True rites and maimed rites: ritual and anti-ritual in Shakespeare and his age (review)

168 Reviews Woodbridge, Linda and Edward Berry, eds, True rites and maimed rites: ritual and anti-ritual in Shakespeare and his age, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. 303; R.R.P. US$44.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper). This collection of eleven essaystestifiesto the continuedflourishingof ritual criticism of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Where Frye's 'myth' and C. L. Barber's 'misrule' previously held sway, this is work influenced by anthropologists of the Turner/Douglas/Girard generation. Earlier writers are also prominent especially Van Gennep for passagerites,and Bakhtin for carnival and saturnalia. N e w historicist concerns surface in attempts to define the political value ofritual.The work of Keith Thomas and other recent historians of the age, which sees the beginning of the 'decline of magic', is another important influence. The editors' introductory survey is admirably alert to how particular topics move in and out of fashion. 'Ritual' critics now write little about links between fertility rites and dramatic forms, but the editors suggest they should. Discoveries made by the R E E D project could provide material. The editors express reservations on theories espoused in some of the essays. They note that the edging out of Barber by Bakhtin may be a retrograde step for those trying to set study ofritualin Shakespeare in a contemporary English context. Collections of Shakespearean essays in the 1980s were often the product of a clan of mutually admiring writers. This one presents the diverse theoretical positions of a Comon R o o m of the 1990s. Readers may compare strategies in relating 'history' to literary texts and styles of argument. 'That Shakespeare was in fact making this connection is purely speculation', Mark Rose admits (p. 257). Others are less cautious. Ritual is justifiably used here for a mixed bag of phenomena, but in some essays it is displaced by other preoccupations. Michael Neill's wide-ranging study of death in comedies says more about 'generic interplay' and mixed tones than about ritual. T w o essays on history plays refer toritualswhile rehearsing old historical concerns with 'order'. Michael Bristol's account of Othello certainly focuses on a ritual, the Charivari. It invites us to set aside the sympathy Othello and Desdemona seem intended to arouse and to see the play historically as an 'unmarrying play'. Shakespeare's audience could 'enjoy' this play, which pours scorn on a transgressive marriage, because it was unaware of racial prejudice, whereas we, according to Bristol, cannot tolerate complicity in its socialritualizationof comic abjection. This bizarre essay is best understood in the context of the hypersensitive racial awareness of contemporary North America At least four essays, three of which have not appeared elsewhere, make memorable contributions to a sense ofritualand of individual plays. All refer in Reviews 169 detail to ceremonialrituals,from parental blessings (Bruce Young) to trial by combat in King Lear (Gillian Murray Kendall), rather than, more vaguely, to 'ritual thinking'. Rose's discussion of ceremony in Julius Caesar is the only one to raise an earlier, legitimate concern of ritual studies: theatre as ritual. Writing initially on touching for the king's evil, Deborah Willis develops an argument about 'sacred physic', from Macbeth to Marina in Pericles, which is richly suggestive for bothritualsof royal power and Shakespeare's romances. Ann Blake Department of English La Trobe University Yudkin, Jeremy, ed., De musica mensurata: the anonymous of St. Emmeram. Complete critical edition, translation, and commentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xii, 385; 1 plate; R.R.P. US$45.00. The late-thirteenth-century treatise De musica mensurata is presented in the form of a didactic poem of 407 leonine hexameters with interlinear glossed interjections, accompanied by a lengthy commentary. For a formal description of the manuscript see RISM B III 3, 113 where it has the sigla D-Mbs Clm 14523. It is one of the most important musical treatises of the second half of the thirteenth century and is the longest and most comprehensive musical treatise of the Middle Ages to have been written up to its time. The unusual format of the treatise and the inevitable questions surrounding...