Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama.

Jonathan Hart, ed. (Garland Studies in the Renaissance, 4.) Set. ed. Raymond B. Waddington. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. x + 292 pp. $44. ISBN: 0-8153-2355-7.

Reading the Renaissance is one of those collections of essays, gathered from colleagues and mentors of the editor, that, in spite of its good intentions and in spite of some excellent essays, fails, like this sentence, to hang together. This is not to imply that our current conception of the Renaissance, going in all directions even as we construct new directions, hangs together. As Hart points out in his introduction, "The essays represent a plural Renaissance and explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, the early modern and the postmodern, world and theatre' (2-3). The collection intends to ask who "is the reader and what is his or her relation to the text and how continuous or discontinuous is that text with the past or the future" (4). There are four sections: The Text, the Reader, and the Self; Gender and Genre; Continuities and Discontinuities; and Anticipations.

Thomas Greene's "Ritual and Text in the Renaissance" traces the breakdown of ritual from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and then traces its remystification in secular events, such as court masques, but it is a remystification "open to a nourishing past but appropriating it for new contexts' (33). Greene's discussion of an incident in Don Quixote is especially good, as is his treatment of ceremony in Shakespeare's history plays. In "Reading the French Renaissance: Textual Communities, Boredom, Privacy," Steven Rendall discusses acts of reading, public and private, as well as gendered reading, storytelling and reading, and places of reading - glossing, in effect, some of the many thoughts Shakespeare may be evoking in the various books that make their appearance in Hamlet. Lisa Neal's essay on "Reading Ultima Verba: Commemoration and Friendship in Montaigne's Writing" is concerned with last words, "the last words of others and the privileged status [Montaigne] accords them; he seems to perceive them as transparent and transmissible, provided that they are recorded by the dying person's friend" (45). Back again to Hamlet, the Prince telling Horatio that "th'election lights/On Fortinbras, he has my dying voice."

Carla Freccero's "Gender Ideologies, Women Writers, and the Problem of Patronage in Early Modern Italy and France: Issues and Frameworks," the opening essay in "Gender and Genre," presents the beginnings of what promises to be a fascinating study of how women writers found a readership, how they found patronage, how they became patrons. While there is a good deal of theory here, there is as well good use of treatises on the behavior of women, such as Francesco Barbaro's De re uxora: "It is proper that the speech of women never be made public; for the speech of a noblewoman can be no less dangerous that the nakedness of her limbs" (68). Katy Emck's "Female Transvestitism and Male Self-Fashioning in As You Like It and La vida es sueno" argues that the female transvestite functions in those two plays "as a trace of and a form of anxiety about 'self-fashioned' male identity . . . . Rosalind and Rosaura, who take their fates into the own hands by adopting the signifiers of male identity, reflect the needs of their marginalised male counterparts" (75).

The editor's essay, "The Ends of Renaissance Comedy" (by far the longest in the volume), opens the third section, "Continuities and Discontinuities." He argues that "the very structure of the plays, the way they end, involves disjunction, stress, and rupture. The ends of comedy represent a return to order, but a restoration with loose ends" (91). This is not new news, and Hart's treatment of the plays (Il Pastor Fido, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, No hay burlas con el amor, Volpone, and Tartuffe) relies entirely too much on plot summary. Robert Rawdon Wilson and Edward Milowicki's "Troilus and Cressida: Voices in the Darkness of Troy" begins by looking at the obsession the West has had with Troy in both epic and romance, then with Shakespeare coming to it late, almost wistfully. What more can be said about love and honor except to scrutinize it again, not in text but on a stage. And the scene, ever the scene, is Act V, scene 4, where Diomedes and Cressida are observed by Ulysses and Troilus, who are observed by Thersites. Shakespeare here is in a hypertextual mode, "composing the play's verbal polyphony" (143), demonstrating his "preoccupation with the interaction of both individual and generic voices, the way they batten upon each other, supporting and undercutting each other (often synchronously), in creating composite wholes" (144). Harry Levin's "Two Tents on Bosworth Field: Richard III, V.iii, iv, v," reads very much like a lecture on Shakespeare's history plays, on Richard III, and on the flexibility of the stage that allowed Shakespeare to achieve his effects. If so, it is a very good lecture indeed, its only footnote a citation of the Riverside Shakespeare as his text, edited by the dedicatee of Hart's collection. Keir Elam's engaging "As They Did in the Golden World: Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It," notes the difference between Shakespeare's sources in The Tale of Gamelyn, a romance, "a world of fantastic happenings, governed by the autonomous logic of the marvelous, subject to the unanswerable laws of magic" and Lodge's Rosalynde, a pastoral, which "looks back to an irretrievably past world of innocent engagement with created nature, . . . the opposition between the poetics of the green world and the poetics of the golden world" (165-66). Shakespeare employs semantic rupture in the play, as distinct from the rapture of pastoral, and it is this rupture, this "breaking away not only from inherited literary canons but from the linguistic and stylistic fixity they presuppose" that "far from killing off the poetics of the golden world altogether, liberates it and renews it, allowing it to recuperate its original kinship with the greenworld poetics of romance" (173). Elam's nifty essay is among the best in the volume.

Paul Morrison's "Noble Deeds and Secret Singularity: Hamlet and Phedre" opens "Anticipations," the final section. Any essay that faults Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare criticism can't be all bad. A comparison of Shakespeare's play and hero with Racine's, "at least outside the Francophone world, is almost invariably structured as the dispensation of a large and comprehensive soul, Shakespeare's and all things Shakespearean, over and against the impoverishment of a codified theatrics, Racine's and all things neoclassical' (1801). Hamlet wants to show, to expose, to make public, yet "in the two carefully juxtaposed scenes that follow shortly after the play within the play, the prayer and closet scenes, the play asserts itself over and against Hamlet's novelistic propensity for excavating depths' (188). Phedre guards against such showing, such public display: "In Seneca . . . Phedre more or less assaults Hippolyte, who demands she remove her wanton hands from the chaste body. In Racine, however, hands never quite touch the body, although the sense of a taboo nearly violated, contact nearly made, accounts for the intense energy of the scene" (196). The volume's concluding essay, Richard A. Young's "Narrative and Theatre: From Manuel Puig to Lope de Vega," discusses the differences between narrative and drama, or, rather, discusses how these differences can break down in each genre, how each can use the other's resources and conventions, how each may be determined from outside the work itself. "The fact that El beso de la mujer arana is to be consumed as a narrative raises certain immediate expectations in the reader, who automatically looks for the course of narration, as if to ensure that the minimum conditions for narrative are being met" (207), but the narrative "is not derived from a single voice but is the product of various, independent discourses" (209). Lope de Vega, it seems, would be quite at home in the modern and postmodern world, insofar as his plays pluck their materials from a variety of literary sources and conventions, using a variety of narrative strategies. This essay is a good closer.

There is an index and a useful "Works Cited,' where, perhaps not surprisingly, many of the citations are to the authors of the essays in the volume.

THOMAS L. BERGER St. Lawrence University