The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton by Camille Wells Slights (review)

play has become less romantic, more thoughtful, with a certain 'moral queasiness' (p 80) about war. Something as simple as a changing attitude to practical jokes has given us a new, darker Twelfth Night. Hamlet presents a more difficult case, and while Berrygives admirable accounts of Michael Redgrave's mature, intellectual prince and David Warner's gangling undergraduate, the attempt to relate them to other productions in a coherent pattern of change does not come off. In general the strength of Berry's work lies not in its overall argument butin local details. Veteran scholarly playgoers look back to the 1940S and 1950S as a golden age when directors respected the text instead ofslanting it towards their own interpretations. By studying promptbooks Berry establishes that in that 'golden age' plays like Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida were cut at an angle, to serve a particular interpretation, and that in recent years cutting has been lighter and more honest. He suggests, interestingly, a connection between the recent war experience of the audience and the crisp military style of Anthony Quayle's Coriolanus and Richard Burton's Henry v. He gives a sensitive appreciation of Olivier's film of Henry v, and of the effect of the sea-sounds in John Barton's 1969 Twelfth Night. Finally, it is no slight on him to say that the best parts of his book are written by others, since to have an eye for a good quotation is no mean virtue. Kenneth Tynan on the Olivier Coriolanus, Benedict Nightingale on John Barton's 1968 Troilus and Cressida, Ronald Bryden on the Peter Hall-David Warner Hamlet - these and many others, evoking the special quality of a production for those who never saw it, make a Canadian reader reflect enviously on how well the English have been served by their drama critics. (ALEXANDER LEGGATT) Camille Wells Slights. The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton Princeton University Press. xix, 307. $21.00 The subject of this study is the casuistical tradition established by Protestant writers in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whether Anglican or Puritan, the casuists sought to comfort and aid the doubting conscience, and transform it into a right conscience capable of action. They assumed the problematical nature of moral decision and insisted on the importance of taking full account of circumstances. Seeking to find the rational means by which man relates general moral law to his own actions, they were concerned with both the uniqueness and the typicality of particular decisions. But the Protestant emphasis on conscience led to the assumption that ultimately everyone is his own casuist. What men needed, then, were models of the decisionmaking process itself. The casuists developed a minor prose form as they 416 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 sought to illustrate the methods by which, as Richard Baxter put it, 'theoretical knowledge' is reduced 'into serious Christian Practice.' To illustrate the tradition Camille Wells Slights draws on the work of a number of casuists, including William Ames, Thomas Barlow, Richard Baxter, Joseph Hall, and Jeremy Taylor, but her discussion of casuistical prose relies very heavily on the examples provided by the rational and somewhat academic Robert Sanderson. An incisive and useful account of the tradition and its methods is followed by a second and larger section consisting of four essays. This more ambitious argument sets out to demonstrate that the casuistical view of morality is expressed in major fictional works. The intention is not to establish specific sources but rather to show that English literature of the age is informed by the processes of thought and language developed by the casuists. There are difficulties inherent in this project which are not fully resolved. One, the most striking, arises from the fact that much of the imaginative literature with which Slights is concerned belongs to the closing years of the sixteenth century or the opening years of the seventeenth, while her principal models of casuistical thought, with the exception of the lectures delivered by Perkins at Cambridge in the 1590s, are found in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Of the four writers of fiction under consideration, only Milton was in a position to...