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156 Reviews interjects a running commentary. In The kalender ofshepeherdes, he adds to the intriguing jumble of practical information and moral didacticism. And, in numerous texts he addresses the reader through prefaces and envoys. These poems provide a goldmine of comment on the status of print. Copland laments the influence of passing fashion in the popular appetite for books, acknowledges poor standards of spelling and punctuation, and even claims that the public has lost interest in the printed word. His remarkable envoy to Chaucer's Parliament of fowls celebrates the transition from manuscript to print, which preserves a text 'frome ruynous domage / In snowe wyte paper', and allows for the modernization of 'termes olde'. Erler's impeccably researched volume offers insight into the man and his milieu. She retains Copland's spelling and punctuation, provides extensive details about the books with which he was involved, and reproduces original woodcuts. The edition reveals a man who enjoyed neither the financial success of de Worde, nor the literary reputation of Skelton. As such, however, he typifies the movement towards a new cultural industry. Like many who followed him into the printing houses of London, Copland believed in the potential of his medium to promote literary and moral values, yet simultaneously felt constrained by the tradesman's motivation to 'get a peny as wel as I can'. Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Davis, Lloyd, Guise and disguise: rhetoric and characterization in the English Renaissance, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1993; cloth; pp. ix, 217; R.R.P. CAN$45.00. Early Modern scholars would, I a m sure, be grateful for a seven day moratorium on the publication of new books. It is impossible to do justice to all of the new studies being churned out. This, Lloyd Davis's fourth book, might make one's heart sink, because it compels a thorough reading. Exhaustively researched, as well as both imaginative and critically acute, i t covers an enormous amount of ground in a truly illuminating way. The book explores textuality and the production of cultural identity in the English Renaissance. In this respect it relates closely to New Historicist thinking. It argues that drama and history are often central strategies both to attack opponents and to legitimate structures of power. Reviews 157 But rather than foregrounding the mind of the creative reader w h o seeks evidence of subversion only to find it eventually subjected to the very forces which have produced it, Davis doesn not claim a firm subjectivity for his readerly self or for the textual figure of hegemonic subjection. B y this I mean,first,that in the very conception of characters w h o are subject to the conditions of their subversive self-assertion, critics such as Stephen Greenblatt articulate their own desire for an ontological subjectivity. Citing Karen N e w m a n , Davis notes that the critic w h o longs 'to sustain the illusion that I a m the principal maker of m y own identity' does in fact read on the basis of that illusion because its nostalgic presence is felt everywhere in his writing. Davis seeks to displace this profoundly twentieth century subjectivity by refusing to stabilize for himself a N e w Historicist position. Secondly, he argues not that dramatic characters can be read as seeking the materialization of an ontological subjectivity, but rather that this perception of subjectivity within Renaissance texts is anachronistic. H e thus challenges critics w h o read disguise in these texts as an ego-oriented signification of 'human nature' or as affirming a 'true identity'. Davis argues that selfhood is not an intrinsic essence which lies beneath disguise, but is rather figured by the complex and ambiguous processes and conceptions of disguise. Disguise, according to Davis, 'marks a discourse through which ideals of ethopoetic origins and goals and theories of social interaction confront each other' (p. 16). In chapter one he challenges critics such as C. L. Barber who posit essentialist explanations of a peculiarly Renaissance 'character' as pre-ordained by the humours or by transcendental powers, and which assumes a prediscursive identity as something authorially present which guides enquiries...

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