Shakespeare Studies, vol. 23.

Ed. Leeds Barroll, book-review ed. Susan Zimmerman. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. 294 pp. $52.50. ISBN: 0-8386-3640-3.

Published annually in hardcover, Shakespeare Studies deals with the cultural history of early modern England and the place of Shakespeare's production in it. The present volume contains eight essays and twelve book reviews. Regrettably, space constraints necessitate focus on only three of these essays, the following being among the most provocative.

Arguing that Measure for Measure reflects "the conflicted place of marriage laws and sexual and gender rules as the state affirms its interest in an ordered family life and the due succession of property rights" (196), Alberto Cacicedo examines the play against conflicting modes of marriage (spousals, clandestine, and priest-officiated or "official") in Renaissance England. Spousals, the mode of Claudio and Juliet, were the most controversial since, in problematizing the status of offspring and of property rights, they compromised the authority of the state. Hence the Duke's - and the play's - insistence on the "official" mode. That the final matches in Measure for Measure lack propriety is irrelevant to the play's larger concern: social control through preservation of state authority.

Thomas Moisan approaches The Taming of the Shrew through the Latin lesson in 3.1, which, he argues, illuminates the play and the social issues the play addresses. "When read against the backdrop of contemporary concerns over the uses and abuses of learning, particularly classical learning, and especially when applied to the education of women," he writes, "the scene presents a travesty of what happens when learning and what Sly calls 'household stuff' collide" (101). In subverting the norms of instruction and reversing the roles of student and teacher, the Latin lesson becomes a practicum for the training of a shrew. Especially intriguing are the congruencies Moisan adduces from the lesson's Ovidian text: "Bianca's deft negotiation of the 'lessons' of her ... self-appointed tutors evokes Penelope's deft deflection of the advances of her self-invited suitors," recalling "the genuine interweaving of art and domesticity" informing Penelope's delaying strategy (111).

Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., argues that New Historicism's fixation on Foucault's conceptualization of power thwarts rather than promotes historicization. In the case of The Tempest, the imposition of a colonialist "frame" effaces a large field of pertinent early modern discourse to which, Schneider contends, the play is tethered - discourse which is rooted in such classical moralists as Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, whose centrality to English Renaissance thought Schneider cogently demonstrates. Thus Prospero's irascibility, rather than attesting a leak Kin the play's romantic envelope which reveal[s] the ugly colonialism within" (124), is better explained in the context of Seneca's angry man - a context likewise embracing Lear, Othelio, Coriolanus, Timon, and Macbeth. The weakness of the colonialists' position further appears in their rationalizations of Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda - in their assertion, for instance, that Prospero broaches the rape to divert attention from Caliban's rightful claim to the island, an assertion that nullifies the Caliban-Ariel antithesis the play erects. In situating The Tempest in such ethical context and in advocating greater familiarity with Renaissance cultural materials, Schneider suggests a useful corrective to the political overemphasis New Historicism sometimes presents.

In the remaining essays, Philip Armstrong explores the role of cartography in Shakespeare's plays; Charles Spinosa, land law and landholding in King Lear; James Stone, androgyny in Hamlet; and Stephen Carter, rhetoric and "envisioning' in The Rape of Lucrece. Unfortunately, Stone's and Carter's arguments are hampered by the jargon-laden rhetoric still rampant in academic prose, Stone claiming, for example, that Hamlet "passes beyond the ideal specularity of comedy to a specifically linguistic duplicity and subjectifying self-division, the principle of difference which patriarchal, misogynistic discourse takes woman to be" (85). In the volume's sole non-Shakespearean essay, Alexandra Halasz ponders the implications and construction of celebrity in early modern England, deftly tracing the process by which the figure of actor Richard Tarlton accumulated representational force.

This volume is far-ranging and impressively researched, illuminating Shakespeare's milieu no less than his works.

BARBARA L. PARKER William Paterson University