Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama.By Harry Newman

Abstract

Harry Newman’s important book investigates intertwined technologies, rhetorics, and theories of “impression”: practices that impose pattern on malleable substrates, from wax to metal to paper to bodies to ideologies. Reading four plays in relation to these concerns, Newman also explores a history of criticism that “represent[s] Shakespeare’s poetic and imaginative authority … as forceful, transformative, fertile and impressive” (74). The book is meticulously researched, synthesizing the copious bibliographies on its plays and concepts (although the Works Cited misses some citations, and readers would benefit from a considerably more extensive index). Newman’s thesis reveals new aspects of well-studied texts and his discussions of critical history and practice will have lasting significance. Chapter 1, “Technology, language, physiology,” establishes the lexical, conceptual, and material overlap among printing, coining, and wax-sealing. The imprinting of wax, metal, and paper are linked not only by mechanical similarities of pressing a rigid form onto malleable substrate, but...