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428 D.F. ROWAN Orrell's contributions to the physical realization of Sam Wanamaker's vision have been critical and crucial. Orrell's fine mind and sure grasp of a wide range of research techniques and scholarly disciplines have provided essential answers to many of the problems which had to be faced before a new Globe could actually be built. Orrell must be allowed the last word when he suggests in his final chapter a major question facing theatre historians. He notes the various theories now held which find the origins of the Globe in the bull- and bear- baiting rings, or in the elaborate temporary structures of courtly dramatic festivals. He agrees with Frances Yates that the theories ofVitruvius were well known to such men as John Dee and Robert Fludd, but shrewdly observes that there is no link between the design of the Globe and that of the antique theatre described by Vitruvius in his Fifth Book. Where then did the Globe come from? Who are its ancestors? This is the question which John Orrell leaves us: 'As yet, we must reluctantly conclude, there is no altogether satisfactory hypothesis to explain the provenance of the Globe, prior 'at any rate to its first manifestation as the timbered round of Burbage'S Theatre [1576J.' Apocalypse Then JOHN REIBETANZ Joseph Wittreich. 'Imnge of That Horror'; History, Prophecy and Apocalypse in 'King Lear' San Marino, CaliIomia: Huntington Library '984. xiv, 185. $22.00 The term 'apocalyptic' comes readily to mind when one is thinking of King Lear perhaps too readily. The intense bleakness of the play's setting and mood translates easily into the idiom of our contemporary nighhnares - the camps, whether German or RUSSian, the desolate battlefields and their more desolate survivors, and the still unrealized but ineradicable images ofthatworst horror, the world after a nuclear holocaust. Although we owe the familiarity of these associations to directors like Brook or Kozintsev and critics like Kott or Mack, the play itself supports them. King Lear offers us the actions of appropriately barbaric cruelty, the unaccommodated extremes oftemperaments and elements, the lackof 'support systems' forits casualties, and perhaps above all the distinctly contemporary tone of despair thatwe catch in comments like 'They kill us for their sport' or 'Humanity must perforce prey on itself.' King Lear speaks to OUI time in a language of apocalypse. Yet the play also speaks a different kind of apocalyptic language, a far older tongue in which few of us are fluent. Its accents emerge through Kent's reference to 'the promis'd end' and Edgar's to 'that horror: through the prophecy of doom UNIVERSI1Y OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1986 'KING LEAR' 429 that obsesses Gloucester in act I and the five trumpets that signal the denouement in act v, and more obscurely through Lear's references to those sacrifices upon which the gods themselves throw incense and to the wrath of the dragon. This is the Apocalypse of St john, familiar to Shakespeare's age through the Book of Revelation and the wealth ofinterpretative commentary surrounding that book in the Renaissance. It is considerably less well known in our age, and the spectator of King Lear may wonder what bearing it has on an interpretation of the play, or what relation it has to those more current images of apocalypse. Few people can be as well prepared to deal with such matters as joseph Wittreich. Editor (with C.A. Patrides) of The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, author of Angel ofApocalypse and Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy, Wittreich has read widely in Renaissance apocalyptic writing and has studied its impact on creative literature. The documentation in his most recent book testifies once more to his broad knowledge of this area; and 'ImageofThat Horror' shows that Wittreich has also read everything of note written on King Lear over the past few decades. . 'Image of That Horror' began as part of an essay on the apocalypse in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Then King Lear entered the picture and, as Wittreich writes, 'that pilot study simply could not bear the full weight of the play' (p ix). The present...

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