Poems of the Elizabethan age: an anthology (review)

160 Reviews is obscure and this heightens the sense that the linear progression from a rather monolithic 'humanism' is overdrawn. The theoretical introduction is wordy, the concept of rhetoric underspecified, but in exemplication lies genuine compensation. Conal Condren School of Political Science University of N e w South Wales Hiller, Geoffrey G., Poems of the Elizabethan age: an anthology, London and N e w York, Routledge, 1990; paper; pp. xx, 332; R.R.P. AUS$19.95 [distributed in Australia by the Law Book Company]. The second edition of this anthology is almost identical with thefirst(published by Methuen in 1977). The pagination remains the same, though the second edition has been reset in a larger type-face, making it easier to read. The few changes that have been effected are by and large minimal. For instance, the poems by Drayton, 'Stay, speedy time,' and 'How many paltry, foolish, painted things', have been reversed in the second edition. The explanation for this may be elliptically encoded in the change of annotation about 'Stay, speedy time' (p. 61). In thefirstedition, this reads, 'Published in early form 1594; extensively revised before 1619', but in the second, the last part reads, 'extensively revised for 1619 (no. 17)'. Presumably, therefore, the editor chose to switch the order of the poems so that the position of 'Stay, Speedy Time' reflects the 1619 date. The text itself, however, draws no attention to this change, nor does it give the reasons for it. Other changes, however, have far different implications and consequences. Gascoigne's Arraignment has been supplanted, in the second edition, by two poems by Queen Elizabeth (Sonetto [T grieve and dare not show'] and 'When I was fair and young'). Likewise, the anonymous 'Come away, come, sweet love!' and Lodge's Old Damon's Pastoral have made way for A dialogue between two shepherds, by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. In each case, a woman poet's work has been introduced into the collection, yet no notice is made of this in the prefatory material. The consequent impression is that the anthology has always represented women poets, however minimally. Nor is there any comment on the status of w o m e n poets during the Elizabethan period or on the nature of their work in a literary scene dominated, on the one hand, by male writers but, on the other, by the Queen herself. Instead, the original preface again blandly proclaims that the anthology's anangement of poems by genre 'is the way the Elizabethans themselves, who were so conscious of literary genres, would have wished their poems to be read' (p. xvii). This suggests an empowerment of literary genres independent of social realities such as who wrote, who read, and what gender interests may have been Reviews 161 served. Yet surely some sort of dissonance must be set up when w e read, for example, a sonnet written by a w o m a n who knew, as we do, that women are in general the objects, not the subjects, of this poetic genre. David Buchbinder School of Communication and Cultural Studies Curtin University of Technology Jeffreys, Elizabeth, Brian Croke and Roger Scott, eds, Studies in John Malalas (Byzantina Australiensia, 6), Sydney, Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990; paper; pp. xxxvii, 370; R.R.P. AUS$21.00. The work of the early Byzantine chronicler John Malalas presents many problems for scholars. As one of the contributors to the volume under review expresses it w e basically have to work with 'a 150-year old redaction of an inaccurate 350-year old transcript of a 900-year old manuscript'. If this were not enough to discourage attempts to work towards an understanding of the work, various passages of subsequent Greek authors stand in obscure relation to it as do later works in Slavonic, Ethiopic, Syriac and Latin. The tradition of scholarship on this author has therefore been marked by teaming which, however powerful, has rarely proved adequate to the task at hand. It is the great merit of this new collaborative volume to have placed discussion of John Malalas on a much firmer basis than has ever been the case. And, coming as...