io88 Reviews Thomas Browne inhabit similar gloom? He does. Hydriotaphia evokes 'ashortness of time, a lateness and degeneracy inhistory' (p. 136); Religio medici was published as Pu ritans sacked Norwich Cathedral and destroyed its organ (pp. 142, I45), in an agewhen soldiers at aChristmas service aimed muskets atAnglican communicants, arrested all, and imprisoned some (p. 146). The Garden of Cyrus, like gardens themselves, results from awareness of the 'inexorability of death and oblivion' (p. 15 5). In a time of strife and destruction, gardens, together with friendship, become obvious refuges. With Milton we hear of the labyrinth of the ear (pp. I69-77), through which Satan penetrates Eve's subconscious, and the amplitude of the poem itself (pp. 179-8I), paralleling the abundance of flower and fruit in doomed Eden. For Dryden amain concern is the artistic failure of The Hind and the Panther, an embarrassing apolo gia, together with the polemics it provoked, where (p. 238) itwas hampered by that political deadweight, James II. A chapter on Dryden's later satires leads to another on Swift's early ones, especially A Tale of a Tub. There in the foreground are images of science (p. 301), madness, torture ('Last week I saw awoman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse'), and the repulsive filth and stench of the human body. After all that, one might feel relieved the seventeenth century ended when it did. Cotterill's book, dedicated to thememory of her brother, is not easy reading. But it is a serious study, the result of extensive research, and thereby commands respect. Readers may even feel that this still, airless, unselfaware volume, bringing before us the rhetorical mansions of the seventeenth century, all built from constant in tertextuality and all targets for criticism or pamphlet attack, is itself of literary and psychological interest: American Gothic in print. In short, whatever one thinks of its apparent emphasis on the more gloomy, morbid, and perverse aspects of the Stuart age, it is an impressive volume, deserving the attention of all who are concerned with English literature from Donne to Swift. UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE, PAMPLONA ANDREW BREEZE Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays onyacobean City Comedy. Ed. by DIETER MEHL, ANGELA STOCK, and ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2004. ix+236pp. ?45. ISBN O-7546-4097-3. Essentially a Festschrift for Brian Gibbons, whoseyacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London: Hart-Davis, I968) estab lished realistic comedies of London life as a distinct Renaissance dramatic subgenre, this volume re-examines city comedy 'in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation and playhouse politics' (p. 2). In the process, these essays extend Gibbons's insights into the genre's ironic ambiguities, its theatrical and literary affiliations, and its ori gins in social conflict and change, while offering amore nuanced interpretation of its relationship to traditions of civic pageantry, to the romanticized urban comedies of Dekker and Heywood, and to Shakespearian drama. The very useful introduction, written by Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, provides a succinct overview of recent scholarship on the subject and explains the volume's punning title, a reference to the intriguing tricksters whose machinations both expose anti-social fraud and yet give the genre's portrayal of the emerging capitalist marketplace its dramatic energy. The collection includes essays by Dieter Mehl on The London Prodigal, by Alan Brissenden on family relationships inMiddleton's major comedies, by Andrew Gurr on the complex theatrical auspices and social allegiances of city comedy, by David Crane on the hypothetical dynamics of audience response in The Dutch Courtesan, by MLR, I0 I .4, 2oo6 Io89 Ruth Morse on the appropriation of Roman comic conventions and the contrasting attitudes towards illusion in Every Man inHis Humour and Twelfth Night, and by Robyn Bolam on the urban elements in The Taming of the Shrew, The Woman's Prize, and the film IO Things I Hate about You.With varying degrees of success, Matthias Bauer and Deborah Cartmell claim parallels to city comedy in Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady and Michael...