MLR, 99.1, 2004 159 equivocal status of closet drama' (p. 14), Raber is aware of the ramifications of the genre for the cultural, social, and political lives of both men and women. The book contains lengthy introductory and concluding chapters, both of which are densely packed, defining Raber's frame of reference and the conclusions that she has drawn. These might more usefully have been divided into several chapters so as to allow readers to appreciate the wealth of material that she is handling and the complexity of her analyses. Her assessment of the development of the genre and the history of its criticism are welcome sections within the introductory chapter. She spends some time locating her chosen texts within their historical framework before going on to focus upon a group of 'representative texts' in the following chapters. The central chapters allow her readers to work through Raber's hypotheses with reference to specific texts. While her choice of plays is apt and will broaden the book's appeal, it is perhaps debatable whether the overall organization best serves her purpose. She is clearly drawing upon extensive knowledge of the field, and has much to say about its place within early modern society, but a broader canvas, with central chapters devoted to themes independent of specific writers, might have served her purposes better. Raber concludes with an examination of the decline of the genre while continuing to define and refine the term 'closet drama'. Her aim during each stage of the book has been to demonstrate to her readers that closet drama provides a forum for the 'concentrated analysis of power' (p. 19), that itis an effective'vehicle forcritically analyzing and commenting upon dramatic performance' (p. 242), and that it reflects(and affects) changes in the perception and creation of gender, genre, and class throughout the early modern period. University of Reading Lucinda Becker Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. By Patricia Palmer. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii + 254pp. ?4?; $59-95ISBN0 -521-79318-1. How legitimate is it to study early modern Ireland without a knowledge of Irish or reference to an Irish-speaking culture? What were the interactions between the dominant, invading English culture and the Irish-speaking culture the colonists encountered and displaced? On a more mundane level, how much Irish did English settlers actually know? These are the central questions posed in Patricia Palmer's important book, a work that is passionately committed but never loses sight of hardheaded scholarship and which manages to be both engaging and angrily polemical. As with most of the best scholarship, Palmer uses her insights to range more widely than her stated subject and develops a comparison between linguistic colonialism in Ireland and the destruction of languages in the Americas, enabling the reader to compare Spanish and English imperial expansion. In the opening chapters Palmer outlines the ways in which English and Spanish colonists imposed their linguistic will on the natives they encountered. Much ofthe analysis will be familiar to students of the material, but it is restated and summarized in a useful and intelligent form. Palmer shows how both English and Span? ish adventurers and commentators attacked the constituent elements of the native languages they encountered?pronunciation, semantics, grammar, cognitive range, ete.?as supposedly inferiorto the language they used themselves. The perceived lack ofwriting?often assumed because of preconceptions which precluded examination? caused peoples to be labelled as barbarians. Palmer shows how the destruction of both 160 Reviews Irish and the range of languages in the Americas occurred less through a deliberate policy?Spanish Jesuits made a concerted effortto learn a number of tongues?than the lazy and convenient assumption of superiority, a 'more indirect operation ofpower which seeped into all quarters of native life, including language' (p. 35). The Eng? lish in Ireland were more culpable still. Numerous commentators note how noisy and clamorous Ireland was. Barnaby Rich in The Irish Hubbub (1617) bases a whole pamphlet on Irish addiction to wailing and weeping loudly at funerals. Yet, as Palmer points out with perfect justice, the striking paradox is that 'the language which made...