Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender.

This collection serves two particularly useful purposes. First it gathers together influential essays in feminist literary criticism, such as Janet Adelman's compelling study of maternal power in Macbeth and Phyllis Rackin's analysis of the displacement of evil women in the movement towards tragic male subjectivity in Richard III. Just as importantly - and making the volume more than the sum of its parts - the editors have placed varied, often contentious, feminist readings alongside one another. Carol Cook's Irigaray-based reading argues, for example, that in gesturing beyond its own binarism Antony and Cleopatra demonstrates the absent excess associated with Cleopatra and woman; in the next essay, Linda Charnes effectively denies the move outside history that informs Cook's essay as much as the "liberal humanist critic's (LHC)" reading of transcendent Love (Charnes's stated target, 272) by challenging readings which attempt to find an alternative world exempt from the expansionist rhetoric of both Caesar and Cleopatra. Such juxtapositions refute a unitary vision of academic feminism and yield a fertile field, if not an infinite variety, of readings.

The book is divided into three major sections, the first of which, "Tragic Subjects," occupies nearly half the volume. Sara Eaton's piece here locates an analogy between the courtly tension of humanist versus aristocratic discourses on the one hand, and the rhetoric of textuality versus blood enacted by Lavinia and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. Though partially updated (like several others) for the collection, her essay would additionally benefit by citing Katherine A. Rowe's relevant article (Shakespeare Quarterly 45 [1994]: 279-303). Similarly combining historicist insights with feminist reading, Carol Thomas Neely notes the nearly equivalent incidence by sex of different categories of madness, in order to suggest that drama placed more emphasis on gendering its representations. Drawing on Michael MacDonald's study of Richard Napier's medical practice, she analyzes the fragmented discourse and the shift from supernatural to secularized accounts of madness in relation to Ophelia and Lady Macbeth, madwomen who die mournfully even as their male associates "recover" sufficiently to assert their (tragic) identity. Coppelia Kahn completes the section by connecting its two major critical strains, historicism and emphasis on the phallic mother. She links the double binds associated with maternal power to those inherent in the gift-giving rituals of Jacobean court patronage, illuminating that recalcitrant text, Timon of Athens.

The second cluster, "Implicating Othello," demonstrates the editors' decision to place essays in dialogue. In "Desdemona's Disposition," Lena Cowen Orlin carefully examines the changes in place (from Sagittary to Cyprus and into an increasingly "domestic" space) that may encourage an audience well-versed in patriarchal theories to collude in the mistaken assumptions which lead to uxoricide. Margo Hendricks explores the ghostly gaze of Venice, its double cultural image as ideal and whore which structures the agency and reception of both Othello and Desdemona, and complicates the meanings of "race" beyond color alone. Finally, Mary Beth Rose's discussion of "The Heroics of Marriage in Othello and The Duchess of Malfi" draws on contemporary documents of Puritan marriage discourse to make a different case for the female as a potential hero in Jacobean tragedy.

The final section, "Shakespeare Our Contemporary?", supplements Cook and Charnes with autobiographical reflections by Shirley Nelson Garner and Gayle Greene. Like the book's introduction, the origins of feminist Shakespeare criticism come to the fore here, with mixed results. Whereas the introduction usefully locates feminist analysis in an historical (albeit dominantly American) context, it inclines towards beating some dead horses rather severely; for example, A.C. Bradley, Maynard Mack, and Richard Levin serve as whipping boys for their respective generations (the LHCs wittily skewered by Charnes), but the attention they get nearly overshadows more interesting questions concerning current feminisms. Similarly, after reading the lively, provocative essays in this volume, the final expressions of dissatisfaction with Shakespeare, based on memoirs of study and scholarship from earlier decades, seem anticlimactic. At the least, the implied audience and purpose of the editors' comments appear at odds with the engaged critical practice they sandwich. While the history of the field and the editors' specializations make the foregrounding of psychoanalytic feminism apt, and historicism's recent reign earns it pride of place, nevertheless the absence of performance criticism in the volume is a problem; a piece on theatrical or filmed Shakespeare might have produced a more energetic finale. These are quibbles, however, of a less than fatal sort; the collection remains an important volume for scholar and student alike, and a tribute to the enduring contributions of its authors.

DIANA E. HENDERSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology