The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking.

Resisting what the author reads as the New Historicist tendency to reduce history to political mechanisms (and literature to dialectic), The Scythe of Saturn examines the quite different hermeneutic orientation of "magical thinking." While Robert H. West (Shakespeare & the Outer Mystery, 1968) asks us to consider "outerness" - the supernatural subjectified as a metaphysic and applied to the assessment of morality and aesthetics - as an analytical structure for assessing the explicitly magical in Shakespeare's drama, Woodbridge more fundamentally seeks to articulate a view of the world balanced between traditional magical belief and modernity, moving us away from the overtly supernatural in Shakespeare and toward those patterns of his thought rooted in a magical sense of the world. To distinguish the past from the early modern present, Woodbridge explains that while the medieval legacy of magical belief "accepts the possibility of human supernatural agency, sometimes aided by divine or demonic forces, sometimes working by sheer force of will aided by magical words," magical thinking "is the unconscious residue of such belief, which remains to structure experience even though true magical belief has atrophied in the individual psyche" (12). Woodbridge draws upon the work of comparative anthropologists like Mary Douglas and Victor Turner to argue that magical thinking is a pervasive human phenomenon rather than a culture-specific construct.

Each of the text's five chapters traces the residual presence of magical beliefs in English culture at large, turning thence to Shakespeare's drama to witness the manifestations of magical thinking in artistic contexts. Identification of the body personal with the body politic to establish their shared sense of borders, or "liminal zones," allows one to read the invasion of individual or of country as a magical pollution (as in The Rape of Lucrece) best combated through protection magic (and hence even the chronicle histories are as much "about" subjective interpretation of natural phenomena as of politics). This identification also contextualizes the reading of scapegoating as ritual purification, with Woodbridge moving away from the Christian archetype of the scapegoat-as-innocent to find Shakespeare's tragedies demonstrating that the sacrifice of the guilty party ("killing the king") is the more natural and redemptive practice. Seasonal magic, particularly derived as the metaphorical combat of winter's sterility with summer's fertility, produces an ambivalence in Shakespeare's drama that reflects "an age both exhilarated by nascent modernity and enchanted by lingering magic," and hence discordantly affirming both "civilization and nature" (201). The color triad of black/white/red, implicit in love poetry from the sonnet tradition to the blazon and replicated in human constructs from seasonal representations in art to game structures, functions as an enchantment, a visual encoding of erotic desire. Finally, through the saturnalian inversion of hierarchical relationships, magic mediates the unpleasant inevitability of age yielding control to youth in order to guarantee society's perpetuation.

I retain just a few reservations about this lucid, stimulating study. Particularly in light of Woodbridge's caveats about historicizing magic, it seems problematic to conceive all hierarchical subversion as magical exercise, for surely in such schema "magic" of necessity becomes a political metaphor, if not indeed a tool. Additionally, the author's occasional use of psychoanalytic mechanisms to trace manifestations of magical thinking has been more effectively performed by theorists such as Bruno Bettelheim or Richard Caldwell (The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth, 1989), and her attempts to establish the complex relationships among magic, cultural semiotics, and Shakespeare could be strengthened by reference to the "Elizabethan universe of discourse" described by Keir Elam in Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (1984). Nevertheless, cultural materialists will find this study a particularly useful heuristic, as will scholars interested in theories of transmission of folkloric beliefs.

SID SONDERGARD St. Lawrence University