Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden.

Howard Erskine-Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Clarendon), 1996. 5pls. + x + 284 pp. $55. ISBN: # 0-19-811731-0.

Howard Erskine-Hill announces his project clearly in his introduction: "My chief focus is the governance of the body politic, and the way in which major poetry between the later years of Elizabeth and the later years of William III was aware of and intervened in the discussion of this governance" (5). This book reflects the recent revisionist trend in historiography, seeing a series of conflicts whose outcome was never assured rather than a smooth "Whig" progression from monarchical towards Parliamentary hegemony. Nevertheless, in literary terms its approach is a fairly traditional one, putting standard canonical works (Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden) in the context of the history of ideas. Erskine-Hill's book shows the value of this approach in its detailed and confident readings of individual works, its clear, nuanced account of the political debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its able demonstration that the works both reflected and vigorously participated these debates.

The strongest section of the book is part 1, "Shakespeare and the Succession of Kings." Its first chapter is a valuable account of sixteenth century political theory of monarchy, emphasizing Bodin and the English histories of Wentworth, Hall, and Fox. Erskine-Hill goes on in the next two chapters to show how, far from affirming the Tudor myth, Shakespeare's history plays question the theory of"indefeasible hereditary right" which was the underpinning of James VI's claim to Elizabeth's throne. Excellent, detailed readings of the first tetralogy and King John, and then of the second tetralogy, interestingly argue that Shakespeare "encourage[s] the idea of the founding of a new dynasty by a brave, charismatic, and politic leader" (98) presumably Essex rather than James. The connections with current political debates that Erskine-Hill finds in the post-history plays are less direct, but still plausible and interesting. For example, in the situation of Hamlet's father Erskine-Hill sees Shakespeare "spin[ning] a spider web of approximate but in historical context suggestive allusion" to the Darnley affair, making Hamlet's situation a commentary on James I's sensational political heritage. Erskine-Hill's grasp of Shakespeare is deep, wide, and telling, and he does a particularly good job of making us take a new look at the oft-neglected first tetralogy.

In part 2 Erskine-Hill tries to show seventeenth-century republicanism debated in a succession of works that leads from Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Jonson's Catiline through Milton's public sonnets and pamphlets to Marvell's "Horatian Ode," with contemporary Venice and republican Rome as the chief mediating examples of republican governance. This section, drawing together so wide a range of works from a much broader period, does not hang together as well as part 1, though the individual readings are mostly strong. Part 3 sustains an interesting parallel between Milton and Dryden, comparing Milton's disillusionment with Cromwell in the 1650s to Dryden's disillusionment in 1688, and finding a critique of Cromwell in Milton's Satan. The section tracing monarchical imagery through Paradise Lost is particularly strong, arguing that Milton reserves monarchy for God alone, and critiques its human application in his portrait of Satan. Erskine-Hill's arguments in these sections depend largely on seeing connections that are "obvious in context" between contemporary politics, and events and situations in the literary works. Some of these connections are quite interesting and convincing; others seem more debatable.

In his introduction, Erskine-Hill rejects New Historicism as ideologically driven, preferring what he calls "a more discriminate historicism . . . which nominates a centre of interest, and seeks, from the historical record in its full breadth and variety the evidence proximate and relevant to that interest" (6). One might wonder, then, why he limits his literary evidence to only the most standard of texts. It is not entirely clear why his approach could not be applied just as profitably to less standard canonical works - and perhaps even more profitably, since it would be newer and fresher to see how works by women writers, for example, participated in the contemporary political debate. Nevertheless, while one might not agree with all his conclusions, Erskine-Hill's book is solid in its scholarship and sensitive in its readings, especially of Shakespeare.

KATHERINE HOFFMAN Roanoke College