Konrad Eisenbichler and Janice Liedl, eds, Love and death in the Renaissance (review)

Reviews 133 amongst these factors were restrictions on the theatres: Lenten closures, closures at times of state mourning and as a means of crowd control in political emergencies, and closures due to plague. Plague, the pathologies of ratflea,and bacillus and the public health measures used to contain their effects are the subject of Chapter 3, which adopts the annaliste method in examining the activities of Shakespeare and his fellows in 1603 when the great plague came to London. In the final three chapters, the focus shifts to a detailed consideration of bow die disruptive cultural conditions in which Shakespeare wrote actually determined his habits of composition. The main narrative of the book is a reconsideration of the 'order and tempo' (p. 15) of the writing of the Stuart plays, in which Barroll contends that Shakespeare did not write plays at all during times when the playhouses were shut and that long periods of inactivity were followed by periods of enormous productivity when stages again became available. Some of the premises on which Barroll bases his argument are open to dispute; for example, that the playhouses were closed when the daily plague toll rose to thirty deaths (not forty as is generally assumed), that thefirstproduction of a Shakespeare play followed very hard on its completion, and that a play is not likelytohave been performed at court twice in a four-month period (in the case of Lear) or in two consecutive Christmas seasons (in the cases of Othello and Measure for Measure). Barroll's revisionist chronology charts peaks and troughs of activity as theatres opened and closed; for example, a two year hiatus between 1602 and 1604 followed by the composition of Othello and Measure for Measure, a further hiatus of up to twenty-two months then Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Lear by the end of 1606. The idea that Shakespeare needed to see the plays on the stage in rehearsal and production in order to keep writing is certainly attractive and it surely aids the project of giving the bard a good dousing in the waters of time, material contingency, and environmental calamity. Whether Barron's dates and data are sufficient to make his case compelling is another question. Denise Cuthbert Department of English Monash University Bartlett, Kenneth R, Konrad Eisenbichler and Janice Liedl, eds, Love and death in the Renaissance (Dovehouse Studies in Literature, 3), Ottawa, Dovehouse Editions, 1991; paper; pp. x, 219; R.R.P. AUS$? Love and death in the Renaissance presents papers selected from a conference of the Renaissance Society of America in 1990 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance 134 Reviews Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. The preface adds that the book's focus was also the theme of the conference. The papers included here cast a fairly wide net, as might be expected with such a wide theme. Neoplatonism is fairly well represented; for example, in Ellen M . Anderson's leading piece focussing on Cervantes's El rufian dichoso, and in William R. Bowen's essay on Marsilio Ficino on love and music. Indeed, makes makes an appearance in several of the papers, including Linda Phyllis Austern's 'Love, death and ideas of music in the English Renaissance', and in Alan Levitan's 'Love-metrics and death-metrics in Antony and Cleopatra'. There are, moreover, pieces on Spenser, Vives, Castiglione and Petrarch, as well as a second paper on Antony and Cleopatra, an exploration of the German Melusine and Dr Faustus, and a consideration of a medieval treatise by Andr6 Dulaurens. T w o of the papers, one dealing with Montaigne's Essais, the other with La navire by Marguerite de Navarre, are in French. For this reviewer at least, one of the more engaging essays is Levitan's almost musical analysis of the metrics of Antony and Cleopatra. Confessedly subjective, especially in that Levitan connects his analysis with a- particular performance he saw of the play, his paper advances the hypothesis that there are Egyptian and Roman rhythms embedded in the spoken lines. He identifies these rhythms, respectively, as triple or three-quarter time, and as duple...