The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy by David Young (review)

126Rocky Mountain Review narrator, as reader) rather than plot as the basis for a feminist poetics. Taylor's cataloguing of Paley's preoccupations suggests that Paley theorizes and experiments with similar issues. Thus the thematic cataloguing of Taylor's book—whose virtue is its thoroughness—might well be useful in locating the spaces, the burdens, the concerns, the enthusiasms from which Paley stages her narrative experiments and explorations. As such Taylor's book can be a useful place to begin. SUSAN STAKER University of Utah DAVID YOUNG. The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 154 p. David Young has produced a concise, intelligent, and consciously old-fashioned study ofthe four tragedies which, at least since Bradley (1904), have generally been regarded as Shakespeare's greatest: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Lifting the book's title from one of drama's most self-reflexive moments—Hamlet's advice to the players ("Suit the action to the word, the word to the action")—Young gives us his own method in a nutshell: he sticks closely to the texts under discussion, allowing them (seemingly) to reveal themselves. Throughout the book, he pursues "the secret of [the tragedies'] artistic success, the temperance that gives them smoothness, the balancing oftensions that allows them scope and intensity, their eloquence and energy" (134). The result is New Criticism of a high order. Drawing upon his experiences as teacher, scholar, spectator, and amateur actor, Young approaches each play by examining a key feature of its verbal style and a central feature of its structure. Thus, for example, he finds Hamlet largely characterized by four kinds of verbal dilation (narrative, injunctive, theoretical, exclamatory) which form a tension with the notably "thrifty" plot structure. In Othello, the Moor's narrative ability—one measure of his heroism—is overtaken by that oflago, who enjoys the "structural" advantage of intimacy and complicity with the audience. In Lear, Young finds "expansive and capacious structural features" which are balanced by "a curious inwardness and intimacy in its language" (87). And the treatment ofMacbethincluding a discussion ofthe play's metaphors which builds nicely upon Cleanth Brooks' famous "Naked Babe"—shows us how Shakespeare employs highly sophisticated verse within a deliberately "primitive" tragic structure, a combination that permits the minute delineation of "Macbeth's unruly consciousness" (112). While this summary does not dojustice to the subtlety of Young's analyses, it may serve to point out some of the strengths and limits of his approach. The exclusive focus on "style" and "structure"—terms which Young admits to be "slippery" (5)—produces many interesting individual observations. Nevertheless, some readers will wonder why a book on Shakespeare's greatest tragedies has so little to say about the evolution of tragedy itself, about the material and intellectual bases of Renaissance theatre, and about the many Book Reviews127 important issues in Shakespearean scholarship that have been raised by feminist and new historicist critics. While I find much contemporary "theory" to be of dubious value, I have to agree with its contention that true criticism must understand and be able to defend its underlying assumptions. Young's ahistorical treatment ofthe tragedies as unified, autonomous artworks strikes me as his book's most serious weakness. To be sure, Young anticipates this complaint. In both his introduction and conclusion, he portrays himself as one swimming against the critical tide: "my resistance to contemporary fashions in criticism, including the penchant for jargon, is deliberate rather than naive" (ix). Yet although he tries to distance himself from "excessive claims about the independence and unity of art," he falls back at once upon the assertion that Shakespearean tragedy—even after we discount our need for culture heroes and cultural landmarks—"teases us by its very excellence into a consideration of how that excellence functions and of what it may finally consist" (135). While I certainly applaud his avoidance ofjargon (unless "style" and "structure" be simply terms from an older jargon), I think he might have done more to explain his disagreements with contemporary criticism. Such an explanation, of course, would have disrupted the smooth progress ofhis own argument, but perhaps such narrative disruption is the...