Shakespeare and Multiplicity.

Both of these books are organized around topics so broad that their merit derives more from discrete perceptive responses and informative glosses than from the development of their theses. "Multiplicity" in Professor Gibbons' terms refers to Shakespeare's genius in fusing generic and allusive sources of different kinds. These include multiple genres within individual plays, diverse expressive devices (including stage images and representations of the human body, as well as language and rhetoric), and especially a large spectrum of literary forerunners, among which are his own earlier works alluded to in later ones.

Not all of the seven plays from which Gibbons draws most of his exemplary materials are obvious favorites, for two of the plays most extensively treated are Cymbeline and Titus Andronicus. Cymbeline, the subject of the opening chapter, might be called Gibbons' paradigmatic play. Its allusions are partly topical, as Frances Yates showed some time ago (the king's two sons and daughter replicate the family of James I). But its plot is based on chronicle histories of earliest Britain, fusing "myth, recorded fact, legend, folk-tale, romance, [Shakespeare's] own earlier plays and poems, and miracle" (24). The scene where Iachimo spies on the sleeping Imogen, for example, alludes overtly to the poet's own "Rape of Lucrece." Such interweaving of literary precursors with court masques, folk plays, and historical chronicles creates "the effect of fable" (25) - a public and private history of Britain, since some of its most expressive images are those of dream. This chapter reveals the technically accomplished and richly expressive stagecraft of one of Shakespeare's least performed plays.

Some of the other sections on more familiar plays are also rewarding, but there is some unevenness and looseness of connection, perhaps reflecting the diverse earlier forms of Gibbons' own material (in addition to the articles and lecture that form the basis of three sections, the chapter on the coexistence of "topicality" with folklore in Measure for Measure was preceded by the author's Cambridge edition of that play). Thus the chapter on the affinities between King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Taming of the Shrew as plays of "excess" remains fragmentary, beyond the obvious point that all of these plays shock their audiences through violence. The more specific categories Gibbons establishes for these plays: an initial social or urban context, a withdrawal into the wilderness, and the revenge of the victim through a ritual meal, have to be stretched or ignored in order to incorporate all three dramas. The final banquet in Shrew is hardly Kate's revenge on her most obvious persecutor, Petruchio, and there is no meal at all at the end of Lear. Surprisingly, the play that would seem best to fulfill these criteria, Timon of Athens, is not even mentioned.

Yet Gibbons' discussions, even when they are somewhat randomly developed, are often suggestive. Among the most productive of his source studies is his treatment of As You Like It, where he concentrates less on Lodge's Rosalynde - the primary source for the play's plot - and more on Sidney's Arcadia, a seminal text for English pastoral. It was to Sidney, according to Gibbons, that Shakespeare's play owed some of the subtleties of sexual disguise, erotic mistakes, and narrative gaps that highlight the problem of interpretation. Particularly illuminating is Gibbons' view of the function of primitive fable or narrative as a stabilizing structure for the audience, especially when juxtaposed with the world of fashion and wit that governs the play's dialogues. In such discussions Gibbons' emphasis on "multiplicity" becomes particularly fruitful.

For Camille Wells Slights, Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from Comedy of Errors through Twelfth Night, can most profitably be studied in terms of their social component, the communities that they represent in diverse forms. This seems a useful perspective for comedies, with their focus on marriage and social integration. She announces her project as a conjunction between contextual and formalist approaches, but though she does not pursue any distinct theoretical perspective (new historicist critics like Louis Montrose are referred to, but do not govern her argument), her interest is not in close readings of the plays either. Rather, she provides glosses on social aspects of the plays, some of which the reader or viewer might not have been aware of.

Obviously, the value of these contextualizations will depend on the extent to which they bring to the surface social or cultural aspects of the plays that have hitherto received little emphasis. Few readers of Much Ado probably register the social differentiation between Don Pedro, the Spanish conqueror of Messina, and the local dignitary, Leonato. Yet once Slights points it out, several of the play's elements stand out in sharper focus, including the deference Leonato inexplicably pays Don Pedro even when the latter has helped slander (and apparently kill) his daughter. For this reader, Two Gentlemen of Verona - a difficult play to like with its duplicitous or amorously passive "heroes" - was put into an especially illuminating context of conflicting aristocratic values which "contain the seeds of their own destruction" (67). On the one hand a gentleman's word was his bond and truthfulness was held in high esteem, but on the other the competitiveness of court life - Silvia is a desirable object largely because "all swains commend her" - virtually necessitated deception and sycophancy.

Professor Slights pointedly does not erase those aspects of the plays that are upsetting to modern sensibilities: according to her, the plays "repeatedly portray characters achieving happiness within undemocratic, racist, sexist societies" (7), even though such resolutions are achieved with some pain and cost. The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice represent, of course, the most notorious cases. Thus she is not convinced (rightly, in my view) by critical attempts to portray Kate's submission at the end of Shrew as ironic. But while she is a persuasive defender of Jessica, whose elopement from her father's cheerless house and departure from his faith have been castigated by many scholars as frivolous betrayal, her explanation of Portia's treatment of Shylock in terms of Elizabethan notions of outward religious conformity is unlikely to make the enforced conversion more palatable to modern readers. Slights's social perspective makes her a conservative reader of the plays, even though she acknowledges - usually in passing - the problematic aspects of the comedies' marginal or unassimilated characters.

The main difficulty with her emphasis is not ideological, however; in many cases her commentary seems remote from the specifics of reading and performance. Laughter, jokes, and play are irrelevant to her analyses, as she ruefully recognizes at several points (e.g., "Despite my misleadingly solemn account of attitudes toward society in The Comedy of Errors, dependence on social relations is central to the play's comic tone," 20). Her literal gloss on the insults traded by Beatrice and Benedick, for example, virtually ignores what even untrained undergraduates are quick to see: the "wars" engaged in by these two well-defended characters are flirtatious from the beginning. Slights's passing acknowledgments of the plays' wit or humor seem perfunctory; her real energy is in social commentary which, while sometimes illuminating, is often ponderous for its subject.

Bridget Gellert Lyons RUTGERS UNIVERSITY