Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Page, Metaphoric Books.

Frederick Kiefer. Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1996. 384 pp. $52.50. ISBN 0-87413-595-8

Frederick Kiefer has provided a cogent treatment of the use of written and printed materials in Renaissance plays as props and the sources of figurative language and metaphoric ideas and action. Kiefer demonstrates that the invention of the printing press changed the Renaissance from an oral culture to one in which authors increasingly used language drawn from the print shop, library, and study. Kiefer focuses on the influence of Luther and Erasmus, who in their voluminous works on the Scriptures enhanced the importance of the written word, but at the same time emphasized the ambiguities of texts and the dangers involved in multiple interpretations by different readers. This dual emphasis forms the poles for Kiefer's analysis of the role of books in Renaissance drama.

Kiefer's principal thesis is that print imagery infiltrates the plays in many contextual ways, furthering the plot, signaling and supporting themes, and creating additional meanings. He illustrates this process in a representative range of plays, including Heywood's If you Know Not Me and A Woman Killed with Kindness, Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, and Shakespeare's Pericles and As You Like It. Many other plays are treated summarily in three invaluable appendices, which, however, do not mention Ralph Roister Doister, a play which is dominated by writing motifs.

The third part of the book is the core of his study, consisting of six chapters about three major metaphors: the Books of Conscience, Nature, and Fate. In the final chapter, Kiefer analyzes the use of the Book of Fate in The Spanish Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi. His treatment of the links among the various texts in Kyd's play cogently demonstrates that it is dominated by a sense of underworld fate established in the induction scene. However, it is distressing that Kiefer has neglected to cite my and other critical works on the play which anticipate, parallel, and, in some cases, go beyond his comments to establish related significant insights. Kiefer's contention that Hieronimo uses the two letters from Bel-imperia and Pedringano to establish Lorenzo's guilt and to justify his fated vengeance has been anticipated in articles by Ronald Broude and by me. In Thomas Kyd's Mystery Play ... (Peter Lang, 1983), I, as Kiefer does, connect the various texts in the play to demonstrate that justice is being worked out on earth in conjunction with the fate represented by Revenge and Proserpine. My book also provided the first extended study of the relationship between Andreas "wandering" in the underworld and Hieronimo's search for and fulfillment of justice, a parallel which Kiefer discusses (234). For this idea, I was mainly indebted to Sacvan Bercovitch's article "Love and Strife in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy" (SEL 9 [1969]: 215-29), which also provided the insight that the infernal Book of Fate was a symbol of the Empedoclean cycle of Love-Strife which informs the structure of the play. Kiefer not only neglects to cite Bercovitch, but he also does not refer to Robert Knapp's pertinent Lacanian discussion of the play's texts and author-figures in Shakespeare - The Theater and the Book (1989), which he cites only in a footnote on 2 Henry IV (335n.58).

Further, in two related articles, I drew upon Peter Goodstein and S. F. Johnson's work (both of whom are cited by Kiefer in his analysis of Danielic parallels [343-44]) to demonstrate that the play is concerned not only with pagan justice but also with a harsh Christian revenge/justice. I also interpreted the translation into English of the polyglot playlet "Soliman and Perseda" as equivalent to St. Jerome's (Hieronymus) translation of the Bible into the Vulgate. And I further compared this translation to the Reformation translation of the Bible into English, the new Vulgate, an act which Kiefer refers to throughout his book as a central influence on the growing awareness of the importance of print in the sixteenth century. Finally, in Apocalypse and Armada in The Spanish Tragedy (Sixteenth Century Studies, 1995), I combined these foci in a study of the play as a Christian mystery whose inset mystery texts - works with hidden meanings - must be interpreted correctly to arrive at the play's politico-religious subtext. Granted, this most recent book most probably appeared too late for Kiefer to cite in his study, nor do I expect him to refer to the entire range of my critical works on The Spanish Tragedy, which is only one of the many plays he analyzes. However, he does have an obligation to his own scrupulous scholarship, to his scholarly audience, and to the peers who have explicated The Spanish Tragedy before him to cite their pertinent scholarship and to relate it to his insights. Unfortunately, in this instance he has failed to do so.

FRANK ARDOLINO University of Hawaii