Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey.

Susan Snyder. Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey.

Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2002. 238 pp. index. $44.50. ISBN: 0-87413-795-0.

Despite its title, Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey, this collection of Susan Snyder's essays attests to the singular presence of a generous and sensitive Shakespearean teacher and scholar. Published posthumously after Snyder's death in 2001, this volume provides readers with eighteen essays--three previously unpublished--that are arranged chronologically and which reflect Snyder's trenchant and vital analysis of assorted Shakespearean drama. The collection benefits from the prologues of two additional voices, those of Jay Halio, who completed the editing following Snyder's death, and Meredith Skura, a former student and colleague of Snyder.

Snyder's early essays on dramatic structure in Romeo and Juliet and Othello are landmark studies that argue for Shakespeare's manipulation of comic and tragic laws: in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare establishes a "comedy-into-tragedy" design in which comic elements like Friar Laurence and the Nurse become irrelevant in a tragedy governed by love's urgent dimension; as well, Snyder informs us that Othello's construction is based on the typical comic conventions that Shakespeare unpacks for their tragic implications. The same attention to dramatic structure is found in the later "The Norwegians are Coming," in which Snyder compares the sonnet structure, where the final couplet disrupts reader expectations, to dramatic "misleadings" in plays like Othello or Hamlet, where Shakespeare begins the action with one dramatic event only to overturn expectations.

Several essays reflect Snyder's agility in covering a range of plays with a variety of critical methodologies. Thanatology leads Snyder to examine the ars moriendi of King Lear and the inevitable death that claims the major characters and propels the play to its inexorable conclusion. In Antony and Cleopatra, the fixity and solid directness of Rome counters the luxuriating, "unpurposive motion" of Egypt and Cleopatra. Snyder concludes, acutely, that Antony and Cleopatra ultimately transcend in death the polarities of fixity and flux that had governed the play's dramatic structure. In the suggestive "Ourselves Alone," Snyder characterizes the role of single combat--Hal's heroic challenge of single combat against Hotspur--as a gesture outdated in its romantic view of heroics vis-a-vis the cold reality of modern technological warfare. Snyder also turns to Freud in her essay on The Taming of the Shrew, finding analogies between Freud's treatment of his subject Dora and Petruchio's "taming" of Kate. In essays on Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, Snyder views the way in which the Althusserian notion of ideology (subversive prophecies and family feuds respectively) enfolds characters in behavior that restricts free will and independent agency.

Snyder's role as editor of All's Well for the Oxford Shakespeare coincided with her interest in poststructuralism. Textual cruces in Act 1.1. of All's Well--ruptures of syntax and dramatic action--lead Snyder to a meditation on Shakespeare's characterization of Helen as an ironic, active lover in a world governed by patriarchal demands. Displacement and deferral are the chief Lacanian notions examined in "The King's Not Here," in which Snyder focuses on Helen's fulfillment and its continued displacement; Snyder sees the play as resolving the emotional dilemmas posed in the sonnets by a lowly speaker smitten with a detached, aristocratic nobleman. Snyder also offers a textual study of speech prefixes and stage directions in the play, observing that the Folio choice of generic rather than proper names in All's Well sometimes reveals Shakespeare's own generic notion of character.

The final three essays reflect Snyder's uncompleted role as editor of The Winter's Tale. In "Memorial Art in The Winter's Tale and Elsewhere," Snyder examines Leontes' oppressive role in creating the "wife-memorial" Hermione. As Snyder notes, Leontes, like Browning's Duke of Ferrara, can control his spouse only in her dramatic silences. In her study of Mamillius and his brief time upon the stage, Snyder draws on early modern English breeching practices of young boys to discern in Mamillius's premature death the gender polarization injected into the play by Leontes when he isolates the boy from his mother. In the final essay of this triptych, Snyder returns to the theory proposed in 1952 that The Winter's Tale originally failed to include Hermione's reanimation and that Shakespeare deliberately altered the ending to accommodate new production demands (the influence of the masque and court spectacle; the acquisition of the Blackfriars; a royal performance for Princess Elizabeth's marriage in 1612-13).

This collection should appeal to scholars who valued Snyder's thoughtful, clear-sighted scholarship. It makes for a lasting tribute to Susan Snyder and her legacy.

HARDIN AASAND

Dickinson State University