In Hope of Heaven: English Recusant Prison Writings of the Sixteenth Century (review)

260 Reviews 1987 article) is recapitulated at length in Scott Wilson's chapter. Peter Holland's Hamlet essay on the text in performance is, perhaps confusingly to students, not about staging and production but a contribution to the recent critical debates sparked off by the Holdemess and Loughrey edition of Ql. T w o pieces in the Hamlet coUection of immediate value to students in their range and direction are Sharon Ouditt's on feminist readings and, an impressive success this, Nigel Wheale on Lacan. Both write as simply and clearly as their material aUows, and also criticaUy: both consider challenges to the theoretical position and repeatedly discuss its limitations. A n y teacher wanting to direct students determined to embark on Lacan and Hamlet could confidently suggest that this is a place they could jump in. But too few of these essays seem to have kept this audience in mind. A n n Blake School of English La Trobe University Strauss, Paul, In Hope of Heaven: English Recusant Prison Writings o Sixteenth Century (American University Studies: Series 4, EngUsh Language and Literature 166) N e w York, Peter Lang, 1995; cloth; pp. 156; R.R.P. US$35.95. The recovery of writings by English Catholics in the early modern era has been gaining pace in recent years. The works of the great clerical polemicists have long been in circulation, and attention is now shifting towards the personal and spiritual prose created by people w h o saw themselves as members of a persecuted religious minority, and w h o often wrote to sustain their o w n faith and that of their coreligionists . Paul Strauss's study aims to fit this genre. H e takes as his subject the writings of four well-known Catholics (John Fisher, Thomas More, Robert SouthweU and Benedict Canfield) w h o were imprisoned for their faith (or in the case of Southwell and Canfield for their religious profession) and analyses the spiritual writings generated by their incarceration and expectation of imminent death. H e states in his Reviews 261 introductory chapter that these works fall into the tradition of consolatory literature but that they are also 'personal statements of the author's o w n deeply held beliefs' (p. 2). These two criteria form the basis for his analysis of the texts. Each of the book's five chapters follows a similar structure. First Strauss sets the writer and writings within their historical context. H e then assesses the classical and early Christian influences in the prose, foUowed by their attention to elements of specifically English recusant devotion. In his exegesis of each author's work Strauss pays special attention to the narrative, the structure of the prose and the dominant imagery employed by the writer to express his fears and hopes for salvation, hi this w a y he ploughs through his selected texts: the Tower works of John Fisher ('A Spiritual Consolation' and 'The Wayes to Perfect Religion'); Thomas More's The Dialogue of Comfort; The Epistle of Comfort, written by Robert Southwell for Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, w h o was imprisoned in the Tower; and Benedict Canfield's The Christian Knight. The strength of Strauss's studytiesin his intricate dissection of the chosen texts. His careful exploration of the principal themes and images provides the reader with a detailed precis of the works. It also reveals something of the devotional orientation of these four individuals, and the centuries old spiritual traditions which shaped their thought. Yet there are also weaknesses in this book. Indeed the very attempt to look at the four m e n as exemplars of the recusant tradition is fundamentally flawed. While Southwell and Canfield are undoubtedly worthy of the title 'recusant', neither Fisher nor More fit the role comfortably. Both were opponents of Henry Vffl's reforms, but given that 'recusancy' (refusal to attend the services of the Church of England) was not instituted until the 1559 Act of Uniformity, the term seems somewhat anachronistic in their cases. Strauss appears to be aware of this (p. 95), but he none the less chooses to ignore the anomalies raised by the fact that over...