Reviews265 ing in clarity because of a failure to make fine distinctions as to what apocalypticism and millenarianism might have meant to whom, when, and where. Such objections fade, however, in the light which flows from the work as a whole. Particularly impressive is the chapter on "The Tempest and Time's Dissolution." This essay has some memorable moments , especially in considering the island as a paradise. Here Marshall is at her best, combining some splendid readings of the text with reflections on various contextualizing possibilities which the "matrix of ideas involving the earthly paradise, fortunate isles and New Jerusalem " (p. 90) might evoke. The idea of the locus amoenus announced here is taken a stage further in the final chapter, "Ideal Worlds: Utopia, Paradise, Theater." Here the writing is deeply thoughtful, and we are privileged to share a few visionary glimpses into other realms of being. CHRISTOPHER WORTHAM University of Western Australia R. A. Foakes. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. ? + 262. $49.95. R. A. Foakes has been studying Shakespeare and writing about him for a long time. He edited Henry VIII and The Comedy of Errors for the Arden Shakespeare in 1957 and 1962, respectively, and he refers in Hamlet versus Lear to an article he published in Shakespeare Survey in 1956 on the imagery of war in Hamlet. He is therefore in a better position than most critics to take the long view of critical changes over the last twenty or thirty years, as he does in this book. His position (evident in his own reading of Hamlet and Lear) is that while poststructuralism has irrevocably changed the critical landscape, it has not always done so for the better, and in its neglect—if not its rejection— of aesthetic effect and the work as a whole, it has certainly gone too far. In other words, Foakes might be described as a reluctant and conservative convert to radical reading. The heart of Hamlet versus Lear is to be found in its sixth and seventh chapters, where Foakes analyzes Hamlet and Lear in a way that exemplifies his critical method. "Design" is an aesthetic effect that he wants to recuperate, but the particular designs he finds in Hamlet and Lear respond to current critical theory in that they are "political"— that is, they pay special attention to power relationships. The "primary design" in Hamlet (p. 156) thus pits two kinds of juridical power against each other, neither of them very satisfactory. On one hand is the old aristocracy, represented by old Hamlet; on the other is the new, represented by Claudius. Prince Hamlet is between, impelled by the vengeful, misogynistic, warrior ethos of his father but inevitably drawn 266Comparative Drama into the political machinations of his uncle. In Lear the "shaping" is more temporal than spatial, and Foakes discusses the play in terms of three phases of the action that arise from Lear's initial decision to abdicate: division, expulsion, and confusion. These two chapters bear a generic resemblance to the sections of Arden editions that are typically called "The Play," offering a concise critical introduction to the principal issues of a given play as a particular editor sees them. The rest of Hamlet versus Lear can best be described as a justification for these two chapters and for the kind of interpretation they represent . Well aware that aesthetic coherence is not a reigning assumption in criticism, Foakes follows a tripartite strategy. First, he writes genealogies of cultural and critical interpretations of Hamlet and Lear with a view to showing how interpretive fashion has changed in response to changing cultural assumptions—particularly political assumptions. This section allows him simultaneously to respond sympathetically to current theories about reader response, to reject what he takes to be the excesses of such theories, and to create a background against which his own readings of the plays appear more in line with poststructuralist strategies than might otherwise be the case. Second, he addresses recent textual criticism in order to establish that texts of Hamlet and Lear are sufficiently stable for one to argue that aesthetic coherence is possible. (In both cases, he opts...