The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance.

This book focuses on plainness in English texts from around 1530 to 1608, the "plain" conceived not primarily - indeed sometimes not at all - as a style of writing, but as, variously, an ethos, a way of living, and an epistemology. A term that Graham does not use but which seems to gather some of these valences is Raymond Williams' "structure of feeling." As a structure of feeling, plainness offers Graham a way to discuss how early modern subjects fashioned their convictions in tension with a humanist emphasis on rhetorical performance and debate for debate's sake. We might take "plain," then, to mean a kind of serious, believing inwardness, one that believes itself to be not only simple and true, but simply true. Throughout, Graham is concerned with "antirhetorical plainness," and much of his study concentrates on the ironies that result when authors and characters find themselves performing the anti-performative.

Graham has chapters on Wyatt; on Ascham's The Scholemaster, and An Admonition to the Parliament; on Greville; on Marston, and Revenge Tragedy; on Coriolanus and Timon of Athens; and on King Lear. The most successful of these is the Greville chapter. Having shown the potential aggressiveness of the plain in Wyatt's poems - a politically, philosophically, and linguistically absolutist plainness that seeks to "subsume all truths, all perspectives, all voices, in one Word" (35) - Graham reads it as a tool with which, activated by his personal voice, Greville sought to erase the bothersome confusion of "rhetorical practice" (97). Yet it is in this chapter that a weakness of this otherwise engaging work appears. Graham is continually surprised to find apparent binarisms like "public"/"private" and "(inward) peace"/"(outward) order" collapsing, blurring, even merging. The casualness of a reference to "deconstruction" in his conclusion belies the fact it is precisely to deconstruction that we owe such insights.

And while this remains a provocative study, packed with insightful observations, it raises many analytical and methodological questions. Because the plain is, to Graham, not a thing but a feeling, there is little connection made between the (linguistic) stylistic and the thematic. One is sometimes left thinking that there is nothing plain about conviction. Similarly, it's not clear what isn't plain; which writers, and which works, for example, might one consider its opposite? Are they Fish's "self-consuming" artifacts? If it engages Fish's categories, this study's historical narrative is close to that of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Like this text, Graham's study has an uncertain relation to the medieval era. More troubling, perhaps, is that the omission of women's writing, popular literature (from school books to devotional manuals), and recusant texts leads to an almost inescapable feeling that, as far as it is synonymous with the plain, conviction was the exclusive property of Puritan and Anglican men during the English Renaissance - Shakespeare's religion being anyone's guess - and generally confined to serious, even canonical texts.

This said, Graham's remains a powerfully cogent study, one that employs an anthropology of plainness and its corresponding structures of feeling to shed new light on rhetoric and society in Renaissance England.

DOUGLAS BRUSTER University of Texas, San Antonio