Shakespeare's Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor.

Giorgio Melchiori's book is divided into roughly two equal sections. In the first, "The Corridors of History," Melchiori seeks to establish the textual history and transmission of those plays that constitute Shakespeare's so-called second tetralogy. He argues that Shakespeare's multiple revisions to these plays can be reconstructed through hypothesis, as can the text of an "ur-Henry IV." In the second section of the book, "The Knight of the Garter Inn," Melchiori attempts to trace what he describes as the "ancestry" of Shakespeare's Falstaff character. While he takes into account the Falstaff of Henry VI, Part One as well as the Oldcastle controversy, Melchiori is also interested in the history of a character he refers to as an "archetype" (77), one that can be traced from its Italian roots, first appearing in English drama in Anthony Munday's The Two Italian Gentlemen. Melchiori also considers the relation between Merry Wives and "the Garter entertainment presented on 23 April 1597" (94), an entertainment that some critics believe was the occasion of the first performance of Shakespeare's play. The final chapter considers the various narratives that surround Edward III and the origin of the Order of the Garter.

Melchiori supplements the plays that constitute the second tetralogy - Richard II; Henry the Fourth, Part One; Henry the Fourth, Part Two and Henry V - with Edward III and The Merry Wives of Windsor, thereby establishing a conceptual "sextet." Two factors underline Melchiori's argument and the ensuing hypotheses: a Falstaff character appears in each of the six, and each play provides "open or covert allusions to" the Order of the Garter and its ostensible concern with issues of "Policy and Honor" (12). A Falstaff character circulates in communities that promote the values and ideology of the Garter, representing either an alternative to or a critique of the values propagated. The claim concerning Shakespeare's hand in Edward III is thin. Melchiori draws attention to two recent articles, and he points to the case of The Two Noble Kinsmen and the fact that arguments concerning a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher have not barred that play from entrance to the canon of Shakespeare's works (not to mention Henry VIII, or constructions of Middleton's role in Timon of Athens).

Like other recent critics and editors-Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Grace Iopollo, etc. - Melchiori suggests that Shakespeare's revisions can be uncovered. He argues that "the Lancastrian tetralogy was originally conceived as . . . a trilogy of remakes" (14 emphasis added), and he provides a "conjectural reconstruction" of the supposed "one-play version of Henry IV" (14). In the case of Henry IV, Melchiori argues that "the author's second and final thoughts" appeased only subsequently (14). The argument offered in support of the claims for Shakespeare's revision of the components of the tetralogy is entirely hypothetical, conjectural. The book also speculates about what "Shakespeare originally wrote" 01), and it presumes upon the existence of Shakespeare's "foul papers" (49-50, 65); the assumptions and categories upon which such claims depend have been analyzed and historicized by Margreta DeGrazia, Stephen Orgel, Paul Werstine and others. Putting to one side the notorious hand D in The Book of Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare's works are available as early printed texts only; much speculation accompanies arguments of transmission that attempt to go beyond this point. Melchiori also undertakes an elaborate scene by scene "reconstruction" of a supposed "ur-Henry IV."

While his arguments concerning textual transmission remain conjectural, Melchiori initiates a provocative reading of metadramatic action in 2.4 of Henry IV, Part One, and the critique of prior efforts to nail down the date of Merry Wives is also rigorous. Furthermore, the discussion of ambiguities in the Quarto and Folio texts (and selected modern editions) of Henry IV, Part Two is useful, marred only by Melchiori's idiosyncratic manner of establishing textual preferability: doubt the Quarto reading [of Rumour's Induction speech] reflects Shakespeare's meaning and intentions" (67).

The discussion of the influence of Pasqualigo's Il Fidele on Anthony Munday's Two Italian Gentlemen is useful; however, Melchiori generalizes well beyond the case he has sketched in: "I suggest that, inadvertently, by devising this play, Munday had founded a new dramatic genre, and that this is the original model of Shakespeare's comedies" (84). He moves far too quickly when he tries to establish a developmental link between Pasqualigo's character, "the braggart Frangipietra" (87), and Munday's Captain Crackstone, a "typically English prototype of the boon companion of Prince Hal" (88). Indeed, there is a certain rigidity in the ongoing argument about character and nomenclature. When he describes the relation between Mistress Quickly and Pistol in Merry Wives, Melchiori argues that "Shakespeare had no choice but to imagine" (111) a larger connection between characters with the same names who appear in different plays. There is room here for more theoretical work. While Melchiori proceeds to construct and idealize "the archetypal Falstaff known the world over" (77), he intermittently addresses the problem of making a more or less unproblematized shift between different plays that include the same characters. The Falstaff of Merry Wives, as contrasted with the Falstaff of either parts of Henry IV, might well provide an example of a larger, more complex notion of the character discrepancy that arises between scripts.

DALE CHURCHWARD University of Western Ontario