John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist by Ronald Huebert, and: The Elizabethan Theatre VI ed. by George Hibbard (review)

408 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 supplied in good measure, beginning at the very outset with a neat rhetorical analysis of a speech from Troilus and Cressida (p 8), continuing with the lucid distinction between pastoral as poetry of stasis and epic as poetry of kinesis (p }2) and the equally acceptable assignment of praise to Calliope and blame to Clio (p 45). I have quietly appropriated for my own use the contrast between Spenser's interruptions of narrative and Ariosto's (p 109) and the well-controlled comparison between the figures of Despair in Book I and Meliboe in Book VI (p 172). If the pun is Cain's 'fatal Cleopatra: and it is, he is in good company, with Shakespeare and the brightest of contemporary critics. He is polite, tentative, even playful, making one feel just a bit churlish in nearly always declining his gambit. I am dubious about Trist-ramus 'sad branch' (p 163) and think that 'say' the noun simply means 'assay' (p '77); 'cheere'in sixteenth-century English so regularly meant disposition, sad or merry, that I do not find an oxymoron in 'heavy cheere' (p }1), nor do I find a syntactical play at the end of Mutabilitie in the lines Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And love of things so vaine to cast away. The syntax demands 'which makes me (to) loath this state of life so tickle and (makes me) to cast away love of things so vaine.' 'So vaine to cast away' as an adjectival phrase, Isubmit, is not English. As for Busyrane as a busy frog, from Queen Elizabeth's pet name for her French suitor (p 103), and as for Artegall as victim of French wiles (art-de-Gall, p '54), all I can do is polish up my long disused pig-Latin and say ixnay. I mustn't make too much of this: we don't want a book (or a review) on Spenser to be 'too solemn sad: and the main argument never hinges on such jeux d'esprit but rings out, sound as a bell. (WILLIAM BLISSETT) Ronald Huebert. John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist McGill-Queen's University Press 1977. xvii , 248. $21.95 George Hibbard, editor. The Elizabethan Theatre VI Macmillan of Canada. xii, 161. $11 .95 The two books under review are as like as chalk and cheese, but each has the educational and nutritive virtue of those staples, and taken together they suggest the range and liveliness of current studies in English Renaissance drama. Ronald Huebert's John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist is a spirited work that merits a generous welcome even (perhaps especially ) from those with doubts about its method (the application of art-historical terms and distinctions to literature) and its conclusions HUMANITIES 409 (that Ford is innocent of the charges of decadence and limited poetic talent often lodged against him). Huebert realizes that his thesis will 'raise some skeptical eyebrows.' Hence his first chapter defines and contrasts the baroque with the mannerist, rococo, and classical styles, and puts the case for the literary use of Wolfflin's distinctions with clarity and good sense. The plates he analyses are well chosen, the literary examples cogent, and the contrary views he surveys are presented justly and met with directness and conviction. The second and third chapters treat Ford's typically baroque themes: sacramentalized love and death, madness, and the primacy of illusion; and examine the structure of his plays, emphasizing the difference between closed (earlier) and open (baroque) forms. Subsequent chapters argue for a more rewarding complexity than is usually found in Ford's verbal texture, and for his place in a baroque lineage that includes Massinger, Fletcher, Shirley, and Otway. A concluding 'Essay in Criticism' defends Ford from the naive evolutionary view that sees him as the exemplary figure of the 'decline' of English Renaissance drama; it then goes on to argue the limitations of a variety of recent critical schools. So large an enterprise ineVitably leaves one with questions of detail. Should the reference to Smith's Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvai/'d as suggesting a turn towards a 'baroque' rhetoric not also tell the reader that...