Shakespeare's Imitations.

Mark Taylor. Shakespeare's Imitations.

Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2002. 185 pp. index. bibl. $35. ISBN: 0-87413-775-6.

Examining four plays representative of Shakespeare's canon (a comedy, a history, a tragedy, and a romance), Shakespeare's Imitations argues that such elements as characters, motifs, speeches, and scenes "imitate" (e.g., replicate, mimic, parody) other such elements in the same play and, frequently, in texts external to it (external texts are those by such writers as Ovid, Homer, and Virgil, as well as by Shakespeare himself). An imitation does not merely repeat its model, however, but glosses, completes and deciphers it; exploring these imitations, therefore, will produce a fuller understanding of them and the plays they inform.

Following an introduction, which examines classical and Renaissance theories of imitation, chapter 1, on A Midsummer Night's Dream, considers how Pyramus and Thisbe imitates various elements of the larger play while simultaneously imitating a tale in Ovid's Metamorphoses as well as the "piteous overthrows" of the protagonists in Romeo and Juliet. Thus this play-within-a-play functions to interrogate and illuminate concepts of love in the play proper.

Chapter 2, on I Henry IV, posits the public world of the court as an imitation of the private world of the tavern, the Falstaff-Hal interludes of 2.4 constituting unheroic versions of the encounter between Hal and his father two scenes later. Taylor also considers the ostensibly "epic" nature of the play--and of the Henriad of which it is part--in conjunction with the Aeneid, individual incidents of which the play "recall(s), imitate(s), and revise(s)" (75). Hal's offer to duel Hotspur, for example, parallels that of Turnus to fight Aeneas, both duels coming to pass against the wishes of the works' respective kings. Unlike Turnus, however, Hal harbors no lofty national ideals; whereas Turnus undertakes his duel to preserve Latium, Hal undertakes his for self-glorification, his offer being merely "a spontaneous boast" (87). The imitation thus reveals Hal as a "bruised and diminished" version of his classical prototype (77), rendering wholly ironic Canterbury's assessment of the young king at the opening of Henry V.

The focus of chapter 3, on Hamlet, is The Murder of Gonzago, an incomplete and thus problematized imitation of the dumb show introducing it, which is itself an imitation of an old play in the actors' repertory as well as of recent events at Elsinore. Taylor additionally discerns in the dumb show an imitation of Richard's courtship of Lady Anne in Richard III. Other imitations consist in the "pairs" that inform the play: for instance, pairs of kings (Old Hamlet, Old Fortinbras), pairs of similar or analogous characters (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet and Laertes, King Hamlet and the Ghost ["a figure like your father"]), and, of course, pairs of plays (Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago).

Chapter 4, on The Tempest, demonstrates how Sycorax "is the model Prospero unconsciously imitates in coming to the island from afar and, once there, in enslaving the native population" (152). Claribel--like Miranda, a young Italian woman coveted sexually and politically by a North African male--is the model Miranda imitates. Other imitations consist in the two conspiracies, of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso, and of Caliban and his fellows against Prospero, both plots mimicking the insurrection of Antonio, aided by Alonso, against Prospero twelve years earlier. These imitations are in turn examined against Renaissance educational theories, Taylor concluding that "Antonio represents a monumental failure of European education and of the ideal of human formation it tacitly enshrines" (164).

Some of what Taylor posits as imitations seem simply a repackaging of existing criticism--the notion that Pyramus and Thisbe parodies elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, for example, is something of a critical commonplace--and his attempts to demonstrate correspondences occasionally seem strained. He argues, for instance, that Pyramus and Thisbe copies Ovid in presenting a metamorphosis, adducing Pyramus's lines, "Now I am dead,... My soul is in the sky," as evidence that Pyramus has been transformed from a mortal to a god. Still, Shakespeare's Imitations contains much to commend it. The parallels Taylor draws between Shakespeare's text and Virgil's are thought-provoking and illuminating, as are his speculations on how closely a completed version of The Murder of Gonzago would have mimicked the dumb show, and the book as a whole makes a substansive contribution to the study of literature within the context of Renaissance theories of imitation.

BARBARA L. PARKER

William Paterson University