Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 by Jonathan Lamb (review)

the early modern preoccupation with slander and demonstrates how that cultural anxiety adds tension and vitality to Shakespeare's works. Gross adds acoda ("An ImaginaryTheater") concerning the current theater and die continuing role oflibel and slander in drama. In fact, he goes beyond linking the early modern and postmodern in claiming that "noise" has always been an integral part oftheater and always will be. Jumping across literary historical periods from the ancient Greeks to postmodern productions oíHamlet, diis portion ofthe study is the least contiguous. The codahas die musing quality ofan outline for a future study, to which I lookforward, but touches on far too broad a topic to cover in its 14 pages. Shakespeare's Noise provides an entry point into familiar plays that leads us to new terrain and better appreciation. The study has made me reevaluate some of what I "know" about Shakespeare—as the best scholarship should—and has enlivened my reading (and I hope my teaching) ofShakespeare's plays. The groundwork Gross sets down readily applies to works he does not discuss, and has given me new inroads into plays such asMacbeth, Henry V, andJulius Caesar. This book belongs on your Shakespeare shelf. %& Jonathan Lamb. Preserving the Selfin the South Seas, 1680-1840. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 2001. 345p. Greg Grewell University of Arizona Jonathan Lamb is at home in the university and at sea. In the summer of 2001, Lamb not only served as a consultant on a BBC historical adventure series that retraced part of Captain James Cook's eighteenth-century exploratory voyage through the Soudi Seas; he also sailed six weeks on a replica of Cook's ship the HMS Endeavor, performing the labor once common to an ordinary seamen. For the past several years, Lamb has been collecting, publishing, and writing on sea narratives and sea studies: in 1994, Lamb, Robert P. Maccubbin, and David F. Morrill co-edited a special edition of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life, tided The South Pacific in the Eighteenth Century: Narratives andMyths; in 1999, along withAlex Calder and Bridget Orr, Lamb co-edited Voyages andBeaches: Europe in the Pacific, 1769-1840 (University ofHawai'i Press), a collection oftwenty essays by scholars ofEuropean, Polynesian, and setder descent, representing a variety of disciplines (including history, anthropology, Maori studies, literary criticism, law, cultural studies, art history, and Pacific studies); and in 2000, Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas co-edited Expbration and Exchange: A South Seas»2 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2002 Reviews Anthology, 1680-1900 (The University ofChicago Press), which places narratives by well-known characters such as Captain Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those by lesser-known explorers, missionaries, beachcombers, buccaneers , scientists, cartographers, natural historians, and literary travelers who for one reason or another sailed the Soudi Seas. Lamb's latest publication, Preserving the Self, is a culmination ofdiis ocean ofstudy. In this book, Lamb sets out to chart the ways the "evolution ofa self," the development ofa market economy, and the attempts to map die world interrelated during "the enlargement ofBritain's second empire" (3). Proffering "an alternative way ofviewing and narrating" the forays of Europeans into the Soudi Seas (4), Lamb challenges the predominant diesis that early explorers were confident, cock-sure, aggressive colonizers out merely to increase the empire's knowledge of the world and plunder the wealth ofunknown peoples and cultures. In contrast, Lamb contends, these "navigators rather redoubled their ignorance than increased their knowledge" and "spread ignorance before they spread trade routes and disease " (4, 5). To support his claim, Lamb in the first chapter explores competing constructions of the self—not the subject and the implications attached to diat category, as he explains in the Introduction (5)—as theorized by then-prominent European philosophers such asJohn Locke, David Hume,Thomas Hobbes, Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Bernard Mandeville,Jean-Jacques Rosseau,Thomas Malthus, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and others. Tracing the way diese theories surfaced and were tested in literary productions such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720), Lamb explores the boundaries that divide the private and the public self, "die active, single selffrom the social selfon whose behalfit is mobilized" (18...