The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe by Ian McAdam (review)

humanities 363 should probably have had a footnote affixed to it. The Dido chapter is the weakest, because the evidence for Tantalus in that play is scanty (as it is for The Jew of Malta). Since the author spends much of his time discussing the Ovidian translations in this section as well as the one that precedes it, it might have been best to combine chapters 2 and 3. This illustrates the one larger difficulty in the book. Thematic studies tend to stretch themselves, sometimes to airy thinness. The thesis in Playing with Desire sometimes disappears, the author apparently more concerned to discuss other ideas about Marlowe that are nevertheless important to him. At times, the argument for the primacy of the enticed Tantalus does not so much supplement the concept of the overreaching Icarus as repeat it. The book, quite engaging and not jargon-encrusted, wearing its immense learning lightly and well, could be read aloud to an audience. The author bravely attempts to write about Marlowe without much reference to poststructuralist studies, especially those of recent importance from the practitioners of new historicism and queer theory. He treads carefully around the issue of gayness in the canon. Although one could say that queer theorists have overdetermined the issue in Renaissance studies, one could also say that their important work on Hero and Edward II could have benefited the author's analyses of these texts. His background on classical literature is deep, his knowledge of the classical tradition obvious. He happily includes two woodcuts from Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblems (1586) that depict Icarus and Tantalus; they illustrate not only his thesis, but the older idea that he is trying to supplement. Since he has seen four of the plays in production, he can discuss them as vibrant dramatic entertainment rather than as mere school-texts for students at university. His introductory chapter, `Marlowe and the Torment of Tantalus,' is very fine. The last chapter, on Hero, is simply excellent. He builds on Gordon Braden's argument concerning the narrative form of the epyllion in order to explain the poem's technique as a type of narratus interruptus, which nicely illustrates his argument about tantalization. In some respects, the book answers Harry Levin's monumental midtwentieth -century study, The Overreacher (1952). The author constantly creates the impression of devotion to his subject. His frequent echoes of Marlowe's language in his own prose suggest that he wants to say as much as he can, doubtless incorporating a lifetime of reading, rereading, and successful classroom teaching in this labour of love. (M.L. STAPLETON) Ian McAdam. The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe University of Delaware Press. 284. US $43.50 Ian McAdam's project in this fascinating and audacious new book on the 364 letters in canada 1999 plays of Christopher Marlowe is to restore, in a new configuration, some of the discarded elements of essentiality to the human subject. He takes issue with the currently dominant view of human identity as a cultural artefact. We have, he argues, vastly underestimated the role of individual ethical and moral choice and individual responsibility in the process of selffashioning . Further, he rejects the notion that selves are void in favour of a belief in the interiority of self produced by conscious choice, memory, and will, and realized through individual assertion: the irony of identity is that the unavoidable struggle for an integrated self in Marlowe is doomed from the start. Support for this position is supplied by the life and works of Marlowe, whose homosexuality restores some of the mystery of identity and takes us to realms quite beyond those of practical social control. Complicating the knotty issue of his homosexuality is Marlowe's obsessive and subversive engagement with religious matters. It is the tense convergence of these twin concerns that carries the matters of identity and subjectivity in Marlowe to depths of contradiction that notions of selffashioning are not altogether equipped to explain. Homosexuality refers, indeed, to a form of human otherness, but, McAdam avers, it is an otherness whose critical value is capable of transcending the constructions of historical and cultural...