Neill's application of representations of death and anatomy encourages their exploration in other authors, and Helms challenges readers to integrate learning with life outside the theater.

MARGARET J. ARNOLD University of Kansas