The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender by Jeanne Addison Roberts (review)

248Rocky Mountain Review reasonable interpretation to be synthesized by the next, along with the deposits of other previous histories. But even the concept of "plausibility" deconstructs under pressure. Perkins points out that "plausibility" is socially and temporally grounded. The term means adhering to the currently accepted rules of historiography, and to current assumptions about human character and motivation, about the probable causes of events, about the structure of reality, and so on, and these change, making the past itself change. And "plausibility" requires a social consensus within the discipline of literary history. To Perkins this means that "plausibility must ultimately mean plausibility for me and for whoever thinks as I do" (17), one of many "hermeneutic circles" that plague the discipline. Yet, the discipline should continue to try to write "plausible" literary histories even though it can't be done. Such histories, Perkins argues, are valuable because they familiarize us with distance. Literary history familiarizes us with works we otherwise would never have known, but it also places them in a world and mentality that is not our own. "Thus, to learn to read with the perspective of literary history is like growing up. We encounter a wider, more diverse world of books, expressing mentalities that challenge us by their difference" (184). Although the ideal of objective knowledge of the past cannot be achieved, we must pursue it, for without it, "the otherness of the past would entirely deliquesce in endless subjective and ideological reappropriations" (185). Although Perkins' own arguments sometimes are vulnerable to the relativism he uses on literary history (how can literary theory/criticism establish the plausibility of its attack on the implausibility of literary history?), his book is a clearly written, carefully argued, and self-reflective analysis of wide-reaching literary issues and problems—and another dismaying demonstration ofjust how theoretically "soft" (in Kernan's word) our discipline really is. PAUL A. TROUT Montana State University JEANNE ADDISON ROBERTS. TAe Shakespearean Wild: Geography , Genus, and Gender. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. 214 p. In this imaginative, quirky, literate book, Jeanne Addison Roberts tackles what in some theoretical circles might be a preposterous task: setting out to explain how Shakespeare imagines the tension between "human" culture and the Other, the unbounded psychological field against which he defines a male culture. Informed by readings of feminist anthropology, psychoanalysis , and, of course, Shakespeare, Roberts attempts to reach "a new understanding of how male psychological development conditions worldviews, how traditional intellectual concepts may change, and how psychological dimensions , personified in stage characters, may play out recurring male Book Reviews249 visions of gender" (17). While some theorists would vigorously protest these assumptions, Roberts' eclectic approach produces a lively, witty essay on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture. In her introductory chapter, Roberts states the premises of her analysis and her rationale for them quite bluntly. The literature of the Western world can reveal a tension between two competing paradigms, she notes. One paradigm, adopted by many feminists, posits that Culture is defined through an opposition to a perceived Other, often characterized, particularly by the Greeks, as foreign, alien, animal, and female. The second paradigm , an Aristotelian one, organizes the two terms of the opposition (Culture and Nature) into the Great Chain of Being, popularized among Renaissance studies by E. M. W. Tillyard in TAe Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1944). The latter posits a hierarchical view that erases the tension between western male versions of order and what it perceives as wilderness. Roberts points out that both paradigms can be useful for reading Renaissance texts and attempts to offer her own paradigm that incorporates both of the others. Male definitions of Culture, she claims, rest on several different images of chaotic outer world. Sometimes Culture faces a foreign, barbarian frontier, sometimes a female or animal one, occasionally a female/male one (in Shakespeare's drama, figured as the Amazon). Occasionally, it conjures up a male wilderness, figured in literary terms as a space for male rivalry, the hunt, male initiation. All of these different spaces overlap, so that sometimes Culture imagines the Other as both female and animal or as female and foreign. For Roberts, the challenge is to provide what she...