Friar Bacon Research Articles

‘On Pleasures Past, and Dangers to Ensue’: Site-Specific Violence and the Post-Renovation Rose Repertory

ABSTRACT Models of early modern English theatre-making rely on fantasies of repetition. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playing companies leveraged a repertory system wherein a set stable of actors performed a different playtext up to six days a week. Such repetitions make available hauntological possibilities that attach to reoccurring bodies, props, costumes, and even architecture. This article considers the repertory of plays that repeated on the stage of the Rose theatre after renovations added a roof over the stage with its attendant pillars, which afforded the Lord Strange’s, Earl of Sussex’s, and Lord Admiral’s players a new spatial, vertical dimension. In a brief post-reno period of highly regular playing, I argue that the pillars came to regularly serve as trees, arbours, and other ecological features to facilitate a character’s death. In The Battle of Alcazar, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and a single comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the pillars make possible an accretion of hauntological resonances attached to their location on the thrust. This article explores the ways in which such dramaturgical repetitions, newly available in the Rose after the 1592 renovations, would have built up returner-audiences’ associations with specific architectural features.

In the Service of Magic

Wagner and Miles, the primary servants in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, derive their function and identity from their masters. Since both Faustus and Bacon are magicians, their servants are influenced by contact with magic. Although they are less significant figures than the protagonists, the servants help to determine the outcome of their respective plays. By examining Wagner and Miles as servants of both their masters and of magic itself, we can see how Faustus and Bacon fail as magicians, as masters of magic. In comparing the “good” servant, Wagner, whose master is overcome by magic, to the “bad” servant, Miles, whose master renounces magic, we can arrive at an understanding of true service and its relationship to magic.

Physical and Spiritual Conversion: Femininity and Religious Materiality in Three Early Modern English Plays

The act of adopting or removing religiously coded clothing in early modern English drama has long been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. The costumes worn to signify the religious affiliations of principal female roles in Lewis Wager's ca. 1566 The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene, Robert Greene's ca. 1588–1592 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Christopher Marlowe's 1589–1590 The Jew of Malta function to indicate perceived identity while also acting as part of an ongoing religious conversion. Such use of religious clothing in staged drama, contextualized alongside vestiarian controversies and the commonplace practice of playhouses using Catholic vestments as costumes, reveals the tensions surrounding the power of clothing to completely transform the wearer into someone else. Just as the vestments themselves were transformed for use on the stage, so too do the costumes transform the wearers' religious identities in each of these plays.

Building a Wall Around Tudor England: Coastal Forts and Fantasies of Border Control in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

This article examines the border wall and the image of fortress England in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and early 1590s nationalist discourse. While Greene recognizes the need for an international outlook in geopolitics, Bacon’s wall speaks to contemporary interest in coastal fortifications and brass ordnance in the wake of the Spanish Armada. Greene lampoons the wall as magical thinking, but the play clings to metaphorical walls as more cost-effective symbols of national security and autonomy. The play’s awkward combination of pan-European sentiment and strident nationalism offers a prophetic commentary on post-Brexit Britain.

Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

<i>Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship</i>. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

The “Living Art” in The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

The popularity and fantastic productions of natural philosophy drive the The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Those creating and responding to the special effects compete across boundaries of place, of cultures, and of courts. In the end, Friar Bacon's demonstrates his dominance and in so doing defines nationalist exceptionality while showcasing theatre as the ultimate alchemy displaying it. The play celebrates English performance, stage art that out-alchemies alchemy. Theatre, the play suggests, best celebrates and protects English interests. It can take on anyone and anything, including in this play, science, magic, myths, history, Oxford, kings, and emperors. The competitive contests, for that is what they become in the play, include verbal sparring and quibbles that trade on the conventional metaphors of alchemy or the “Art,” as it is often referred to in the play. The dialogic war of words is additionally supported by extravagant spectacles signifying individual skill in the Art while also confronting its limitations.

The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager Callan Davies The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions. Jenny Sager. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 208. $90 (hardback), $73.12 (e-book). In one of his Lord Mayor’s Pageants, Thomas Heywood complains of the “throng” who “carry their eares in their eyes” (Londini Emporia, London 1633, B3v-B4r). His contempt for fans of spectacle is ironic, considering that he is one of early modern England’s most spectacular dramatists, sitting firmly alongside Robert Greene, the subject of Jenny Sager’s exciting monograph. Though a preference for the ear over the eye has characterized criticism, past and present, of early modern drama, recent studies have sought to balance the scales. The Aesthetics of Spectacle is part of a growing body of criticism—one that combines literary analysis with performance and film studies—that seeks to see again the value of early modern visual effects. In so doing, it brings into focus one of the most influential and critically overlooked Elizabethan dramatists. Twenty-first-century film critics are less scornful of those who “carry their eares in their eyes”; reviews of the recent blockbuster Gravity suggest that its powerful visual effects are artistic and intellectual achievements. Variety’s Justin C. Chang praised it for restoring “a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen [sic] that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide” (28 August 2013). If the visual qualities of a 2013 film can be intellectually appreciated, then why not the dumb-shows, brazen heads, squibs, and hell-mouths that are so prominent in the popular entertainment of the 1590s and 1600s? Sager’s study, then, remedies the “taint of Puritanism and anti-theatricalism” in literary criticism by using “modern cinema” as a comparative medium with analogous visual effects (1). It associates early modern theatrical practices with the twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial film industry (a methodology also seen, for instance, in Emma Smith’s “Genres: Cinematic and Early Modern” in Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1). In order to suggest the usefulness of cinematic analogy, The Aesthetics of Spectacle begins and ends each chapter with a short consideration of a visually spectacular film, from Jaws to The Godfather to George Méliès’s The man with the rubber head. It is not, however, a comparative study. These cinematic correspondences bookend what are largely historical readings of Greene’s plays and their affect, effects, contexts, and popularity. Yet, while the comparisons are slight, they underline Sager’s aim of applying to early modern plays the more generous and sensitive approach to visual effects seen in film studies. The chapter on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus King of Aragon uses Méliès’s metatheatrical special effects as a means of appreciating the value and influence of Greene’s drama; like early film’s “cinema of attractions,” Greene’s plays “prioritise the act of display not the need to tell a story; they prioritise mimesis over diegesis” (106). [End Page 771] Indeed, the comparisons with modern cinema are part of the monograph’s theoretical framework—a framework outlined in the introduction and the opening chapter, drawing on a number of modern and early modern influences, from the Aristotelian conception of wonder to Brechtian theory. If the range of reference in these establishing chapters seems broad, it represents Sager’s interest in using cinema as a conceptual analogy while maintaining, in reading the plays themselves, a considered historical analysis. While Friar Bacon and Alphonsus can be seen to contain the hallmarks of a “theatre of attractions,” they are also deeply concerned with idolatry, iconoclasm, and religious representation. The reading of Orlando Furioso explores the association between madness and creativity through a comparison with Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. The chapter goes beyond theoretical discussion to argue concisely and persuasively for Greene’s interrogation in the play of intertextuality, classical imitation, and Marlovian drama. If one of the book’s aims is to establish “how spectacle, rather than being...

Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi (review)

Reviewed by: Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi Lowell Duckert WOODEN Os: SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRES AND ENGLAND’S TREES. By Vin Nardizzi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013; pp. 224. Just how modern is the phenomenon of “green architecture?” Although it has recently become a catch-phrase for buildings assembled from recycle/d/able materials, structures were once primarily composed of “green” stuff—wood. Take the early modern English playhouses, a series of commercial theatres in the round—so-called wooden Os—that dotted the outskirts of London’s city limits, from the opening of the Theatre in 1576 to the closure (and eventual demolition) of all theatres circa 1642. And yet, as Vin Nardizzi pronounces, these wooden rings have somehow escaped environmental analysis. Wooden Os adds to the long-engrained critical history of early modern drama by magnifying the physical substance that most studies overlook: the woody matter of the stage itself. Investigating “the cultural pervasiveness of the material link between theatres and woodlands” (24), Nardizzi deftly employs an ecocritical methodology that examines (and frequently challenges) implied divisions between nature (trees) and culture (wood products). Wood works upon culture; what work would wood do? Using Jonathan Gil Harris’s term of untimely matter (4) to trace wood’s “eco-material effects” (22), Nardizzi’s answer is the book’s central argument: far from exhibiting a “green” abundance of forests that we might expect, the art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the real wood shortages facing England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Wooden Os traces an “eco-material history of English theatre” (30) that reacted to this scarcity. For playwrights, the response to ecological crisis worked synecdochally; wooden props on the stage (like stage trees) and the wood of the stage (such as ceiling supports) stand in for the once-living trees that fell in order to erect wooden theatre spaces. Plays highlight this crisis of deforestation, Nardizzi smartly shows, through their gestic and deictic language: for instance, a remark like “yon pine does stand” (4.13.1) from Antony and Cleopatra (ca.1606–07) may reference either a stage prop or the theatre’s built-in wooden columns (or both). For theatre entrepreneurs like the Burbages the response was pragmatic: the first Globe, the author reminds us, was a product of “recycling”: built from the Theatre’s wooden remains transported across the Thames to Bankside during 1598–99. Overall, we are implored to “see … the English woods inhering in the superstructure of the wooden O” (136). A play was not just imagined to be in the woods, but was within them already. Each of the four chapters addresses particular “eco-solutions and fantasies” (12), as well as “never-green nightmare[s]” (87) in response to England’s wood woes. Chapter 1 puts the “vanishing” onstage tree of Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (late 1580s) into conversation with sixteenth-century geopolitical and theatrical pressures: its magical departure symbolizes the salvation of wooden Os from the abuses of anti-theatricalists who wished to tear down the theatres; protection of England’s trees from the conquest of the Spanish Armada that wished to invade England’s forests; and fantasies of colonialist extraction in Virginia’s New World woods. Chapter 2 reads the “felling” (and burning) of wood/man Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–98) as a middle-class act of environmental protest against the aristocracy (represented by Windsor Forest or the knight’s rotund body). Situating this class struggle onstage alongside John Manwood’s Treatise (1598) on better management of monarchical forests, civic pressures to shut down the theatres, and the company’s movement to Bankside, we glimpse a search for a more rooted “playhousehold” (77) within conflicts of the commons. Chapter 3 investigates the critically neglected composite version of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca.1600), claiming that the tree on which Horatio’s murdered body hangs, and that is subsequently destroyed by Isabella, demonstrates the process by which environmental devastation could be transformed into commercial gain: the hewn trees necessary for the Fortune Theatre’s construction (that made fortunes by restaging...

'Bogus History' and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

In this paper I focus on Greene’s Elizabethan comedy, which David Bevington has referred to as containing ‘bogus history’. I argue that Greene embraced the history he inherited. The play contains three strands of history that parallel and intertwine: the pursuit of marriage for Prince Edward; the story of Margaret of Fressingfield; and a depiction of Friar Bacon, the magician. We can think of several categories of history, but ‘bogus’ raises different issues. ‘Bogus’ seems to presuppose the superiority of accuracy as a function of historical writing, an alien concept to most Tudor-Stuart writers of history. Using the examples of Spenser, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Heywood, I delineate concepts of history in Shakespeare’s time. From this delineation I examine the play, ending with Bacon’s speech at the play’s end in which prophecy and history coalesce, reinforcing the play’s link to thirteenth-century England.

Dragons on the Jacobean Stage

This paper investigates a mixture of plays both Elizabethan (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594) and Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92)), and Jacobean (Barne’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) and Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin (1622)). These plays stage supernatural entities such as male witches, magicians and dragons. What binds all these plays together is having dragon(s) controlled by a magician. It is important to investigate the stage directions of the dragons in making their exits and entrances, what role they have in the plays, and how they affect the character of the drama. This study examines some sorcerer plays with special concentration on the character of the sorcerers, looking at the kinds of rituals and magic they make. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Barnes’s Alexander VI, and Rowley’s Merlin are male magicians and, each has a different role, being assisted by spirits or devils. I will investigate their role in each play and how they relate to witchcraft.

Renaissance historical fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe

Davis's study could scarcely be more timely or invigorating. SEAN KEILEN, College of William and Mary. Williamsburg VA A majority of the fiction composed in England in the second half of the sixteenth century was set in the past. All the major prose writers of the period (Thomas Lodge, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, Robert Greene) produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sidney's Arcadia) to the time of Henry VIII (in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller). Yet while studies of the historical drama of the period abound, the historical bias of prose fiction has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. Renaissance Historical Fiction is the first book-length study of this important topic. It argues for the complex ways in which these prose fictions engage with an idea of the past, and of their power to destabilize some of our dominant models for understanding the period of 'the Renaissance'. The wide range of texts discussed includes Lodge's Robin the Devil; Greene's Ciceronis Amor; John Lyly's Euphues and his England; and the anonymous Famous History of Friar Bacon. In addition, a chapter apiece is devoted to three key authors (Sidney, Deloney and Nashe) whose work best represents the imaginative richness and thematic complexity of the historical fiction of the late sixteenth century. Alex Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

Love and Technological Iconoclasm in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

The climax of Robert Greene's 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay presents a moment of secularized iconoclasm: the destruction of the brazen head created by the play's sorcerer protagonist. English iconophobia, as expressed for example in the Homily Against Idolatry , had long insisted on the social harmfulness of material images. This essay argues that Friar Bacon 's longstanding interpretive difficulties, noted by William Empson and others, can be mitigated by observing that Greene's play echoes contemporaneous texts by regarding religious idolatry and the emergence of early modern science as similarly threatening to traditional forms of human connection.

Magical Journeys in Sixteenth-Century Prose Fiction

This essay examines two traditions of Tudor prose fiction that address the pleasures and perils of the magical journey. The `magical jest-book' narrates the pranks and fantastic voyages of the trickster magician, from Virgilius the Sorcerer to Faustus and Friar Bacon. Lucianic satire satirizes intellectual gullibility and religious hypocrisy by describing journeys to Heaven and Hell. The essay argues that these two traditions cross-fertilized each other in the course of the Reformation, and became fused in the 1580s as components of the great burst of creativity that generated both Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and some equally ebullient, though neglected, works of experimental prose fiction.

Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For example, the talking brass heads in Robert Greene's two Renaissance plays, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus, Prince of Aragon have their roots in Arabic sources, and the former derives specifically from legends concerning the thirteenth-century alchemist and philosopher Roger Bacon. These early instances of the artificial anthropoid also anticipate, in a broad sense, the kinds of philosophical issues regarding subjectivity that cyborgs bring up for our "posthuman" society. The literature of the earlier era also represents a fear that humans will be diminished-all of the creators in the fictional literature examined are in danger of losing control of their creations, and thus of having their agency called into dispute.

Early Modern Dramatizations of Virgins and Pregnant Women

This paper examines representations of virgins and pregnant women in early modern drama showing how perceptions of the feminine based on biblical representations, witchcraft, and the connection between women and nature influenced the early modern mind. Virgins who appear in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay , Anthony Munday's The Book of John a Kent and John a Cumber , Thomas Middleton's The Witch , and William Rowley's The Birth of Merlin are examined alongside Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale . The pregnant women in The Winter's Tale and The Birth of Merlin are held in contrast to illustrate the power women wield at transformative stages in their lives. From liminal spaces these women mystify the rigidities of patriarchal society.

“A Language All Nations Understand”: Portraiture and the Politics of Anglo-Spanish Identity in Aphra Behn's The Rover

Aphra Behns' The Rover harks back to an earlier period of intense Anglo-Spanish rivalry in which the iconography surrounding Queen Elizabeth played a central role. But the play also moves past nostalgia for late-sixteenth-century narratives of English national identity to a cosmopolitan perspective that substitutes the vitiated courtesan for the virgin queen. This essay considers Behn's play–as well as its antecedent, Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso–as part of a trajectory of dramatic, poetic, and prose works, including Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friay Bungay, Sir Walter Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Philip Massinger's The Renegado. Such works either directly or indirectly comment on the Anglo-Spanish rivalry, and together they amount to an incremental critique of Queen Elizabeth's defining place within the late-sixteenth-century imagination.

Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. By Wendy Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xiv + 292. $60 hardcover

Wendy Wall's book analyzes domestic scenes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama by blending the methods of recent cultural studies with the caveats of recent literary theory. Examining such plays as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Shoemaker's Holiday, The English Traveller, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, she argues that the scenes of everyday life become uncanny, shifting their meaning so that the familiar becomes strange. These moments challenge the usual associations their original audiences might have harbored regarding everyday tasks. A kitchen scene might invert class relations, blur gender stereotypes, suggest illicit sexual attraction, and so forth. The book considers such domestic activities as wet-nursing, housecleaning, food preparation, medical care, and butchering. For each activity, Wall examines contemporary texts, especially books of household advice and manuscript collections, to understand the culture of the early-modern householder. She then considers how popular drama fits into such a householder's assumptions and beliefs, and she discusses what such scenes offered to early-modern viewers.

Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt

432 Reviews entries (such as 'Commedia dell'arte', 'Ronsard', and 'Guazzo') a bibliographic item displaces any comment on quite what they are about. In the introduction Gillespie acknowledges that the basis of this reference work throughout is 'the recent findings of other scholars'. These are primarily the editors ofthe single-play volumes ofthe leading Shakespeare editions included in Gillespie's bibliographies. This presents a problem. The greater part of Shakespeare's Books may be found in the detailed scholarly work of these editions, which are cheaply available individually and all collectively accessible in the institutions this dictionary is aimed at. Given this situation and the inflated price, I leave readers to draw their own conclusion . University of Reading Ronald Knowles Hamlet in Purgatory. By Stephen Greenblatt. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Prince? ton University Press. 2001. xii + 322pp. ?29.95 (pbk ?19.95). ISBN 0-691058733 -3 (pbko-691-10257-0). In this book Stephen Greenblatt illustrates how Shakespeare's ties to Catholicism have once again become a fertiletopic for scholars, particularly since the publication in 1985 of E. A. J.Honigmann'sground-breakingbook*S/*a&es?eare: The 'Lost Years' (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Many of the issues Honigmann raised were re-examined at the 'Lancastrian Shakespeare' conference held in England in 1999, with speakers sometimes working within their own narrow, and sometimes too limited, frameworks, all in an attempt to determine finallyhow Catholic Shakespeare really was. But as the recent work of historically based scholars, particularly Alison Shell, has shown, the question of Elizabethan and Jacobean England's ties to Catholicism can, with sufficientarchival research, be painstakingly, almost comprehensively, examined and constructed. Thus, the most recent, and most persuasive, scholarship on the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture of Catholicism takes into account as much available archival material (including pamphlets and documents, and records of every kind as well as literary and theatrical texts) as possible. In his book Greenblatt's eventual thesis is that Shakespeare used various medieval and contemporary religious pamphlets, tracts, and other written texts as a 'different' sort of source material for Hamlet. For Greenblatt, these documents 'stage an ontological argument about spectrality and remembrance, a momentous public debate, that unsettled the institutional moorings of a crucial body of imaginative materials and thereforemade them available fortheatrical appropriation' (p. 249). Once Green? blatt reaches this point of discussion of Hamlet specifically (in the last of the book's five chapters), he displays his usual stylistic and intellectual brilliance. Yet the road to this point is often too uneven to be fully persuasive. New historicists have granted themselves a licence to pick and choose their histor? ical evidence, often in a seemingly random way, as in Greenblatt's firstthree chapters on 'A Poet's Fable',' Imagining Purgatory', and 'The Rights of Memory'. The sparseness of historical documentation concerning Catholic treatment of purgatory from which Greenblatt draws his evidence in these three chapters about Shakespeare's influences is notable. An astonishing number of pro- or proto-Catholic tracts were published in English (either surreptitiously in England or on the Continent) between 1580 and 1605. Greenblatt's strategy of lookingat so very few of them, and depending so much on more arcane medieval tracts, looks dubious, especially compared with the kind of wide-ranging and extensive research that scholars such as Shell have been willing to undertake and use to their advantage. MLR, 98.2, 2003 433 In addition to limitations, Greenblatt gives short shriftto various other texts that might have greatly enhanced his examination of purgatory and the ghost-world: most notably medieval plays (and their palpable influence in the Renaissance) and Elizabethan and Jacobean non-Shakespearean plays. For example, in simplistically stating in chapter 4, 'Staging Ghosts', that 'two of the greatest playwrights of the age, Marlowe and Jonson, show surprisingly little interest in the popular stage figure of the ghost' (p. 154), Greenblatt shows surprisingly little interest in the drama of anyone other than Shakespeare. In addition, Greenblatt fails even to survey common theatrical conventions in which Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their contem? porary dramatists engaged. Robert Greene (in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in A Looking Glass for London, co-written with Thomas Lodge), William Rowley, Thomas Dekker...

Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue by Eileen Allman

MLR, 98.2, 2003 433 In addition to limitations, Greenblatt gives short shriftto various other texts that might have greatly enhanced his examination of purgatory and the ghost-world: most notably medieval plays (and their palpable influence in the Renaissance) and Elizabethan and Jacobean non-Shakespearean plays. For example, in simplistically stating in chapter 4, 'Staging Ghosts', that 'two of the greatest playwrights of the age, Marlowe and Jonson, show surprisingly little interest in the popular stage figure of the ghost' (p. 154), Greenblatt shows surprisingly little interest in the drama of anyone other than Shakespeare. In addition, Greenblatt fails even to survey common theatrical conventions in which Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their contem? porary dramatists engaged. Robert Greene (in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in A Looking Glass for London, co-written with Thomas Lodge), William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford (in The Witch of Edmonton), and George Chapman (in Bussy D'Ambois) are a few examples among those who use the dramatic convention of ghosts or 'hellish spirits' to remind audiences of the wages of sin. Most strikingly, Greenblatt demonstrates a reluctance to confront Dante's profound and especially widespread cultural legacy in regard to purgatory. A recent, sold-out exhibition of Botticelli's late fifteenth-century illustrations of The Divine Comedy at London's Royal Academy of Arts more than demonstrated the exceptionally powerful cultural impact of Dante's concept of purgatory in the fifteenthand almost certainly the six? teenth and seventeenth (and later) centuries. The form and meaning that Dante gave to purgatory have never become obsolete, nor have they failed to filter into postmedieval literature, including Renaissance drama. In the book's prologue Greenblatt eloquently describes how as a Jew he came to Catholic concepts of purgatory as a somewhat cynical adult. At times in the book, he offers a new convert's zeal in discussing the wonders of purgatory. But at other times he offers an amateur's naivety: for example, his continual complaints about the terrifyingaspects of purgatory do not take into consideration the comfort that purgatory could offer to the practising, or non-practising, Catholics (and less than enthusiastic Protestant converts) in Shakespeare's time, and since. For Catholics who embrace a vision of purgatory from childhood, a few indulgences, purchased through extra prayers or even cash, offera soothing promise of eventual salvation, an option denied to Protestants. Some might even enjoy, as I did as a child, the heavy rituals associated with learning about purgatory's limits and margins. Greenblatt may find it incomprehensiblethat many practising Catholics still purchase 'mass cards' designed to help release the souls of their dead relatives from purgatory. But I can imagine, as Greenblatt apparently cannot in this book, why Shakespeare and his audience (many still steeped in the remnants of Catholic liturgy and belief even if Protestant), and the medieval and Renaissance authors and artists who influenced them, would find the option of purgatory marvellously palliative. I would recommend this book espe? cially for its last chapter on Hamlet, 'Remember Me' (portions of which Greenblatt delivered over the years in conference papers). As for the rest of the book, I was left wondering why today's new historicists must work so hard to convince us, and themselves, that their own highly selective, and sometimes naive, view of history is one that Shakespeare and his audience must have shared. University of Reading Grace Ioppolo Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue. By Eileen Allman. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1999. 212 pp. ?30. ISBN 0-87413-698-9. Eileen Allman writes about 'the historical knot of gender and authority in revenge drama' (p. 17) and she subscribes to some of the feminist and historicist premisses of 434 Reviews those critics who have found the genre to be disturbingly misogynist. However, she comes to differentconclusions herself, arguing that the misogynist elements in the plays are countered by a strong admiration forvirtuous women who resist tyrannyand who use the language of religious piety to authorize their far from silent or obedient behaviour. While admitting that political and social authority in Jacobean drama is conventionally gendered, she shows how the link between...