Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos.

McAlindon's study of Shakespeare's representation of tragic experience is based on "the ancient model of natural order as a dynamic system of interacting opposites" (xiii). The author seeks to demonstrate the multiple ways in which Shakespeare's tragic imagination is profoundly rooted in and inspired by mediaeval ideas and commonplaces still current, side by side with New Philosophy, in the late Renaissance, ideas which contribute to the Shakespearean construction of reality and its embodiment in action, character and motif

Fundamentally, Shakespeare's depiction of an antithetical nature is not specific to his genius but a traditional synthesis of ideas derived from Plato, Aristotle, and the pre-Socratics. This tradition, in McAlindon's well-documented account, yields two different models and two different habits of thought. One is the hierarchical and essentially stable system of corresponding planes, institutionalized in Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture; the other is a complementary (rather than oppositional) notion of the universe as "a tense system of interacting, interdependent opposites " (7) in which every order, every structure of identity is subject to violent change. McAlindon distinguishes himself from Tillyard in attributing this latter model to Shakespeare, "for premodern cosmology construed the world not only as a hierarchical structure of corresponding planes but also as a dynamic system of interacting, interdependent opposites" (s). In this version of a contentious cosmos every stabilizing movement towards harmony and order will manifest itself as a precious but fragile concordance of discords.

McAlindon's is a valuable contribution to the mainstream traditional of Shakespearean interpretation, a scholarly study which skillfully deploys its revisionary Tillyardism to escape the sogginess . of warmed-over Tillyardism. In today's critical climate, this is a welcome and useful restatement of a tradition of thinking and mythmaking that has been largely eclipsed by new historicism. But the book's major strength, I find, lies less in the novelty of ideas or interpretations than in the careful fine-tuning of the detail, and refinement with which the author traces the figure of these ideas in the Shakespearean carpet of representation. This figure, dramatized over and over in the tragedies, is of "Chaos ... come again, and McAlindon's erudition and critical intelligence re-educates us, in what I would like to call his acts of humanist hermeneutics, to appreciate its extraordinary resonance.

If tragedy is indeed the representation of an experience of chaos, its essence conflict and dialectic contrariety, then McAlindon's informing hypothesis about an essentially antithetical and contentious cosmos provides a capacious model, formal, philosophical and historical at once, of dualism and dynamism, embracing different levels of critical understanding, from the cosmological to the ethical (character and action), to the generic (tragedy is nothing if not conflict and contention), and down to the smallest linguistic/ imagistic details.

Stability and tension - the pair of terms evokes the old New Criticism, a school with which McAlindon refuses to be identified. Yet the dialectical habit of thought was always at the heart both of the monolithic readings provided by the old historicism as well as of the ambiguity-hunting old New Criticism, and McAlindon's mode of historicizing does not escape this habit - nor should it - in his readings of the texts, which are often concerned with correcting" and amplifying or complicating an earlier or mainstream reading. The readings of the plays are on the whole excellent - I was particularly impressed with the chapters on Othello and Antony and Cleopatra (which takes us back to Plutarch and Ovid by a fascinating route) - although the cosmological frame of reference can sometimes stiffen into a mechanical inventory (the chapter on Hamlet suffers from some tediously exhaustive listings of elemental images and images of strife which shed little light on the play's moral and psychological enigmas.)

Like Kirsch's The Passions of Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, this is an "old-fashioned book" insofar as its discursive frame of reference for the culture, ideas, and preoccupations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries looks to the past, drawing upon the texts of antiquity and late mediaevalism rather than the socio-political conditions and the philosophical ferment which appeal to new historicists, cultural materialists and deconstructionists in their quest for the sensibility and experience which formed the early modem period. Unlike Kirsch, however, McAlindon sensibly refuses to grind the polemical axe, and he avoids the pitfalls of a sterile debate between essentialists and relativists by a shrewd ackmowledgement of the plays' embeddedness in contemporary English history. The relevance, for instance, of a decade of anxiety and discontent culminating in the Essex rebellion, to Julius Caesar; of the emergence of a capitalist society from the disintegration of feudalism, and the problems of individual self-definition, or the disagreements about what constitutes the sacred in political and religious authority, to King Lear; of Christendom's complex confrontation with the Ottoman East in the sixteenth century to Othello - all these are interestingly woven into the discussion. But they remain strictly peripheral to McAlindon's insistent central claim that the Shakespearean representation is "considerably more than an oblique encounter with the socio-political contingencies of its own time, " and it is this claim which governs the readings because "given the nature of human nature, and of the world we inhabit, the same problems will recur endlessly in different forms" (159, my emphasis). Although the complexities (and it is important to note that McAlindon's word is never "realities") of human nature and the natural world are perceived to be unchanging, it is precisely in McAlindon's generally rich account of the different forms, enactments and envisionings that the virtue of the book lies.

HEBREW UNIVERSITY, JERUSALEM Elizabeth Freund tov