Elizabethan World Picture Research Articles

Serpenti, eroi e rose di maggio. La danza cosmica di femminile e maschile in Shakespeare

Abstract – Drawing from Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Theory , this article focuses on some representative feminine figures in Shakespeare’s plays as manifestations of what the anthropologist Riane Eisler defines as the partnership paradigm as opposed to the dominator one. The chapter shows some relevant analogies between the Elizabethan world picture with its ‘order and degree’ and Eisler’s dominator model, and how Shakespeare challenges and subverts the ruling cultural paradigm of his time through the representations of ‘otherness’ in some women characters who clearly embody the partnership model. In partnership society, roles are not imposed through fear and violence but shared within a loving and caring community, more oriented towards what Krippendorff (2014) calls the “reign of freedom”. Here, each person self-regulates and modulates the limits of his/her individualism by respecting also the common good and happiness of all. While the male hero of the tragedy fails in his extreme individualism, this partnership community, found especially in the comedy, is women-oriented and shows how one can ‘govern’ with grace, irony, imagination, and wisdom, thus teaching how peoples of different colours and personalities can participate in the creative and ever-changing art of living in a true community. Female figures who show strong traits connected them to a partnership dimension are present also in the tragedy as a foil or an alternative to patriarchal rule.

“Contending with the Fretful Element”: Shakespeare and the (Gendered) Great Chain of Being

Abstract E. M. W. Tillyard’s short but seminal book, The Elizabethan World Picture made its appearance as a ground-breaking work in the mid-1940s. It successfully adapted Arthur O. Lovejoy’s discovery of the Great Chain of Being as the central idea and metaphor of the premodern world picture for English Renaissance culture and literature, offering a key to understanding the often unfamiliar and obscure natural philosophy and metaphysics behind its works of art and literature. The concept of the Great Chain also led to Shakespeare being seen as a supporter of a conservative order in which religious, moral, philosophical, and scientific notions corresponded with each other in a strict hierarchy. The poststructuralist turn unleashed a severe attack on Tillyard and his legacy. As Ewan Fernie in a recent book on the Renaissance has diagnosed: “Now, after the theoretical overhaul, the notion of an ultimately authoritarian Renaissance has been thoroughly revised. In place of Tillyard’s full-fledged and secured physical, social and cosmological system, more recent critics tend to posit a conflicted and constantly negotiated culture with no essential pattern”. But what has happened to the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which, without doubt, played a major role in the Renaissance world picture and provided a basic knowledge about the elements? In my paper I am going to revisit some aspects of this world picture and examine how Shakespeare related to this (more often than not) in a subversive way, while still remaining within the boundaries of this organic and proto-modern system. Since the concept of the elements had gender aspects, too, I will also focus on the question of how proto-modern natural philosophy theorised about the dichotomy, antagonism, and the cooperation of male and female principles.

Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi: John Selden by Jason P. Rosenblatt

i86 Reviews a case in point. Itmight make more sense in the context of an introductory course which would pick up on such examples. While I am cavilling, there is a problem for any introduction ofwhat is included and what gets covered too quickly. On inclusiveness, Hattaway is hard to fault.He ranges beyond the strictly literary to travelwriting, sermons, and history.The voices of themajor canonical writers don't drown out lesser, though often just as illuminat ing, authors. There is particularly deft use ofMary Wroth and Samuel Daniel, for example. The speed of coverage (especially with the long quotations) is sometimes less defensible. The page on themasque, forexample, mentions Jonson against Inigo Jones, quotes Chapman, but ignores The Tempest and Milton. The description of the genre is accurate enough, but does not lead anywhere. Contrast thatwith the six pages on City Comedy and the court, where there is aworked-out thesis and a critical perspective even though thecitations are necessarily limited.Quotations from sections like thiswill launch a thousand essay questions. Influential books on theperiod, such as E. M. W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Pic ture(London: Chatto & Windus, I943 etc.) or (though hardly introductory) Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More toShakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, I980), achieved their status by having a uni fying thesis.You could thinkwith them and argue with them.Hattaway's book isn't thatkind of operation. It doesn't have thatdominating idea. In the latterhalf, though, itdoes begin to develop some interesting angles. In particular, the chapter on 'Fic tivePersons and Places' opens up some interesting possibilities, particularly on the interplay between 'character' and allegory; and the account of the fool puts more lumbering accounts to shame. So put thison your reading-lists. Encourage your stu dents to persevere through the later chapters. They will still need Isabel Rivers's Classical and Christian Ideas inEnglish Renaissance Poetry: A Students' Guide, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, I994) for reference, and some narrative history. But this book will set them up nicely. KEELE UNIVERSITY ROGER POOLEY Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi: John Selden. By JASON P. ROSENBLATT. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. 2006. ix+3I4pp. ?63. ISBN 978-0-I9-928613-3. John Selden isbest known forhis competence in an impressive range of ancient and modern languages and for thebreadth of his learning in such fields as the history of tithes and titles of honour, the English constitution, and common law.He devoted much of his formidable energy, however, to studying theTalmud and bringing rab binic commentary tobear on a variety ofmatters thatwere exercising his compatriots during theupheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. In his examination of the impact ofHebraic scholarship on earlymodern writers, Jason P.Rosenblatt makes twomain claims about theman he regards as 'themost learned rabbinic scholar in thecountry' (p. 4) between theexpulsion of the Jews in 1290 and thevisit ofRabbi Menasseh ben Israel in I655, theyear afterSelden's death. Firstly, his publications were plundered (oftenwithout acknowledgement) by such writers asMilton, Marvell, Stubbe, and Culverwel as if theywere 'a primary rather than secondary source of rabbinic scho larship' (p. 5); and secondly, inmarked contrast to the Judaeophobia that coloured thework of JohnLightfoot, 'theother great contemporary English Talmudic scholar' (p. i6o), he 'transmitted an uncommonly generous view of Judaism' (p. 9). The 'calm tolerance' (p. 73) of his letter toBen Jonson on the fraught issue of cross-dressing on the English stage-written in i6I6 and usefully reprinted in an appendix-is an early instance of the salutary effectofSelden's 'comparatisthistorico philological method', which 'aims foran aesthetic ofutmost inclusiveness' (p. 7 ).The MLR, 103. 1, 2008 I87 same inclusiveness-'uniting Christians and Jews in away that law and gospel could not' (p. 15 I)-is a feature ofDe jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum (I640), described byRosenblatt as 'theperiod's central textof rabbinic thoughtme diated by a Christian humanist' (p. 147). In thiswork, Selden followsHugo Grotius in identifyingnatural lawwith the seven precepts given to the children ofNoah. Ac cording to rabbinic tradition, thisNoachide code is 'auniversal, perpetually binding law issuing from thewill ofGod' (p. I47) and is to be distinguished from the later Mosaic Decalogue thatwas prescribed specifically for the...

‘Shakespeare and eco-criticism: The unexpected return of the Elizabethan World Picture’

In the early 1970s the Gaia hypothesis of James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that self-regulating processes of homeostasis have locked together the obviously living biosphere and the apparently dead environment so that one might usefully think of the whole Earth as a single organism. Although Lovelock and Margulis came from strictly scientific fields it is easy to see the appeal of their hypothesis for ‘alternative’ Western cultures of the New Age movement, complementary medicine, and holistic spiritualism, all of which have links with the broader anarchist and animal rights movements and with the emerging theory and practice of eco-criticism. At its best, eco-criticism builds upon post-structuralism's rejection of the imaginary unified human subject previously dominant in literary studies to consider how Nature too is constructed as well as depicted in literary works. At the other extreme, however, eco-criticism shades off into a neo-Romantic spiritualism that merely asserts the healing power of living in the countryside or vicariously enjoying it through literature about rural idylls. This essay considers the materialist basis of the Gaia hypothesis, comparing it to ways of thinking about the world that were available to Shakespeare's audiences and in particular its surprising parallels with the much-reviled Elizabethan World Picture described by E. M. W. Tillyard.

Figures of Fidelity: Believing in "King Lear"

This article explores how the female of King Lear address the nature of Reformation believing. By figures I mean both the characters and tropes of female identity. By I mean the experience of inhabiting and being inhabited by some idea concerning the world, the otherworld, or another person. I seek, in effect, to use this play to probe an analogy and a complicity between faith in affective objects and spiritual ones: Why and how do convictions concerning erotic objects resemble those concerning salvation? More to the point, how does the anxiety attendant upon a Calvinist God play itself out in the plane of social knowledge, and why does the failure of faith in the reciprocity of human love comport itself much like soteriological crisis? More generally, why do these two experiences share in the literature of this period a vocabulary, affect, and evidentiary structure? And what does that resemblance tell us about not what, but how, believing occurs in this moment: What kind of an activity is it? What are its objects, subjects, habits, and representations? Much of our recent investigation into early modern thought has concerned itself with what people believed (the Elizabethan world picture? witches? monarchy? liberalism?). Such inquiries have been chiefly concerned with political identities and beliefs conceived of as a matter of dissent or assent. A Renaissance subject in such work is, example, either for social order or against it, contained by it or subversive to it (usually the former). Histories of Reformation religious identities often operate along similar lines, asking, example, was Christopher Marlowe an atheist, or was Shakespeare a Catholic? Such investigation first identifies a thinkable thought and then searches the thinker, via his text, signs of its presence, which tends to be imagined as an

Shakespeare: Reading/Text/Theory

place and time where two systems come together constitutes an environment.7 Shakespeare's plays and poems are made up of a variety of such systems: linguistic, dramatic, social, political. We, in our institutional setting, constitute another such system. Our classrooms provide environment where these multiple systems communicate with each other-where they resonate. Let me give a specific example. In my introductory Shakespeare courses at Georgetown, I require students to complete four projects, using four different critical approaches: (1) stagecraft, (2) language, (3) history of ideas, and (4) current political issues related to gender, race, nationalism, or sexual orientation. The texts for course include both Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture and Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction. What I hope students learn from course happens at intersection of poetic imagery, of body movement, of ideology, of political resistance-and at intersection of pastness of Shakespeare with pressing concerns of today. The point at which these concerns meet keeps changing, and to me that's exciting thing about teaching Shakespeare. Take As You Like It, for example. When I studied play in graduate school, it seemed to be all about the green world. When I was writing Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, it seemed to be all about Orlando and Ganymede. When I have most recently taught play in Reading for Sexual Difference, it seemed to my students to be all about Celia and Rosalind-especially about Celia. Who knows what it will be about ten years from now? It's not fixed meaning of these plays and poems but their complex reflective surfaces that earn Shakespeare a continuing place in curriculum. What we need just now, I would argue, is not Paradigm Regained but a version of Pilgrim's Progress.

"Pride and Prejudice": A Study in Artistic Economy (review)

90 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 Kenneth Moler. "Pride and Prejudice": A Study in Artistic Economy. Boston: G.K. Hall (Twayne's Masterwork Studies no. 21), 1989. xi + 110pp. Using language accessible to "the prospective student of Austen" (p. 10), this small volume provides a historical and ideological background for a reading that takes into account the novel's "own literary traditions" (p. 18). Kenneth Moler interprets Pride and Prejudice in light of the theme of moral blindness and self-knowledge and of the eighteenth-century "art-nature" antithesis, first used by Samuel Kliger to analyse the novel in 1947. Moler's critique also acknowledges the breadth and depth of Austen's allusions. The novel's famous opening sentence, for example, is shown to allude, not just to Bumey's Cecilia, but to both the language of proponents of moral self-examination and that "associated with Hume, Smith and other prestigious philosophers of the day." The irony of that statement was sharper for contemporary readers, for whom what appeared to be "the beginning of a philosophical proposition, [turned] into burlesque" (p. 85). This study stresses Austen's artistic economy in her handling of language, her depiction of characters, and her use of symbols. Symbolic motifs (reading and books, music, dancing) are shown as techniques which locate characters with regard to the theme of art and nature. Similarly, such artistic tendencies as Austen's interest in conversation and lack of interest in visual detail are presented as applications of the neoclassical principle of non-particularity. Moler's book also provides a new overview of the historical, ideological, and artistic background of the novel, placing the "art-nature" antithesis in the perspective of the debt of eighteenth-century literature to Renaissance ideas. Thus, the penchant for analogy and the concept of the good as balance are traced back to the Elizabethan world picture of analogous planes hierarchically interconnected in a Great Chain of Being. This perspective, placing Austen's roots in a long and prestigious tradition, adds depth to the analysis of her work, too long perceived as "limited." The reiterated reference to the art-nature dialectic as the harmonious discord between "prudence and benevolence, reason and feeling, wit and judgment, unspoiled natural beauty versus the beauty of the works of man" (p. 40) makes this critique highly coherent . At the same time, Moler seems to make everything bend to the idea that Austen was seeking a concordia discors between the antithetical poles. Thus, Darcy is said to err on the side of "art," while Elizabeth Bennet errs "in the direction of 'nature.' " The latter pole, then, would govern the "socially irreverent intelligence," coupled with "social irresponsibility," of both the protagonist and her father (p. 43). And yet the only evidence provided for calling Elizabeth irresponsible is the presupposition that irreverence inevitably entails irresponsibility (p. 32). The central point here is that of Moler's earlier study, Jane Austen's Art of Allusion (1968): the novel is seen as a reformulation of a character type common to much contemporary fiction, the "patrician hero." According to Moler, Austen initially uses Darcy's failings to disparage this character type, presented as perfect in the novels following the "Sir Charles Grandison tradition." Austen is said to put down Darcy for his arrogance, but then to reinstate him and affirm his social role. This ambivalent attitude is compared to "Pope's treatment of Belinda and her upper-class friends in The Rape of the Lock" (p. 99). The comparison tends to obscure the difference between Pope's brand of satire, which pokes fun at his characters for their petty limitations in contrast to the greatness of epic heroes, and Austen's, which typically invites the reader to laugh at a character who acts too much the hero. Although Moler has not changed his position with regard to the novel's treatment of the patrician hero, this new critical work differs from his much-cited study in a stronger emphasis on Austen's accomplishments. For example, while the conclusion to the chapter REVIEWS 91 on Pride and Prejudice in Jane Austen's Art ofAllusion alludes to certain inconsistencies in the development of Darcy's character as flaws...

THE POLITICS OF SHAKESPEARE'S KING JOHN

Thus, for John Dover Wilson, King John is an uncomplicated reflection of the 'newfound sense of national unity and purpose which was the mainspring of Elizabethan activity in every field'.2 Such qualities may have seemed desiderata in 1936; perhaps also in 1944, when E. M. W. Tillyard saw King John as an exemplification of the Elizabethan valuing of order and degree.3 Criticism of Shakespeare's history plays since 1944 has frequently quarrelled with Tillyard's thesis that all these dramas celebrate the nostrums of the 'Elizabethan World Picture', and has at times almost assumed the character of a flyting.4 Yet Tillyard's view of the plays

Ideology and Subversion in the Shakespearean Set Speech

In the opening chapter of Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore makes a distinction in regard to Montaigne that can be profitably applied to Shakespeare as well. Contending that We need to recognise . . . how a writer can be intellectually radical without necessarily being politically so,' Dollimore broaches a possibility that is seldom acknowledged by Shakespeareans who assume that the playwright's apparent political conservatism is firmly rooted in his identification with the received ideas of his time, conveniently summarized in the still influential model of the Elizabethan world picture. Thanks to a generation of Renaissance scholars, we are now able to recognize that this model itself may be in need of drastic revision, indeed that it may well constitute a unitary myth of our own century's making, and therefore an extremely reductive view of an age that was actually engaged in an intensive interrogation of its received ideas.2 It would be premature and equally reductive to apply the insights of these new historicists to Shakespeare in a manner that overestimates his intellectual radicalism, that substitutes, for example, a figure of subversiveness in place of that of the wise embodiment of moderation or, at worst, the apologist for Tudor absolutism.3 As Felix Raab has suggested in his survey of Machiavelli's reception in Tudor England, though the providentialist assumptions of the past were clearly being threatened throughout the last half of the sixteenth

The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance

BOOK REVIEWS51 Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1983. 173 pp. $19.50. by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. Ever since the Reformation historians have tended to side with the reformers and to play down the positive aspects of Tridentine Catholicism. It is an implicit assumption of postRenaissance historiography. More recently literary critics have joined this game by trying to make us aware of a Protestant poetics, for the most part freeing itself from the trammels of a Medieval poetics — undefined, unexplored except for the mandatory quotation from Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante's Letter to Can Grande. I have found it difficult to accept this new attempt to put down ten contentious centuries of critical opinion in order to pump up the claims of an originality in the Renaissance that ignores the medieval heritage of English poetry in the Renaissance, particularly because its choice of terms reminds me of my colleague Hans Aarsleff's early experience of European history in his kindergarten days in Denmark. The lesson began with the concept of an "olive oil line" that ran across Spain and southern France. Above that line people were clean, Protestant, and used butter; below that line they were dirty, Catholic, used olive oil, and sang in the streets. The "olive oil line" presents a very neat paradigm for determining many things about European history — in particular, implicit prejudice. I am not sure that a Protestant poetics is a good thing for English literary studies simply because all the books that I have read for the past twenty years that have "poetics" in their titles have been making a sometimes interesting, sometimes silly, attempt to link Renaissance poetics with post-Romantic theories of creativity: the "power of the imagination" and "felt experience" abound. A "Protestant poetics" links both the "olive oil line" syndrome and a pre-Post Modernist theory, and that can surely not be a good thing for English literary studies since it fails to discriminate salient formal and intellectual issues that might characterize the poetics of the poetry written before a poetics was part of our critical jargon. To complete the "olive oil line" of poetics Professor Raspa offers us a Jesuit poetics, based 52BOOK REVIEWS tenuously on the meditational techniques of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, which Raspa alleges is the ground of the poetry of Jasper Heywood, Robert Southwell, John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and EIdred Revett. The simple act of naming these six poets as part of a coherent "tradition" makes the distaff side of "Protestant poetics" take on the vulnerability of the Maginot line. What purpose this book will serve is hard to say, for it is neither new readings of old poets nor an ordinary history of a segment of the English literary Renaissance. Its argument is contorted and often contradictory, and when one finally feels that one has grasped Raspa's new slant, he reverts to an older view of seventeenth-century religious poetry that most of us have been reading and teaching since the publication of Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation (1954). Raspa's main idea is that a "Jesuit poetics" evolved from St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exorcises. His further claim is that this new "poetics" is responsible for a monumental change in world-view to the Baroque in which man's sense of self and his relation to the world of sense changed radically. This seems to me a very dubious proposition, and Raspa does not do much to allay doubts in his own description of his project on page one of chapter one, entitled "Image, Affections and Love": The study argues that Jesuit poetics were constituted of three main elements — "image," "affections," and "love" — and that they influenced English poets for diverse historical and literary reasons. The issues brought up by this study are at once wide and particular. What is meant by "image," "affections," and "love"? How are they meditative? How were they poetic? To answer these questions adequately a new world view succeeding to the Elizabethan world picture in the Counter Reformation mind must be described in the second chapter. Such a step is...

The Cosmographical Glass by S. K. Heninger, Jr.

stories, we might be better able to understand the separation which is cer­ tainly there in the last books of the extant poem. Otherwise a preoccupation with special tricks and schemes, or with some indefinite general subversion, may lead us to miss crucial questions and leave the elements of the poem isolated, even if tied up in a knot of correspondences. Something of this does happen in the present book. It remains, nevertheless, a thoughtful, energetic study: if the poem in Professor Cain’s account loses its buoyancy, he himself never does, and while some of his findings may be more convincing than others, he has given us an abundance of things worth thinking about. ja m es carscallen / University of Toronto S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1977). xx, 210. $17.50 For many generations of students studying the Renaissance and Shakespeare, E. M. Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture has been a miniature bible. Like many other concise handbooks, that worthy but oversimplified work tended to blinker and constrict. For this reason, among many others, S. K. Heninger ’s Cosmographical Glass is particularly welcome. It provides a fairly com­ prehensive and balanced view of the world systems espoused in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the six outlined in Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum (1651 ), and constantly reminds us that (as in Renaissance theory and practice of writing history) there is no completely unified viewpoint among the writers; neither is there a consistent evolution of ideas, so that a theoretician might continue to espouse a concept supposedly laid to rest a hundred years earlier. Heninger could also have added that literary writers often adopted theories of the cosmos for artistic purposes which they them­ selves realized were untenable scientifically. As might be expected, Heninger displays a comprehensive knowledge of background as well as a close understanding of his texts. His presentation is orderly and logical, though occasionally lost in detail. He uses as his starting point William Cuningham’s publication of 1559, from which the title of his own work is derived, and quickly introduces Blundeville’s definition of cos­ mography as “ the description of the whole world, that is to say, of heaven and earth, and all that is contained therein.” Taking these staggeringly large terms of reference for his brief, he divides his main study into five chapters headed Creation, the Geocentric Universe, the Pythagorean-Platonic tradi­ tion, the Human Microcosm, and Contingent Systems. Though the chrono­ 12 logical system of the first three chapters is broken by the late introduction of the Pythagorean notions, in other respects the sequence is the best for feed­ ing the material to the reader. The overlap is not very great, and what repetition there is occurs (unaccountably) within a given chapter, as, for example, the stating three times that Galileo avoided the question of an infinite world, and twice that his opponent, Riccioli, endeavoured to use scientific rather than theological arguments in his refutation. Heninger’s main method of demonstrating the current theories is through a set of 117 superbly printed illustrations, most of them highly illuminating and many of them very detailed (e.g., the tables of correspondences, 122-23) • Certainly, each of the self-explanatory pictures is worth a thousand words, and all the others considerably reduce the amount of theoretical description. The commentary is subservient to the illustrations in most cases, and, as the author claims, it is intended to explain rather than to argue, though this rule is sometimes broken, albeit skilfully and unobtrusively. Considering the complexity of the topics, the text is surprisingly lucid and the summaries are both clear and courageous, especially on the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories, the position of Galileo, and the more knotty ques­ tion of Pico and Agrippa. It is also useful to be told (or reminded) that Copernicus was in some respects a traditionalist. The explications of the figures are generally researched with care and reinforced with analogies from other sources, though occasionally the argument seems a little specious (e.g., the comments on the Calvinism in Fig. 11). Heninger also occasionally ap­ plies a given theory or illustration to the explication of...

The Marlovian World Picture by W. L. Godshalk

Reviews 179 W. L. Godshalk. The Marlovian World Picture. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Pp. 244. 48 Dutch Guilders. W. L. Godshalk's title, reminiscent as it is of E. M. W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture, takes on a slightly ironic twist in the course of this study of Marlowe's dramatic art. Godshalk reveals his attitude rather early in the study when he says, "Human responses, even in the Renaissance, were varied and complex-no matter what the Tribe of Tillyard may believe" (p. 15) . This ambitious attempt to demonstrate the effects of such multiplicity on Marlowe's drama, and its consequences for current scholarship, is a needed antidote to the monocultural ap­ proach frequently applied by intellectual historians of literature. Godshalk's insistence on cultural multiplicity, however, may account for some of his organizational problems. He tends to cover different aspects of each play from a variety of critical points of view. His chapter on Dido, Queen of Carthage, for example, is primarily a perceptive form­ alist analysis, deriving its pattern from plot summary. Edward II is handled thematically, and Tamburlaine emphasizes source study. The book thus becomes a series of essays about the individual plays, each of which is the subject of a chapter, rather than a single consistently organized monograph. The work does provide, however, perhaps because of this diversity of approach, a good summary of textual problems, a new theory for the dating of the plays, and an examination of Marlowe's biography as it per­ tains to the plays. In addition, Godshalk's introductory chapter explains his argument for placing Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta at the end of Marlowe's career. Arguing primarily on terms of artistic growth and thematic concern, he suggests that Marlowe moves in his composition from an interest in "drama of unnatural conilict" in Dido and Edward 11 to the "monodrama" of Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew. Barabas, Godshalk says, is the ultimate achievement in terms of mono­ drama; in this character Marlowe brings together "elements of earthy aspiration and metaphysical evil. If Faustus is the culmination of Mar­ lowe's study of power, then The Jew of Malta is the high point of his monodrama" (p. 203). In the absence of any convincing external evidence, Godshalk's argu­ ments are logical, almost irrefutable, unless, of course, we argue that no author writes plays with the consistent rationality that critics bring to the completed canon. In spite of the sizable amount of work that has gone into the composition of this study, Godshalk finally falls back on the same kind of reasoning that he brand� as "romantic" in the work of Harry Levin, Paul Kocher, and Una Ellis-Fermor. Eventually, he comes to making generalizations on which he bases other broad generalizations: "If Faustus is . . ., then The Jew is. . . ." After condemning the Tribe of Tillyard for oversimplification, he draws his own generalizations about Marlowe's drama. He decides that "Marlovian drama is a warning against the quest for infinity" (p. 37) and concludes that "Marlowe's plays mir­ ror this new, acquisitive society," the society that was too complex to be contained in a generalization. In spite of such inevitable contradictions, it is pleasant to see an 1 80 Comparative Drama apparently young, energetic scholar coming to grips once again with the possibility that there is more than one way to learn about the past. Guided by Herschel Baker, Godshalk may not be as startlingly new as he thinks he is, but his attack on the mass of Marlovian scholarship is reminiscent of Tambu'.rlaine's own dreams of infinite conquest. WILLIAM M. JONES University of Missouri-Columbia Bettina Knapp. Off-Stage Voices: Interviews with Modern French Dramatists, ed. Alba Amoia. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitson Publishing Co., 1975. Pp. iii + 324. $13.50. Bettina Knapp, ed. The Contempo­ rary French Theater. New York: Avon Equinox Books, 1973. Pp. 51 1. $4.95. Bettina Knapp. Celine: Man of Hate. University of Ala­ bama Press, 1974. Pp. vii + 262. $10.00. With these three practical hooks Professor Knapp surely establishes her reputation as a leading Franco-American popularizer. There will be monolingual American undergraduates who know French...

The Poetry of Sir John Davies

THERE is no justification at present for calling attention to Sir John 1 Davies as a neglected poet, or for claiming any higher position for him than he now enjoys. As the author of Nosce teipsum he has always had a certain repute, and more recently Orchestra has come into prominence as an aid to the exposition of the Elizabethan world picture. We are in no danger of overlooking Davies or of mistaking his stature: the danger is that we may mistake the kind of poet that he was. The isolation of Orchestra and Nosce teipsum from the rest of his work is tending to place Davies' poetry in a false perspective, and even to promote the misinterpretation of these two poems themselves. When he published the last edition of his verse in I 622, Davies had completed sixteen years as solicitor-general for Ireland, had sat as a member of the House of Commons, and was shortly to be appointed chief justice. The poems themselves, however, had been written a quarter of a century earlier, in his days as a courtier and a law-student, before he settled down to a serious career. Davies was not a professional poet, nor did he continue to write verse beyond his early thirties. Perhaps the best way of coming to terms with his work is to approach it through the poems excluded from the I622 collection. Davies' earliest writing is to be found in the Epigrammes published along with Marlowe's translation of Ovids Elegies, and ordered to be burnt by the decree of the archbishop of Canterbury on June I, 1599. The Epigrammes belong to Davies' period at the Middle Temple in the early nineties, topical allusions stamping several of them as written about I 594.1 Defining an epigram as that

The Elizabethan World Picture, by E. M. W. Tillyard. 106 pp. New York, the MacMillan Company, 1944. $1.75

The Elizabethan World Picture, by E. M. W. Tillyard. 106 pp. New York, the MacMillan Company, 1944. $1.75

The Elizabethan World Picture. By E. M. W. Tillyard, Fellow of Jesus College and University Lecturer in the University of Cambridge. (New York: Macmillan Company. 1944. Pp. vii, 108. $1.75.)

The Elizabethan World Picture. By <italic>E. M. W. Tillyard</italic>, Fellow of Jesus College and University Lecturer in the University of Cambridge. (New York: Macmillan Company. 1944. Pp. vii, 108. $1.75.)

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Elizabethan World Picture. By E. M. W. TILLYARD. London: Chatto & Windus. 1943. Pp. viii+108. 6s. net. G. B. HARRISON G. B. HARRISON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume os-XX, Issue 77, January 1944, Pages 71–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/os-XX.77.71 Published: 01 January 1944

The Elizabethan World Picture. By E. M. W. Tillyard. (Chatto &amp; Windus; 6s.)

The Elizabethan World Picture. By E. M. W. Tillyard. (Chatto &amp; Windus; 6s.)