Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity.

Desmet's stated aim in this study is to explore "the role played by rhetoric in fashioning and representing Shakesperean character" and thereby "generate a rhetoric of Shakespearian character" (3-4); important to the project are the processes and ethical implications of identification: "The creation of ethical character in Shakespeare's plays and the practice of ethical criticism by his critics are the subjects of this book" (7). These are interesting and important aims, and one wishes to follow her argument about the ethical implications of reading character. Unfortunately, Desmet's way of casting and developing her points presents enormous obstacles to the reader trying to follow her argument.

In part, this may be a deliberate choice. Desmet invokes an enormous variety of classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary rhetorical theories, and because her main critical energies go into deploying them and playing out their implications, her work should best serve readers interested in following the complex interplay of many theoretical positions. The method makes more sense when she focuses on classical, Renaissance, and later authorities, among them Plato and Aristotle; Erasmus, Vives, and Puttenham; Morgann, Coleridge, and Bradley. The method loses effectiveness when contemporary theory not only charges the discussion but becomes the mode through which it is argued: we see issues of characterization through Catherine Belsey's account of the subject as a "subjected being" (3); Paul de Man's revision of Poulet's concept of subjectivity (26); Wayne Booth's humanist ethics of reading (27); Kenneth Burke's notion of rhetorical form (31), his "account of identification's role in persuasion" (59), and his conviction that literature can serve as "equipment for living" (167); Jacques Derrida's essay on Plato's Phaedrus as "a useful gloss on [Maurice] Morgann's attitude to the letter of Shakespeare's text" (55), and many others, not all of them necessarily compatible with the others.

For her and her intended reader, this journey appears to be the point of the exercise. The drawback of her method - one that vitiates her project, at least for this reader - is that it keeps her discussion abstract and distances it from its putative topic. For many readers, the practice of glimpsing questions of dramatic characterization so relentlessly through a thicket of theory will be frustrating. Desmet quotes Kenneth Burke's observation that "the main ideal of criticism. . . is to use all that is there to use" (9), but her mobilization of so many critical and theoretical resources tends to obscure rather than enrich her analysis. This book is a hard, hard read, and it sometimes seems that the author is taking the long road to relatively dear conclusions.

Certain key ideas do emerge. One is that the study of rhetoric - classical, early modem, and modern - can illuminate Shakespeare's methods of characterization. But since "recent literary theory has successfully discredited the notion of a transcendent, coherent self" (3), we must acknowledge that "the self, if not constructed solely by discourse, becomes comprehensible through rhetorical representations" (13). However, "early character studies," which "provide exercises in reading human nature through stylistic play" are "like post-modern textual readings" in that "they demonstrate also the fragility of a self constructed by writing" (35). Further, since "words are arbitrary signifiers that . . . obscure ideas and their relations to one another. . . the role of language in constructing identity continues to be problematic" (43). For this reason, Falstaff has always been "a critical favorite": he "embodied rhetoric and its motives; his glibness, his opacity, and his talent for misleading others all characterize the medium of his creation and of his critical re-creation" (58).

To account for the fact that readers take such differing views of the characters in Hamlet, Desmet raises the idea that when we study dramatic characters, we must note when they become "users of language, not just effects of language" (13) - e.g., we "read" Ophelia through her "reading" of Hamlet, and vice versa, and we note that Ophelia becomes eloquent when Hamlet is mad, as Hamlet becomes eloquent when Ophelia is dead. Readers of Hamlet who identify with the prince achieve rhetorical "comfort"; on the other hand, "Identifying with Ophelia . . . disrupts that complacency by providing an incongruous perspective on Hamlet and his play" (34). The reason readers have been ready to "rewrite Hamlet's characters in their own images" is that Hamlet, as "Shakespeare's play about human identity, offers ample instruction in how identity is formed and deformed through acts of identification." (34).

I hope the summaries provided above will entice those readers for whom the book is apparently intended. Other works dealt with at length include Othello, Cymbeline, Measure for Measure, King Lear, All's Well That Ends Well, King John, and The Winter's Tale.

HARRY KEYISHIAN Farleigh Dickinson University