Boy Actor Research Articles

Portraits, Puppets, Trees: Versions of the Body in John Lyly's Plays

Abstract: This essay explores the constitutive role of a set of key objects—portrait, puppet, and tree—in conceiving ideas of the boy actor's body in the plays of John Lyly. Drawing on materialist theory, the essay argues that across Campaspe, The Woman in the Moon, Endymion , and Love's Metamorphosis , these three objects provide a particularly generative point of reference for Lyly's explorations of the relationship between his authorial control, the body of the boy actor, and the material resources of his playhouse. As I read these three moments in which the child actor and prop interact to create an ambiguous, unfixed object-body, I think through how the potentially rebellious nature of Lyly's materialist stage might serve as a catalyst for his meditations on the particular conditions of his own early modern authorship and his acts of authorial creation more broadly.

"This is and is not Cressid": Seeing Double in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in the context of "that terrible Poetomachia " at the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that Shakespeare stages a microcosm of the poets' war between the recently revived children's companies and the professional theater. Shakespeare appropriates conventions from the boy company repertories to defend against their caricatures of professional playing and its system of apprenticeship. Reading the play as a whole, and the character of Cressida in particular, as perspectival double images, it shows how Shakespeare uses the indeterminate body of the boy actor playing Cressida to create a visual analogy between the two and to foreground their shared dramatic situations. Through the figure of Cressida, Shakespeare metatheatrically dramatizes the vulnerability and exploitation of Elizabethan boy actors caught between warring theaters, and in doing so weaves the War of the Theaters into the Trojan War to reflect on his own contemporary theatrical market.

Trans as Method: The Sociality of Gender and Shakespeare

This special issue on contemporary performance proposes “trans” as method and as a social practice rather than as an immutable identity category that stands in opposition to more established ones such as cisgender men or cisgender women. We ask new questions about Shakespearean performance: How might the meanings of the plays change if we consider them as transgender performances rather than cis-centric stories requiring suspension of disbelief about cross-gender roles? What if the body of the female character and the actor’s somatic presence exist on a continuum rather than in contrary fixations? The enactment of gender practices is not predicated upon “substitutions” (as in substituting the boy actor for Desdemona) or entail diagnostic recognition (as in being reminded of the “real” body beneath the illusion of Desdemona). This introduction outlines key issues with today’s terminology, suggests a more effective and inclusive vocabulary, elucidates trans as method, and demonstrates trans studies’ relevance to Shakespeare studies. Research articles in this issue deal primarily with tacit representations of transness in film and performance, such as the case of an actor who came out as trans posthumously, and interviews highlight practitioners’ voices by rerouting the epistemological circuits that have predetermined who can produce knowledge about gender.

Transgender Reassessments of the Cross-Dressed Page in Shakespeare, Philaster, and The Honest Man’s Fortune

A boy page is in love with his master. One version of this story should be familiar: shipwrecked in a strange land, Viola cross-dresses as the eunuch page boy “Cesario” so that she might serve Lord Orsino, who enlists her to woo Lady Olivia. Matters are complicated when Cesario falls in love with Orsino and Olivia with Cesario, but all plan to be married to appropriate heterosexual partners in the end.1 The story is retold less than a decade later in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster; or, Love Lies A-Bleeding (1608–1610).2 Inspired by Viola’s escapades, this play features the boy page Bellario, whose master, Philaster, employs him to convey romantic messages to his fiancée, Arethusa. Bellario is besotted with his master and at the end of the play is revealed (to both characters and audience) as the girl Euphrasia.3 A few years later, in The Honest Man’s Fortune, the boy page Veramour delivers messages from his master, Lord Montague, to the Lady Lamira.4 Veramour adores his master and is suspected to be a girl in disguise who has been inspired by “two or three Plays” to dress as a boy (5.1, sig. Xxx2r). Eventually Veramour’s clothing is searched and he is declared to have been a boy all along. Each page presents a challenge to conventional scholarly understandings of the relationship between gender and embodiment in early modern culture. This article presents a critical reassessment of the cross-dressed page through the lens of transgender theory, focusing on its evolution through Viola, Bellario, and Veramour. It challenges the supposed “real” material body of the boy actor; it analyzes the importance of class, age, and imitation to transmasculinity; and it investigates the violences to which gender-divergent characters are subject, arguing for reading modern and early modern gender divergence comparatively. Drawing on trans theory, this article discusses the “real” and its relationship to deception, how imitation constitutes gender, the prosthetic materiality of gender, and the role of narrativization in constructing gender. Finally, in identifying gender divergence in characters who are never outed, it seeks to define early trans identities beyond violence and exposure.

“You have a better needle, I know”. Boy Actors on the Early Modern Stage

In this article I argue that an approach relying on metatheatrical analysis and on Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque could account for the apparent subversivism of the boy actor’s cross-dressing on the Renaissance stage: stage cross-dressing was rather part of a sanctioned, conservative transgression. Comedy – linked to the carnivalesque features of the Renaissance stage – shares with carnival its conservatively transgressive quality. The frequency of references to boy actors in disguise-plot comedies and their metatheatricality are analysed. Drawing on the Jacobean play Love’s Cure I will try to show how comic conservatism and metatheatre combine with socially and theatrically conservative outcomes.

Abigail under “the Livery of a Nun”: Staging Nuns in Post-Reformation England

This essay primarily discusses that the role of Abigail in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta embodies contemporary discomfort about femininity, theatricality and Catholicism. In-post-Reformation England, both anti-theatricalism and anti-Catholicism reflect the suspicion of clothing’s potential to misrepresent the wearers’ identity, which leads to ideologically loaded rhetoric that figured Catholic vestments as costume. Abigail, a Jewish girl converted to a Catholic nun, is exclusively depicted as free from stereotypes of either greedy Jew or hypocritical Catholic. However, in Marlowe’s sceptical dramatic world, Abigail’s corporeal presence on stage, with a nun’s habit assumed by a boy actor, summons up the negative values formerly invested in the garments; deception, hypocrisy, promiscuity and immaturity. The sacred singularity of Abigail might be valid textually at best, and the most challenging attempt, especially on Elizabethan stage, is to depict her as a consistently sacred female. In post-Reformation England, nuns on stage, including Abigail, demonstrate the representational crisis of female sacredness under contemporary anti-Catholicism, anti-theatricality and Protestant misogyny.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

<i>Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self</i>. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Innovation and experiment in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicted by T. S. Eliot but a bold and innovative writer. Taking advantage of the emergence of an exceptionally gifted boy actor, he brought a new and more realistic type of woman to the English Renaissance stage, and also two unusually disturbed and psychologised male characters, one who thinks he is a wolf and one who looks into water and sees a monster. He also benefited from the King’s Men’s move to an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, when the Globe burned down soon after the first performances of The Duchess of Malfi, not least because one of those who lived near the new theatre had been Lady Arbella Stuart, whose story chimed very closely with that of the Duchess. Finally he astonished by the richness of his imagery, which together with his recurrent use of sententiae (pithy sayings) creates a sense that the play has a language all of its own. Eliot was right to identify Webster as violent, but he was also much more, and in the Duchess herself he has given us a moving and haunting female hero.

“I pray sir, hear me: I am married”: Language and Sexual Politics in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract This article follows the critical lines of new historicism, feminism, psychoanalysis and performance studies so as to reveal Webster’s challenge of the conventional gender roles via the binary opposites of speech and silence. Within the context of new historicism, I contend that Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613–1614) comments on the corruption and abuse of absolute political power within the reign of King James I and the Catholic Church through the figures of Ferdinand (the head of the state) and the Cardinal (the head of the Church). Contrary to the new historicism’s conception of all-encompassing ideology, Webster attributes male figures’ loss of control over their voices and the movement of the plot to their aural closure to the Duchess’s moral speech. Following the methodology of feminism, I argue that this tragedy enacts an inversion of gender roles with respect to discourse. Webster associates the Duchess of Malfi’s voice and silence with honesty and dramatic authority and her tyrannical brothers’ voices with incestuous and murderous desires. Drawing on Freudian and Jungian concepts of psychoanalysis, I propose that Ferdinand and the Cardinal whose voices are associated with murderous and incestuous desires are linked with the psychic zone of the id while the Duchess, who expresses and acts on her sexual desire within the sphere of marriage, is linked to the ego, the reality principle. Her appearance as an echo in the tragic closure reveals her progression towards perfection, the superego. While Ferdinand’s misogyny is a projection of his unconscious sexual desire towards his sister, his madness is a sign of incestuous frustration. At a meta-theatrical level, I argue that this subversion of gender roles via the binary opposites of embodiment and disembodiment and silence and speech is linked to theatrical performance. Webster shows that the boy actor impersonating the Duchess’s voice and silence appropriates masculine agency while male figures’ voices are linked to madness and lack of subjectivity.

Rosalind and "Śakuntalā" among the Ascetics: Reading Gender and Female Sexual Agency in a Bengali Adaptation of "As You Like It"

My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.

The Convention of the Boy Actor in Early Modern Tragedies

The social condemnation of female voices in early modern England is illuminated by the exclusion of women from the public stage, for a female actor would have been a vocal woman who transgressed th...

Silence, Speech and Gender in Shakespeare’s Othello: A Presentist, Palestinian Perspective

This paper follows the critical lines of feminism and psychoanalysis to argue that Othello is a conflict between female characters' moral voices and male figures' treacherous voices. Drawing on the concepts of Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis, I argue that the association of female speech and silence with sexuality is a projection of misogynist and racist discourses. I read Iago's projection of his evil onto Othello as a verbal intercourse of homosexuality. The cause of tragedy emanates from the fact that Othello weds his shadow, Iago and ignores his anima, Desdemona. While the verbal marriage between Othello and Iago results in Othello's accusation of Desdemona of being a whore, I argue that Desdemona escapes this category because a boy actor impersonates her physically and vocally. I argue that Othello stages for audiences in contemporary Palestine male figures’ deafness to feminist views. While Othello’s marriage to Desdemona symbolizes his integration into Venetian society, his murder of Desdemona signals the loss of his heroic identity and the dissolution of his link to Venice. In contrast, killing the supposedly aggressive female figures in Palestine marks the public respect of the killer. Furthermore, I use the romance of Antar (525-608) as a Palestinian literary intertext to scrutinize the significance of female figures in constructing male figures’ heroic identity and the racial discourse that the Romance of Antar and Othello embodies. Key words : Racism, Misogyny, Projection, Honour Killing, Gender Difference, Boy Actor

“Sing it Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance

This essay examines the Folio version of Othello 4.3 via textual, performance and transnational analytic models in order to contextualize Desdemona’s Willow Song against the sung performances of English female ballad sellers and the Italian actress-singers of commedia and court fame. In this way, the essay argues that modes of female theatricality were contested at the heart of the dramatic and Shakespearean canon. The Folio Willow Song scene reworks the widely circulating trope of the lamenting abandoned woman, a figure whose virtuosic distress captivated audiences of the celebrated Italian commedia and court singers during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One paradigmatic instance of virtuosic song and verbal dexterity, Isabella Andreini’s La Pazzia d’Isabell a (1589), is examined to propose Othello 4.3 as a bravura demonstration of the boy player’s practice in opposition to women’s performance, staking a claim for the virtuosity of the English boy in competition with the foreign actress. Further, given the ongoing scholarly debates over the absence of the Willow Song from the 1622 Quarto and its status in relation to the stage, the essay suggests that the virtuosity required of the English boy actor in the song’s performance feeds into casting practice and hence can illuminate the scene’s textual history.

Mediating Boys: Two Angry Women and the Boy Actor’s Shaping of 1590s Theatrical Culture

Journal Article Mediating Boys: Two Angry Women and the Boy Actor’s Shaping of 1590s Theatrical Culture Get access Andrea Crow Andrea Crow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 2, Summer 2014, Pages 180–198, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2014.0019 Published: 01 July 2014

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre ed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatreed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison Frank Swannack Uman, Deborah and Sara Morrison, eds, Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre( Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 232; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781409449003. Editors Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison claim the essays collected in this volume ‘complicate what has become a standard reading of the blazon’ (p. 3). However, the blazonic dismembering of the female body is a somewhat over-familiar trope in early modern studies. Perhaps in recognition of the difficulty of providing fresh insights into the subject, the editors admit that the anthology is indebted to the critical work of Nancy Vickers and Jonathan Sawday. The essays also draw heavily upon Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Grant Williams’s essay uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories and early modern notions of lovesickness to interesting effect. Unfortunately they lack clarification, and the essay seems rushed. A far more accomplished piece is Katherine R. Kellett’s analysis of the underappreciated female ghosts in the complaint poems of the 1590s. She finds an affinity with these female ghosts in Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. Hermione’s uncertain state between living and dead allows Kellett to explore the blazon through an incorporeal body. Elizabeth Williamson examines courtly love in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The confusion of gendered identities and bodies caused by a boy actor playing Julia finds its expression with a sympathetic audience. Lisa S. Starks-Estes investigates the blazon being staged literally in Titus Andronicus. She argues that [End Page 257]Shakespeare uses ‘a fresh, new, innovative Ovid’ to reinvent the Petrarchan sonnet (p. 54). Her reading of Lavinia being played by a boy actor and the conceit’s resonance with Ovid’s Metamorphosesis fascinating. Sara Morrison finds a refreshing change in the use of blazonic language by female characters in Measure for Measureand The Duchess of Malfi. In particular, she gives details of how Petrarchan conventions are used to depict scars on the female body that represent pain on stage. Patricia Marchesi’s captivating essay examines how theatrical props and human limbs become interchangeable in the B-text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The fact that traitors’ dismembered limbs were displayed in Elizabethan society finds an intriguing correlation with the way Faustus’s body is easily pulled apart. Added to this is Marchesi’s insight that Faustus is comparable to the objectified beloved of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ariane M. Balizet’s subject is cuckoldry in Arden of Favershamand A Woman Killed with Kindness. More specifically, she looks at ‘blazons ofmen bymen’ (p. 98). Balizet argues that the dehumanising effect of the cuckold’s horns erodes the husband’s role as the head of the household. Thomas P. Anderson explores Julie Taymor’s Titus(1999), a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus. He argues that Lavinia’s fragmented body in the film ‘offers a form of corporeal feminism’ (p. 111). The most fascinating section of Anderson’s essay is his exploration of the artificial limbs and how Lavinia attempts to make her dismembered body whole again. Joseph M. Ortiz investigates other uses for the blazon apart from erotic desire. In Shakespeare’s history plays, he finds faces being scrutinised for signs of royal legitimacy. His impressive close reading of Henry Vfinds an allusion to printed history books. Lisa Dickson examines scenes of fragmented and dismembered bodies and texts in The War of the Rosesand The Plantagenets. Erin E. Kelly argues that The Rebellion of Naplesshould be regarded as a play rather than a play-pamphlet. Its graphic depictions of violence imitate the falling apart of Charles I’s body politic. The ending to Kelly’s essay is the most enigmatic and chilling in the anthology. The problems of blazoning the female reproductive body in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whoreare investigated by Sara D. Luttfring. In particular, she examines Giovanni’s anxieties over his sister’s sinful womb. Nancy Simpson-Younger explores identity in the sleeping or dead characters...

‘To serve us in that behalf when our pleasure is to call for them’: performing boys in Renaissance England

This essay argues for the recognition of a culture of child performance that flourished throughout Renaissance England, and foregrounds the social contexts from which the quasi‐professional boy player emerged at the end of the sixteenth century. Examining the academic and religious provenance of child acting in the period and the ubiquity of boys as performers in numerous semi‐dramatic royal and civic pageants, this article reveals that the boy's role in Renaissance theatre begins with the non‐professional performative culture to which he is integral, and stretches far beyond his presence as the transvestite boy‐heroine on an all‐male stage.The examination of the boy's theatrical roles is further contextualized in relation to moralistic, prescriptive literature on the family, which conceptualizes the child as the property of his parents. The discussion emphasizes the cultural perceptions of subordination, economic import and ownership tied in with child development, in order to make visible the link between the child's role in the theatre and his status in the family. The Renaissance boy actor served as a commodified entity which typified a social and economic structure in which children in general played a vital part.

On Playing Cleopatra

It is the richest, most varied, most misunderstood part that Shakespeare wrote, and it's quite impossible to get it all. An actress with imagination and a rich life experience has a decent chance of getting most of it. A mature male actor with years behind him of playing female roles? Let's say a good half of it. A boy actor with none of the above, bar a certain flair, a vague grasp of how 'the other half' thinks, a sharp eye, and who is lucky to have an elder sister (or better still a temperamental mother), might have had a fraction of a chance. Else he should just opt for saying the words loud and clear, introduce a pout here, a flounce there, and pray that the audience ekes out the rest of this superhuman human with their imaginations. Expert though those boys might have been, one does rather wonder: who exactly did Shakespeare have in mind when he wrote it? Some Dark Lady or other, I can't help thinking.

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613) (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613) Matt Omasta Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613). By Edel Lamb. Early Modern Literature in History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. xii + 189. $80.00 cloth. In Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre, Edel Lamb sets out to explore how children's theatre companies of early modern England constructed popular notions of childhood. Lamb invokes the discourse of performativity—specifically Judith Butler—by questioning whether childhood and gender are performed similarly. Because she understands childhood as a socially constructed class, and argues that members of a dominant class (adults) construct and deploy conceptions of young performers, her book aligns with recent scholarship in childhood studies. Rather than investigating the performance of childhood broadly, however, Lamb analyzes the construction of the child player—that is, the children's playing company performer. Importantly, she notes that although many boys continued to perform with the companies well into their (biological) adulthoods, the companies insisted upon presenting them as "children." As such, the book's most significant contribution to the field is a [End Page 495] more nuanced understanding of the ways in which companies' managers carefully constructed and maintained a particular notion of the "essence" of the early modern child player. The author proposes that the stage companies successfully posited a fixed notion of the child player as an infantile, eroticized, and malleable being, one in a state of perpetual "becoming" who is both less than and subservient to adults. Lamb derives her evidence principally from an analysis of playscripts, especially those with "induction" scenes in which child players performed "themselves" preparing for a show. Since these scenes present the players not as characters but as "actors," Lamb believes they reveal how playwrights presented particular notions of players' supposedly "natural" behaviors "out of role." At times, Lamb seems to assume verisimilitude in the scripts, which may detract from the credibility of her analysis. For example, in discussing Ben Jonson's Epicoene, Lamb notes that one actor (in the role of a female "spectator") looks upon another one of the actors and asks: "Did you ever see a prettier child?" Lamb extrapolates that such references "explicitly represent desire for the eroticized child player" (52). In another instance, two characters onstage may kiss (although it is unclear if the boys did in fact kiss in any given production); Lamb claims that this locates the child "explicitly within a homoerotic discourse," and that "the body of the [player] is thus put on display to the spectators and the kiss between the two boy players may act as an eroticized and teasing display of the boys' potential sexual identities" (53). Although some adult spectators may have viewed the players erotically, and although other scholars have opined similarly, the claim that these examples "explicitly" signify broad homoerotic interest in young performers seems untenable. More persuasive are her analyses of how playing companies' material circumstances influenced perceptions of child players. Lamb notes that while boys who performed with adult companies (e.g., The King's Men) eventually became sharers in their companies, the young people impressed or apprenticed to children's companies never attained this status. Even once a player transcended biological childhood, companies still presented him as a child and apprentice—a child learning how to become an adult. Building on this idea, Lamb's second chapter argues that company managers reduced child players to "material objects" functioning "only as a signifier of the identity, gain, and rights of his owner" (46). Citing legal documents listing the boy players as property akin to scripts or costumes, Lamb argues that children were simply elements of commercial trade between companies and paying spectators. Further, players themselves were replaceable, as "the material body of the boy actor is . . . not valuable in itself," but rather it is the deliberately constructed perception of boy players that makes them valuable to spectators. Although the legal relationship between the players and their companies evolved from one of impressed service to apprenticeship, Lamb contends that children always served as commodities exchanged between other parties: parents traded their children with companies...

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox by Peter G. Platt

528 Reviews on the food-related fates ofAaron and Tamora in Titus Andronicus (p. 124). More of a starter than a main course, Food in Shakespeare shows how far feeding and feeling, as Duke Orsino well knew, go hand in hand as well as hand tomouth in the diet of earlymodern drama. This is not rich repast, but its small portions are well seasoned. University of Glasgow Willy Maley Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox. By Peter G. Platt. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2009. ix+25ipp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-7546-6551-9. Ithas long been acknowledged thatparadox is central to Shakespeare's plays, nearly all ofwhich could be called problematic'. Theirmixed ideological messages, refusal to support any single idea, and general open-endedness are, arguably, what make them a source of continued interest and debate. As Norman Rabkin once claimed, polyvalence and polysemy are implicit governing principles inmany of the greatest works of literature.What is less known, however, is that Shakespeare's use of paradox is informed by and representative ofwhat Peter Platt terms 'theRenais sance culture of paradox. Adopting a New Historicist approach, Platt successfully situates Shakespearian paradox within the context of an age thatwas fixated with the unexpected, the uncertain, and the contradictory. The first chapter, '"New, Straunge, Incredible, and Repugnant to the Opinion of the Hearer": The Power of the Paradox in Early Modern Culture', highlights the chief versions of paradox that concerned (and often delighted) Renaissance thinkers: the literary-rhetorical and logical versions?whose roots are primarily classical?and the Christian versions. This chapter also discusses the effectiveness ofparadox as a political tool and itsability to 'transform themind' (p. 12). Claiming that critics of Shakespeare have not sufficiently recognized the power of paradox, Platt is of the opinion that paradox is connected more to activity than passivity (p. 15). He thereby positions himself against scholars, such as Gary Taylor, who consider paradox as ultimately paralysing and ineffectual. After setting the historical scene (Piatt's grasp of history and his extensive use of non-literary material is one of the book's main strengths) and outlining his theoretical standpoint, Platt goes on, in the following three chapters, to look at specific 'sites' of paradox: Venice; equity law and its courts; and the Shakespearian stage. In theVenice chapter Platt examines Renaissance accounts of Venice that establish itas a liminal space between East andWest, land and sea, Protestant and Catholic, before reading TheMerchant of Venice's and Othello's epistemological, ontological, racial, and sexual complexities through Venice's symbolic geography (p. 58). He then focuses attention on the complex issue of equity which led to the paradoxes surrounding legal judgement in Measure forMeasure and TheMerchant. As a law that appreciates the shifting, restless, and paradoxical nature of theworld, equity ends up, ironically, justifying rather thanmitigating the use of strict justice inboth plays. Piatt's last chapter, '"Double Dealing Ambodexters": The Paradoxes of Playing', MLR, 105.2, 2010 529 is almost twice as long as the preceding ones and by far themost ambitious. In it,he takes on themammoth task of examining the paradoxes of performance: the duality of the actor; the paradox of the boy actor; and the paradox of the relationship between audience and player. The Henriad and Hamlet are summoned in an exploration of the paradox of the actor in particular, while TwelfthNight and As You Like It are pivotal to Piatt's discussion of the boy actor and the paradoxes of gender identity.And finally, The Winters Tale and The Tempest are invoked in his analysis of the audience's encounters with the paradoxes of the stage: many antitheatricalists feared, after all, thatviewers could become what they saw, could be both spectator and actor. One suspects that the subject of Piatt's last chapter requires book-length study itself, for it is impossible to do it justice within the scope of sixty-eight pages. Despite this one criticism, this is a stimulating and enjoyable read as well as an important reappraisal of Rosalie L. Colie's Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition ofParadox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) in the light of post-structuralism. Queen's University Belfast Adele Lee The Key of Green...