Rhetoric Of Masculinity Research Articles

Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Masculinity by Nathan D. Howard (review)

Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Masculinity by Nathan D. Howard (review)

Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Masculinity. By Nathan D. Howard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. vii + 338 pp. $120.00 cloth.

Christianity and the Contest for Manhood in Late Antiquity: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Masculinity. By Nathan D. Howard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. vii + 338 pp. $120.00 cloth.

De Valera's Gains: The Masculine Body in Irish Political Cartoons, 1922–39

De Valera's Gains:The Masculine Body in Irish Political Cartoons, 1922–39 Timothy Ellis (bio) Éamon de Valera was unquestionably one of the most significant political actors in twentieth-century Ireland. His political career, spanning almost six decades from the Easter Rising in 1916 to his death in 1975, makes him a fascinating subject for study. Indeed, de Valera's time in high office was arguably one of the longest of any democratically elected leader in history. Perhaps his most significant political achievement was the 1937 Irish Constitution. Controversially, this document proclaimed that "mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,"1 inviting the following question: What connects gender and political power in de Valera's career? How, for instance, was the representation of de Valera's masculinity used to confer political legitimacy? Conversely, how were representations of his perceived lack of masculinity used to denigrate his legitimacy? This essay analyzes the representation of de Valera in the period 1922–39 through the medium of political cartoons. It argues that cartoons demonstrate how discourses of masculinity were central to the construction of political power in the Irish Free State, using de Valera as a case study. The years 1922–39 represent a period of postrevolutionary consolidation in Ireland. It was during this time that the Irish state gradually achieved sovereignty from Great Britain, but also introduced a series of legislation that sought to limit the role of women in public life. The analysis of masculinity offers a useful entry point from which to consider the political culture of these years. Indeed, few historians [End Page 61] would disagree that the political culture of the Irish Free State privileged masculinity over femininity.2 Legislation limited women's participation on juries in 1924 and 1927. It also limited their access to contraception in 1929 and 1934. Moreover, while not a result of formal legislation, between 1923 and 1932 only two women took their seats in Dáil Éireann (Margaret Collins O'Driscoll, who served 1923–1933, and Kathleen Clarke, who served briefly in fall 1927).3 This was the result of a pro-Treaty victory in the Irish Civil War. Most politically active women supported the anti-Treaty side, which was ridiculed by its opponents as "the women and Childers party."4 The way in which political life is represented as masculine has long roots in political history. As Wendy Brown argues, "politics has been more exclusively limited to men than any other realm of endeavor and has been more intensely self-consciously masculine than most other social practices."5 As a state that had emerged from a nationalist revolution, the Irish Free State was particularly marked by a masculine political culture. To quote Joan Scott, emergent rulers have often sought to legitimize "domination, strength, central authority, and ruling power as masculine . . . , and [have] made that code literal in laws . . . that put women in their place."6 As Nira Yuval-Davis argues, gender is heavily implicated in constructions of nation.7 Nationalist revolutions are therefore especially imbued with a rhetoric of masculinity. Drawing on the theories of Ashis Nandy, Gerardine Meaney argues that in these circumstances, of which Ireland offers a classic example, "colonized peoples, often long after colonization itself has ended, tend [End Page 62] to observe or impose strictly differentiated gender roles in order to assert the masculinity and right to power of the (male) subjects."8 Moreover, recent scholarship has demonstrated the intellectual potential of the study of masculinity as a lens for analysis of Irish society and politics. Since the 1990s, scholars of Irish studies have increasingly demonstrated an interest in this subject. Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen have written on the role of masculinities in Irish literature and culture.9 The discipline of history has also shown encouraging signs of coming to terms with the complex relationship between masculinity and political life. Patrick McDevitt's work on sport and masculinity in the British Empire has recognized the significance of Gaelic sport in constructing an Irish nationalist masculinity.10 Fearghal McGarry's biography of Eoin O'Duffy has demonstrated how masculinity and virility...

Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature by Maja Horn (review)

Seccion Bibliografica Horn, Maja. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014. 203 pp. Maja Horn’s Masculinity after Trujillo is an important contribution to Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American studies. After the introduction, the first chapter “De-tropicalizing the Trujillo Dictatorship and Dominican Masculin- ity” analyzes speeches by Rafael Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, and other nationalist Dominican letrados to unearth the keys to the Trujillato’s discourse of masculinity, which, according to Horn, was in part a reaction to the long-lasting US occupation of the Dominican Republic and its imposition of a racialized imperial masculinity. The title of chapter two, “One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorial Political and Literary Canons,” is a pun on the title of one of Doris Sommer’s books, One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. In it, the author carries out a close analysis of two novels by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, De abril en adelante and Una y carne, to show how even leftist-leaning Dominican intellectu- als reinforced this same rhetoric of masculinity during Balaguer’s governments, thus indirectly naturalizing authoritarianism. Horn argues that the attempts by Domini- can canonical writers to emasculate the image of Trujillo as the country’s most virile man reproduce the same masculinist ideology popularized by his government. In fact, they reduce serious political problems to the sexual prowess of the dictator’s phallus. In her view, Veloz Maggiolo and other authors reproduce hegemonic no- tions of gender and sexuality that limit their vision of political resistance. The third chapter, “Engendering Resistance: Hilma Contreras’s Counter- narratives,” rescues Contreras’s important counter-narratives of resistance, which challenge mainstream notions of honor, masculinity, and sexuality, and propose the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends. Horn focuses on the representation of Dominican gender formations in three works by Contreras: 4 cuentos, Dona Endrina de Calatayud, and La tierra esta bramando. She also looks at how Dominican cultural practices foster anti-hegemonic alliances and collective forms of action. According to the author, Contreras’s writing presents si- lence as a site of resistance during the Trujillato. Her novel La tierra esta bramando provides examples of strategies of resistance, such as the strategic use of femininity (being seen as a harmless and apolitical subject) beyond masculinist cultural logics and hyper-sexualized imaginary. The author proposes the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends and proves that the return of the Do- minican diaspora has, in many cases, reinforced hegemonic, masculinist Dominican notions. The last two chapters explore the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, the tourism industry, global media, mass migration, and diaspora on a new genera- tion of Dominican and Dominican American writers that emerged in the 1990s. In particular, Horn is interested in their critique of the discourse of gender and other hegemonic formations inherited from the Trujillato. “Still Loving Papi: Global- ized Dominican Subjectivities in the Novels of Rita Indiana Hernandez” studies Hernandez’s portrayal of new Dominican subjectivities in her novels La estrategia de la Chochueca and Papi. The chapter that closes the book before the conclusion,

Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture (review)

Penner, James. 2011. Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity American Literary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. $24.95 sc. 318 pp.In Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity American Literary Culture, James Penner contends that mid-century literary, cultural, and political debates over masculine identity resemble a vicious cockfight where the preferred mode of attack gendered critique (or virility test) (9). Penner's study explores this vicious cockfight years spanning Depression and sexual revolution, focusing particular on what he sees as an obsession with disseminating specific types of shared by writers and critics alike, an obsession that fosters a preoccupation with the business of policing texts for feminine and effete motifs and references (9). Building on existing work fields of American literature and studies, Penner surveys a host of literary and cultural forms-fiction and film, poetry and drama, literary criticism, and psychological and social studies- investigate array of distinctively male and particularly American stereotypes that emerged between 1930s and 1970s. The rise prominence of various forms of macho during these years leads Penner suggest that rhetoric of has played a crucial role in practice and production of literary culture, and that both as a subtext and as a central concern, cannot be divorced from important literary and political debates of various (8).The risk of writing a critical study focused on ways writers and critics participated public forms of policing each other's masculinity, of course, that Penner too might be charged with engaging a similar form of policing. Yet he adroitly avoids this pitfall by casting a wide critical net and refusing buy into notion at heart of these debates: namely, idea of masculinity crisis. In fact, Penner sees very phrase masculinity as problematic, because implies that one form of approaching its and that a new form of will somehow emerge and replace previous form, when, reality it a foregone conclusion that crisis will never end (15). A central question Pinks, Pansies, and Punks thus how conceptualize opposing types of that appeared and contested one another across mid-century decades. To address this question, Penner suggests existence of a cultural wherein seen as effeminacy and feckless impotence, while founded upon traditional masculine concerns and phallic potency (2). It a binary where hardness is tacitly encouraged and understood as a social ideal, while softness overtly stigmatized (16). Pursuing this system enables Penner interrogate the so-called crisis, mapping ways this binary central a male socialization process where to be male encounter, confront, and internalize dictates of softness and hardness whether one likes or not (15).Through lens of this soft/hard binary, chronologically ordered chapters Pinks, Pansies, and Punks highlight ways literary criticism intersects with political, social, and cultural refashionings of middle decades of twentieth century. Beginning with an analysis of tough-guy of 1930s, Penner uses Lewis Terman and Catharine Miles's 1936 psychological study Sex and Personality define contours of what he terms the hypermasculine ideal (23). Through an exploration of scandal surrounding radical critic and writer Michael Gold's attack on leisure-class softness of author and playwright Thornton Wilder, as well as close readings of hard-boiled novels of James M. …

James Penner's <i>Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture

James Penner's <i>Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture

Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, by James Penner

Review Article| December 01 2012 Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, by James Penner Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, by Penner, James, Indiana University Press, 2011. 297 pages. Yetta Howard Yetta Howard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (4): 702–708. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-1010 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Yetta Howard; Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, by James Penner. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2012; 58 (4): 702–708. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-1010 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Pinks, pansies, and punks: the rhetoric of masculinity in American literary culture

Acknowledgments Introduction: A Short History of Macho Criticism 1. Healthy Nerves and Sturdy Physiques: Remaking the Male Body of Literary Culture in the 1930s 2. Doughfaces, Eggheads, and Softies: Gendered Epithets and American Literary Culture in the 1940s 3. Highbrows and Lowbrows: Squares, Beats, Hipsters, White Negroes, New Critics, and American Literary Culture in the 1950s 4. Reforming the Hard Body: The Old Left, the Counterculture, and the Masculine Kulturkampf of the 1960s 5. The Gender Upheavals of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s: The Black Panthers, Gay Liberation, and Radical Feminism Epilogue: The End of Innuendo Notes Bibliography Index

Facilis hic futuit : Graffiti and Masculinity in Pompeii's 'Purpose-Built' Brothel

Facilis hic futuit: Graffiti and Masculinity in Pompeii's 'Purpose-Built' Brothel Sarah Levin-Richardson (bio) Phoebus / bonus futor (Phoebus is a good fukr, CIL IV 2248, Add. 215); Froto plane / lingit cun/num (Froto openly licks cunt, CIL IV 2257); Murtis · felatris (Murtis is a blow-job babe, CIL IV 2292). Long overlooked by scholarship as obscene recordings of sexual encounters, the 135 graffiti of the 'purpose-built' brothel at Pompeii (VII 12 18-20; CIL IV 2173-96 and 3101a; Add. 215-6 and Add. 465) form a rich corpus that illuminates daily interactions among clients and prostitutes in the Roman world. 1 In this paper, I demonstrate through these graffiti the multiple ways in which male clients, individually and collectively, negotiated male sexuality. Specifically, I analyze how male clients both created a hierarchy among themselves and solidified communal, normative masculinity in opposition to nonnormative males and marginalized females. I. Introduction In the past fifteen years, the graffiti of the 'purpose-built' brothel (hereafter referred to simply as the brothel) have entered the scholarly arena, usually as part of works devoted to surveying or analyzing erotic graffiti at Pompeii. For example, some of the brothel's sexual graffiti were treated by Antonio Varone's Erotica pompeiana: Iscrizioni d'amore sui muri di Pompei (1994; translated into English in 2002 as Erotica pompeiana: Love Inscriptions on theWalls of Pompeii). Varone surveys a wide range of erotic and love graffiti from all over Pompeii, grouping them into motifs like "Preghiere d'amore" and "L'arma d'amore." Through this typology, Varone draws out common themes in a diverse body of material. Francesco Paolo Maulucci Vivolo's Pompei: I graffiti d'amore (1995) presents samples of erotic graffiti from Pompeii, including some from the brothel, evoking how prolific this type of graffiti was. Taking a more analytic approach, Matthew Panciera's dissertation, "Sexual Practice and Invective in Martial and Pompeian Inscriptions" (2001), compares the different meanings and implications of sexual practices in the corpus of Martial's epigrams and Pompeii's graffiti. [End Page 59] These scholars have shed light on various features of erotic graffiti at Pompeii, but do not address how these graffiti may have worked in each specific locale or in concert with nonerotic graffiti. Varone's article, "Nella Pompei a luci rosse: Castrensis e l'organizzazione della prostituzione e dei suoi spazi" (2005), however, adds a new perspective to the study of the brothel's graffiti. Varone analyzes the status and sexual practices of the individuals in the brothel through close reading of its graffiti, demonstrating the potential gains of a contextual or locus-specific approach. 2 In this article, I follow Varone in exploring the brothel's graffiti together as a corpus, but ask different questions of the material. Specifically, I seek to illuminate the underlying structure of the corpus's rhetoric. The graffiti, I argue, are more than just records of sexual liaisons or advertisements of the services of prostitutes; they represent an interactive discourse concerning masculinity. Clients and prostitutes could and did add their thoughts to the corpus over time, which encouraged multiple viewings. In addition, even illiterate viewers could be exposed to the graffiti through someone else's recitation. 3 It may not be surprising that boasts and defamation are constituent elements of this dialogue; but as I will show, the ways in which boasts and defamation are deployed and against whom, and the implications this has for a rhetoric of masculinity, reveal a discourse far different from the intra-elite masculine invective seen in the poetry of Catullus and Martial. II. Contextualizing the Brothel and its Graffiti At the intersection of the north-south Vicolo del Lupanare and the east-west Vicolo del Balcone Pensile, located to the east of Pompeii's forum, lies a modest, two-story structure. 4 The bottom floor contains five small rooms, each with a masonry bed, opening off a central hallway. Erotic frescoes, most showing a male-female pair engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse, line the register above the doorways in the hallway. 5 The graffiti, on the other hand, are found mostly (88%) within the small cubicula. The terminus post quem of both the graffiti...

Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body

Extending recent scholarship on the intersections between disability studies and queer theory, this article engages in a comparative reading of the films Murderball (dir. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro) and Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee), both released in 2005. The popularity of these two particular films, the author suggests, demonstrates a powerful cultural backlash against those representational histories that have conflated feminization, male homosexuality, and disability. Both films successfully remasculinize their subjects, celebrating queerness and disability as the inevitable product of the hypermasculine body. But, ironically, the rhetoric of masculinity that these narratives share is also the source of their antagonism. The author argues that Murderball's `crip' critique of able-bodiedness relies on repeated heteromasculine performances, while Brokeback Mountain's queer hypermasculinity is deeply invested in an ethic of able-bodiedness. Thus a close reading of both films exposes masculinity as the visual mechanism through which disability and homosexuality are beginning to discipline one another on the contemporary cultural stage.

"These Are Not Men": Sex and Drink in the Sermons of Caesarius of Arles

Caesarius of Arles used the rhetoric of masculinity to combat the "problems" of sex and drink and to advance his vision of the ideal lay Christian community. He adapted established language and arguments to his own ends and constructed an uncompromising pastoral stance. Although his success in convincing his congregation is questionable, his approach reveals the complexity and variety of pastoral approaches in late antique Gaul and the role of gender in persuasive preaching.

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (review)

.Reviews113 might also quibble with Mayer's contention that melodrama, unlike tragedy, "exacts no toll" on its protagonists: u[t]he good characters emerge unscathed; they have grown wiser in the ways of the world" (149). Such, of course, is generally the case. But what is one to make ofthe numerous historical melodramas on the laterVictorian stage,Dion Boucicault's RobertEmmet(1884) for instance, that lead inexorably to the gallows or scaffold, culminating in the execution of the historical hero turned martyr? These questions, much like the unfortunate spelling of Eleonora Duse's first name (corrected in the index, but not in the text both times it appears), hardly amount to a molehill ofobjection. For much like writing a letter of recommendation for a superior colleague or student, tempering praise for this very fine book with a few grains of criticism is tough work. There's just not very much to complain about. Stephen Watt Indiana University Alan Shepard.Marlowe's Soldiers:Rhetorícs ofMasculinityin the Age oftheArmada.Aidershot and Burlington:Ashgate,2002. Pp. viii + 248. $69.95. In Marlowe's Soldiers, Alan Shepard focuses less on Marlowe's depictions of actual soldiers than on the playwright's complex response to the period's stern military ethos, an important component ofthe early modern understanding of masculinity. For Shepard, Marlowe's characterization of military men, perhaps even his choice ofplots,was deeplyaffectedbythe war fever in England following the defeat ofthe Armada in 1588. After all, during the 1590s the reading public was deluged with treatises and pamphlets (some ofwhich Shepard analyzes) on the subjects of military strategy and deportment. Like Marlowe, several other playwrights, including Peele, Kyd, and Chapman, addressed public concerns about state security by treating military subjects in their plays. Shepard argues that Marlowe's work both presents and problematizes his culture's "regulated codes of masculinity" as well as its valorization of"callous violence, ... ironic disrespect for diplomatic and even martial rhetoric, and contempt for any form oftheatricalized identity"; ultimately,"the plays do bedevil the putative links ... between state security, prescriptive English masculinity, and the act ofplaying soldier on the stage" (4). Shepard carefully contextualizes Marlowe in a postArmada England whose values Shepard reconstructs not only from dramas but from such texts as Barnabe Rich's Allarme to England and A Path-Way to MilitaryPractise,William Blandys TheCastle,orpictureofpollicy,and Geoffrey 114ComparativeDrama Gates's The Defense ofMilitaryProfession. This book's historicist presentation ofthe cultural documents ofthe day, then, serves a broadly deconstructive rhetorical analysis. Shepard's work usefully complicates the standard views of Marlowe's protagonists. The book benefits from the recent work ofEmily Bartels, Simon Shepherd, Nick de Somogyi, and Curtis Breight but builds primarily on the foundation provided by older historical critics such as Paul Kocher, Leicester Bradner,and Paul Jorgensen.With chapters on TamburlaineIand II,Dido, Queen ofCarthage, Edward II, The Jew ofMalta, The Massacre at Paris, and Doctor Faustus, this work offers a graceful argumentative arc. In Shepard's formulation , the book's argument forms a parabola: Its highest points are its first and last chapters on Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus respectively: in these plays we can see Marlowe's least and most ironic representations ofthe culture wars between soldiers and civilians.... [T]he farther one reads beyond Chapter 1, the weaker the magnetic pull of Tamburlaine's hypermilitarism; the closer to Chapter 6, the stronger the playwright's skepticism. (15-16) Given this structure, the most provocative chapters are those in the second half of the book. Hypermilitarism in Tamburlaine and even Dido needs little commentary . The authorial resistance that Shepard perceives in such elements as the responses ofTamburlaine's prisoners seems slight; these scenes are perhaps an inevitable part of dramatizing a conqueror's progress. In the early chapters the most notable sections are those that draw on contemporary documents to compare Marlowe's handling of well-known events with that of other writers. Aeneas's betrayal ofDido, for example, seemed serious enough to Barnabe Rich for him to question why the English "'for the glory of antiquity shoulde bee so fond to recount their Genealogy from such a desteyned progeny'" (qtd. in Shepard 54). Several of Marlowe's contemporaries wrote approvingly...

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada by Alan Shepard (review)

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 most of the noise is almost never heard' (pp. 40-41). Instead, the Irish often enter texts 'making a racket' (p. 65) because their speech is not represented. John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) shows the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, exchanging let? ters with the Irish. Palmer demonstrates that the encounter as it stands must be a fiction because the illustration concerned reveals that the English knew no Irish, so the translators have been removed in order to exaggerate Sidney's authority. In Chapter 3 Palmer surveys the evidence of Elizabethan administrators' know? ledge of Irish. It has often been assumed that because so many lived in Ireland forso long they must have acquired some ofthe language. Palmer finds the evidence unconvincing , arguing that even the most linguistically adept, Edmund Spenser, borrowed only fortywords of Irish in his works, suggesting that 'his interest was forensic and superficial ' (p. 79). Irish was treated less as a language and more as a sign with newcomers simply learning the limited range of words they needed to survive. The elaborate civil conversations so important to humanists failed to open up a genuine 'dialogue with the other' (p. 119). It will be interesting to see whether Richard McCabe's researches into Spenser's use of Irish come to the same conclusion. It is possible that anglophone culture in Elizabethan Ireland was more hybrid than Palmer's analysis demonstrates. Chapter 5 shows how similar strategies pushed to an even more aggressive limit excluded the native Americans from the linguistic community of the colonists while preserving the fiction of dialogue and inclusion (for obvious reasons), and a final chapter analyses how the Irish managed to include their voices in English texts and so prevent the total silence demanded by the English, or, like Florence MacCarthy, exploited their facility as bilinguals to enhance their own positions and so undermine English confidence in their ability to control Ireland. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland is a well-researched and intelligent book which puts a crucial but all too often neglected issue back on the scholarly map and it demands to be read by a wide variety of scholars, not just those interested in early modern Ireland. University of Sussex Andrew Hadfield Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada. By Alan Shepard. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2002. viii + 248 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-7546-0229-x. Amid his sequence of leather-gloved homicides for the RSC, Antony Sher played Tamburlaine (Stratford and London, 1992, dir. Terry Hands). At one moment Sher memorably continued speaking his mighty lines (which had audiences bouncing iambically in their seats) while climbing a rope, his breathing perfectly controlled as he physically rose above everyone but the upper gallery and comprehended all in his scorn. Through trained strength Sher physically expressed the ideal of male prowess to which Tamburlaine cleaves, and his concurrent public engagement with his personal and theatrical difficulties as a gay South African Jew framed his perfor? mance as a contemporary 'rhetoric of masculinity'. His text, alas, conflated into fiveacts Marlowe's ten?allowing one-night stands but losing the breathtaking generic inversion of Tamburlaine's marriage (ending Part I), MLRy 99.1, 2004 161 and the equally calculated coup de theatre of having, not Jove with a thunderbolt, but Allah with dysentery finallystrike the tyrannous blasphemer down, a whole play later. However understandable the decision to cut and conflate, the loss of Marlowe's formal generic manipulation (and attendant stage business) distorts his diptych...

Shakespeare Studies Vol. 28 ed. by J. Leeds Barroll, and: Shakespeare Studies Vol. 29 ed. by J. Leeds Barroll (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 161 and the equally calculated coup de theatre of having, not Jove with a thunderbolt, but Allah with dysentery finallystrike the tyrannous blasphemer down, a whole play later. However understandable the decision to cut and conflate, the loss of Marlowe's formal generic manipulation (and attendant stage business) distorts his diptych, particularly Tamburlaine himself: had Sher possessed the full two-performance text, and had to manage a far longer part with a quite differentdouble are of plots and tonalities to guide him, another, more interesting Tamburlaine would have had to emerge. My principal problem with Alan Shepard's book is that even Edward Alleyn barely gets a mention, never mind Sher, and genre fares little better. Besides a nod to Jarman1 *s EdwardII (1991), Shepard simply elides performance: his Zenocrateand Dido are wholly female textual constructs, to whom no boy brings life and cross-costumed body; his burning sword of Aeneas, preceding Dido into her pyre, is innocent of wondering how its fieryconsumption was staged in the 1590s. With Edward's pokered scream that wakes the town (and gives directors sleepless nights), such bookish limitation is perhaps a relief; in an extended discussion of theatrical masculinity deeply concerned with blood, both swelling and shed, it creates progressive incoherence. Marlowe's life and politics are also slighted: Charles Nicholl's persuasive study of Marlowe's murder, The Reckoning, is ignored even in the bibliography while a wildly unlikely speculation by Curtis Breight (that the Privy Council ordered Marlowe killed because Edward II was subversive) appears in isolation in the main text. Individual chapters, however, have much to suggest. Edward II receives a lucid discussion, aware of class as well as sexuality and appropriate forundergraduate use? perhaps the firstreal fruitof Charles Forker's excellent 1994 Revels edition. In The Jew of Malta 'why Malta?' is refreshingly more important than familiar arguments about anti-Semitism. There is even an extended and very useful discussion of The Massacreat Paris. But with Dr Faustus the theatrical weakness of Shepard's approach shows clearly in his resort to a magpie terminology of 'magical realism' to cope with the metatheatrics of comedic business. To apply such terminology to Renaissance theatre might be fruitful,but cannot be so if an awkward substitute for any direct approach to how late Elizabethan audiences spectated and audited. The book is readable and well produced, and the most general case Shepard makes, following Nick de Somogyi, for 'rhetorics of masculinity' as a conscious concern of almost all Marlowe's drama, is persuasive. In dealing with martial law Shepard forgets (as de Somogyi did not) the homophonic extension to 'martial lore', but does strengthen the case that the issue needs substantive attention from all concerned with the late Elizabethans. Overall, some chapters are likely to seduce students, but the whole will ravish no scholars and the impotence of a narrowly textual approach to drama (and gender) has rarely been plainer. Cambridge John Lennard Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 28. Ed. by J. Leeds Barroll, book review editor Susan Zimmerman. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 374 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-8386-3871-6. Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 29. Ed. by J. Leeds Barroll, book review editor Susan Zimmerman. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 278 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-8386-3922-4. The annually published Shakespeare Studies, now in its twenty-ninth year, is es? tablished as one of the major international Shakespeare journals. Under the expert editorship of J. Leeds Barroll, aided and abetted by a very persuasive reviews editor, Susan Zimmerman, the journal has gone through a number of transformations in an 162 Reviews attempt to ensure that its concerns remain up to date despite the inevitable time lapse between submission and publication of material. Some three years ago Barroll and Zimmerman introduced the innovative concept of the 'review article' in which the work of significant Shakespeare scholars might be appraised in relation to a topic of current interest. In Volume 29, forexample, Paul Whitfield White expertly evaluates the scholarly work now emerging on 'Playing Companies and the Drama ofthe 1580s', drawing together in an exemplary critical debate a number...

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

1University College Dublin Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada AlanShepard viii + 248Aldershot and BurlingtonAshgate 2002£40.00 0 7546 0229 X

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

1University College Dublin Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada AlanShepard viii + 248Aldershot and BurlingtonAshgate 2002£40.00 0 7546 0229 X

:Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

:<i>Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada</i>

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (review)

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (review)

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada