Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham (review)

The editors of this diverse collection of articles, in honour of a former colleague at the University of Western Australia, have organized them remarkably well around a common theme. Most of the articles discuss aspects of Shakespeare's plays in the context of their time, in the process bringing both the plays and their authors closer to us as people and to our own time.

Ann Blake, for instance, argues that Shakespeare's memory of scenes of violence in the old cycle plays which he saw as a young teenager came back to touch off ideas for violent scenes in his own plays. Human memory feeds the creative process, she reminds us, and violent action has always been the essence of theatre. Joost Daalder discusses proto-Freudian studies of madness in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in which the playwrights discount the usual explanation of their time, imbalance in the humors in our bodies, to point rather to the unconscious at work in their characters and so to human beings at large. Robert White suggests that Shakespeare, in his original conception of King Lear, was unsure of its genre, simply unable to make up his mind about it: 'each character seems to know he or she exists in a play, at the mercy of its plot and genre, but each has a different notion of what kind of play they are in and even what the plot is'. Such indecision makes Shakespeare a more human figure.

There are also a number of essays on seventeenth-century English poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, and a solitary one on a French poet, Maurice Scèves, all well written but inevitably overshadowed by the attention that the volume gives to drama and by the immediacy of drama itself.

Perhaps the most compelling of the articles is the concluding essay by Chris Wortham, whose career the collection is honouring, and his Australian-born wife Anne. The Worthams give a warmly human and at times touching account of their lives in South Africa and in Australia. Chris's story is one of many who migrated from South Africa to Perth in the 1970s and later - which gives this collection a special importance as an enduring memorial to those who influenced that generation in West Australian history.