"Rooted Sorrow": Dying in Early Modern England by Bettie Anne Doebler (review)

76Rocky Mountain Review of Kate and Petruchio in Act II transformed into a rambunctious chase scene, but also with the eloquence of Kate's notorious profession of fealty in Act V preserved to create a startling and effective cinematic moment (11416 ). Pressing his case a bit further, and drawing analogies with the integration of verbal wit in the "screwball" comedies of the 1930s and the more urbane dialogue of Woody Allen's comic films, Jackson ponders the example of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, cautiously hinting at the cinematic capital Branagh derives from his treatment of the "Dogberry sequences, here redistributed in order to make better use of the material and the characters in terms of a film audience's attention, and less dependent than might be expected on the verbal joke of Dogberry's mistaken vocabulary" (118). Yet here one might ask whether a Dogberry so shorn of his language and reincarnated as Michael Keaton "acting funny" can really still be said to be Dogberry, and whether a Much Ado shorn of its Dogberry is still Shakespeare's Much Ado. Such quibbling notwithstanding, Shakespeare and the Moving Image will prove helpful to those seeking initiation into the issues and aspirations that have attended, and vexed, twentieth-century attempts to reproduce Shakespeare's plays in the media of mass culture. With their finely detailed treatment of so many ambitious attempts to bring Shakespeare to the cinematic and television screens, the essays in this volume underscore the durable attractions of Shakespeare's plays and the capacious opportunities the filming of those plays offers to the scholar and the teacher. THOMAS MOISAN St. Louis University BETTIE ANNE DOEBLER. "Rooted Sorrow": Dying in Early Modern England. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994. 297 p. 1 his book on images of dying in literature draws upon what is seen as a visual-thematic tradition (in instances continental or English, early or late) useful for elucidating any given text. That approach is much at odds with a common new historicist one, of basing a given study on materials from a chronologically limited slice across a society. But Doebler does not tackle such problematics though she does address new historicists and formulate some of her assumptions. These strike me as part of a worthwhile dialogue even if she takes up only limited aspects of new historicism. Doebler interprets Greenblatt's "self-fashioning" as a form of modern "individualism " read into an earlier century, seeming not to be aware of the concept's own polemic exactly against the modernist, individualist "self," nor of its bases in post-modern philosophy and language theory. (Perhaps new historicists' reticence about theorizing their premises in those terms has contributed to such talking at cross purposes.) Although Doebler views her subject matter as "essentially personal and theological attitudes" that Book Reviews77 relate only puzzlingly to "society" (183), she tries out the anthropological strand of new historicism (187-218) by applying a maturation schema from Victor Turner to Donne, while also discussing Donne's ars moriendi images. Turner posited stages in an individual's acquiring of identity: of structure, when norms are unquestioningly adopted; of "yeasty communitas," when one identifies with peers rebelling against the structure; and of societas, when a dialectic between the first two phases brings an integrated adult identity. Turner further theorized that people are most creative in their work when they are at the "threshold" between these latter phases; and in these terms, Doebler says, Donne's erotic and religious sensibilities appear as integral to each other rather than as conflicting. The other chapters do not draw on new historicism; they read passages focusing on the good death and the battle of angels and devils over the body of the moriens, from Shakespeare, Milton, accounts of Essex's execution, and a consolatory poem for Elizabeth of Bohemia. Doebler says that she "avoids much modern diction or ideological categories," working instead "by a cultivation of empathy or . . . the historic imagination" (24)—on the assumption that cultivating empathy and exercising a historic imagination are not instances of modern diction. She also expresses a moral viewpoint— the one that underlay earlier reverential readings of canonical texts but used to remain unsaid...