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190 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Roye. At this rate ofproduction, the two-hundred-and-forty-odd sixteenthcentury English dialogues may soon achieve their rightful place in the consciousness of scholars of the period, removing the cloak of invisibility which still shrouds the genre. Parker's edition aids this discovery by providing a readily accessible version of the text with an exhaustive critical apparatus which helpfully contextualizes the dialogue within contemporary themes and debates. This is a careful edition, marked by clarity and thoroughness, and its appearance is important to the future of English dialogue studies. It is regrettable, however, that the editor feels it necessary to adopt an apologetic tone with regard to his text, notingits lack ofliterary distinction, its inferiority to Rede Me and Be Nott Wroth, and even doubting its dialogue status: whether A proper dyaloge is 'a proper dialogue' at all. The commentary on this text is proportionately three times that of Parker's edition of Rede Me, which seems to communicate ananxiety to legitimate publication. The notes continue arguments discussed in the introduction - e.g., that Barlowe and Roye were the authors of this dialogue too, or that Tyndale was the editor of the second treatise - as further attempts to authorize the text? The weight of the apparatus threatens to divert the reader's attention from the ephemeral nature of this early pamphlet as the text almost sinks beneath the abundance of references and quotations from better-known Reformation tracts. But it is most regrettable that A proper dyaloge is classified in the BR section of the library (Reformation history) while Rede Me is given a place in PR (English literature). Shelf-browsers may miss this excellent introduction to the textual culture of early sixteenth-century England. (JUDITH DEITCH) Susan Bermett. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past Routledge. viii, 200. $23.95 Two strategiccritical manreuvres are evidentinSusan Bennett's latest book. The first is to locate that all-englobing monolith 'Shakespeare' at the nexus of a cultural 'knowing' that has served particular political, ideological, and aesthetic uses. The second is to examine 'the effects of proliferation on performances of textual truth and history; with active representations of transgression, dissidence and desire which enact a longing for at least micropolitical change; and with surveillance of the errant and disobedient bodies which persist in their urge to be seen.' Bennett qualifies the second project's relation to the first by stating: 'I do not mean the readings, the questions raised here, to be specific only to the dissemination of Shakespeare, merely to suggest that it is in "Shakespeare" that they are most acutely and vividly posed.' The evidence for the latter part of the statement may be tricky at best to assemble (other media,like music, film, HUMANITIES 191 and visual art, articulate crucial questions of the 'contemporary past' through fixation on key figures), and appears to give the lie to the cultural centrality of the Shakespeare monolith even as other cultural monoliths (Disney, Hollywood, the various tendrils of contemporary pop culture) enact the fraught postmodern moment in which the past recirculates as the lifeblood of an ever-nostalgic present. Nonetheless Bennett's affirmation, even if debatable, is provocative and critically useful because it privileges the literary and performative textuality of the Shakespeare who both is, and is not, Shakespeare. Which is to say, it addresses the importantcriticalquestionofhowcurrent culturalcapital has a fraught relationship with its nominal literary source. Such a questioning leads to what I take to be the central virtue of this book: its wish to engage with Shakespeare as a performative text in which a retrogressive 'longing' for difference may be located as a function of the particular micropolitical contexts in which the performance is achieved. Bennett productively focuses her critical attention on difference asafunction of transgression and dissidence, while recoghlzing the enormous difficulties, both internal and external, to which any attempt to produce difference is subject. The book's four chapters present a formidable array of critical concerns: from 'new ways to play old texts,' to 'production and proliferation' (focused on '17' versions of King Lear), to 'not-Shakespeare/ to the 'post- . colonial body' (as manifestedin The Tempest). The range ofmaterial covered is...

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