CATHERINE BELSEY, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985. 253 p. An absorbing sequel to Belsey's Critical Practice (1980), The Subject of Tragedy employs a wide range of fiction and non-fiction to present a complex analysis of a highly elusive area: what contemporary discourses enabled people "to say, to understand , and consequently to be" (x) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Catherine Belsey, a cultural materialist and feminist, argues that an individual's subjectivity (i.e., sense of self) is not the expression of "human nature" but is socially and historically constructed; she endeavors to discredit the current prevailing view — liberal humanism — by rehearsing its origins and flaws through an exploration of medieval and Renaissance English drama. The post-medieval human "subject" of her title is blinded by an illusory sense of autonomous selfhood, in part produced and reinforced by literature. Both male and female subjects are thereby unsuspectingly subjected to an illiberal, property-based, militaristic society, women to patriarchy as well. Tragedy, as a public gerne not bound to reconciliation, readily exposes social conflicts in the construction of subjectivity. Belsey begins, however, by considering a number of morality plays, notably The Castle of Perseverance, The World and the Child, and Wisdom. In these the protagonist is not a unified, independent source of meaning. Fragmented into allegorical personifications, not yet a subject, he is God's subject — "the temporary location of a conflict [between vice and virtue] which exists before he is born and continues after his death" (15). The emblematic staging of Castle invites the audience to identify with Mankind, to know only that they are not subjects either. In contrast, later perspective staging — a move toward classic realism, more aptly illusionism — worked to confirm autonomy in actors and audience, offering a unified spectacle to unified spectator-subjects. Between the fifteenth century and the Restoration, collisions between residual and emergent discourses, like the collisions between older and newer modes of theatrical presentation, disrupted certainties and released the possibility of plural understanding of drama and of the self. Humanist criticism attempts to defeat pluralism through the construction of interiority. Belsey traces the development of the unified humanist subject from the sixteenth-century Vice, whose interiority and apparent immutable essence in Lusty Juventus and Enough Is as Good as a Feast become the isolation and assertiveness of Kyd's Lorenzo, Shakespeare's Richard III and Coriolanus, and Webster's Flamineo. Assessing the soliloquy's role in producing pseudo-interiority, Belsey foregrounds traces of allegorical fragmentation in the speeches of Hieronomo, Faustus, the Macbeths, and Heywood's Wendoll in order to make a Lacanian point: since the subject of the enunciation (the "I" who speaks) cannot be fully represented by the subject of the utterance (the "I" being spoken about), identity lies in the gap between. It follows that 1) the humanist subject can never wholly represent or express him or herself, and that 2) the project of humanist criticism is to fill the gap, to tell us "what the author really meant" (52), in a fruitless search for the inevitably absent self. Equally alienating for the subject is the differentiation of the self from knowledge, no longer a transforming, self-dissolving knowledge of God. The seeker after empirical knowledge (e.g., Faustus) displaces God; impelled toward the use of knowledge for control, he becomes the incapable arbitrator of meaning. Drawing on Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Belsey maintains that only through conformity to social norms can the isolated, uncertain subject find corroboration. Conformity (subjection) is fostered by Restoration drama's realist (illusionist) narrative technique , wherein closure is achieved through disclosure, promoting a false sense of validating, because common, experience. 83 84Rocky Mountain Review At the heart of The Subject of Tragedy is a chapter on political and individual autonomy in which Belsey deconstructs the Tudor-Stuart strategic opposition between absolutism and chaos. Julius Caesar, Jonson's Sejanus, and Greville's Mustapha are sites where the possibility of an alternative — democracy — is located. The playwrights can voice though they cannot endorse the concept of a politically autonomous subject. Protestant thought also fostered autonomy; Anglican theory placed the monarch within the law, while Puritan...