Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and "King Lear." by John L. Murphy (review)

Book Reviews153 autonomous scholar, not inhibited or victimized by an age of overspecialization and administrative power. He seems to be ever challenged by new horizons , by the very fact of being alive, to explore, to probe, to explain, and to interpret the cosmos of spiritual life from Greek philosophy, literature, and society to the contemporary world. His book is written for those who let their minds float free to marvel at a work of art, a piece of music, a literary text, experience aesthetic enjoyment in an authentic way, regardless of public opinion, commercial, technical, political, ideological knowledge easily obtained by computers. The historic change of human sensory perception is best discovered in the medium of aesthetic experience: "Aesthetic perception . . . sublimates the desire to see and be seen to a 'poetics of the glance,' and thus sustains the process that led artistic aesthesis from discovery to discovery" (64). Aesthetic enjoyment opened people's horizons of sensory experience throughout the ages in various forms, and therefore, Jauss' book is a culmination of accomplishments, written in privileged moments of heightened awareness, well detached from dry contemporary theoretical treatises, answering the reader's common questions: "What makes literature an artistic literary work, and philosophy, philosophy? What makes human reality or nature an aesthetic object of enjoyment?" Reason, will, conceptual rationality seem to be surpassed by intuition, spontaneous and freely chosen action, contemplation within the creative context of the receptive aesthetic experience , revalidating a perception renewed by means of art. This authoritative book has been received far beyond the German-speaking borders, and will remain as one of the few manifestations in literary and artistic aesthetics, refusing the brute reality of everydayness and overspecialization , of rational law and petty calculations. On the contrary, it encourages and revitalizes scholarship, as Jauss himself had the courage to inscribe his existence within the universal human history with its literary, artistic, and philosophic knots of significance, offering the reader a unique access to the human condition and range of perception throughout the ages, thanks to his transcendent genius. We also hope that other works will soon be translated, such as his interdisciplinary proceedings of the symposium: Text und Applikation, Theologie, Jurisprudenz und Literaturwissenschaft im hermeneutischen Gespräch, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IX (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981). In conclusion, the only disappointment for an American reader of Jauss' work might be a lack of information on the wide range of concerns ofthe New Criticism both in England and America. MARLIES KRONEGGER Michigan State University JOHN L. MURPHY. Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and "King Lear." Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984. 267 p. This is a learned and often labyrinthian book, the stated purposeofwhich isto suggest "a theory of performance for the Fool, Kent and Edgar, above all, for Edgar" (1) in King Lear. John L. Murphy grounds this theory of performance 154Book Reviews in "a complex intertextuality" (the phrase is Jonathan Culler's) that gathers around Shakespeare's play and informs it in important cultural, political, and thematic ways (2). Basically Murphy focuses upon the controversial and ardently pro-Catholic "Babington world" (1) of the late sixteenth century in England, with particular attention to the spectacular and self-consciously dramatic public exorcisms of the day which reflected the Catholic position —repudiated by Samuel Harsnett and other prominent Anglicans — that the age of miracles had not ceased. Murphy contends that the "thrilling dramatic exchanges" among the priest, the possessed, and the devils in these exorcisms "turned on the burning issues of controversy in church and state" (3), and furthermore that Harsnett's satiric treatment of these matters in his famous Declaration underlies much of Shakespeare's dramatic structure in King Lear (3). An introductory section delineating these concerns is followed in order by detailed chapters on (1) the complicated web of association joining Fr. Anthony Tyrrell and a zealous group of Catholic laity, particularly the Peckham , Blount, and Gerrard families, all of whom supported the highly politicized exorcisms of 1585-86 in the hopes that these and other related activities would result in the accession of Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne; (2) the establishment of Harsnett's Declaration in the rich tradition of humanist satire embodied...