Engagement With Knavery: Point of View in Richard III, The Jew of Malta, Volpone, and The Revenger's Tragedy by Robert Jones (review)

100Comparative Drama tinguished until The Quiller Memorandum that two conclusions are unavoidable, one that Harold Pinter was the true auteur of The Quiller Memorandum, and two that Pinter found in Anderson an ideal metteur en scène for his (Pinter's) very visual conceits." Nevertheless, film is one of the most collaborative of the arts, and Klein's approach grants Pinter far more autonomy as scenarist than he can possibly have possessed. One suspects that she would be happiest if all the screenplays, like the Proust—on which she writes a particularly brilliant chapter—had remained unfilmed, an odd inclination for someone undertaking a study of this kind. So for the sake of truth in advertising , even though she would lose the allusion to Monroe Stahr's credo in The Last Tycoon, Klein ought to retitle her otherwise admirable study Writing Pictures. INA RAE HARK University of South Carolina Robert Jones. Engagement With Knavery: Point of View in Richard III, The Jew of Malta, Volpone, and The Revenger's Tragedy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986. Pp. 177. $22.50. Robert Jones writes informatively about four important Renaissance plays whose leading figures are villains. This he does by focusing on the ways the protagonists try to "involve us in their knavish points of view" and, as well, the ways we as "audience" form "a particular attitude toward the characters acting before us" (pp. 1-2). Concerned more "with the experience of each play as it confronts its audience than with a 'meaning' or 'theme' that might be extracted from it" (p. 7), and accepting the theoretical proposition that the "actor-audience relationship [is] ... a dynamic and essential element of dramaturgy," Jones examines both the "verbal and dramatic gestures" (p. 18) that compose that relationship. This is not a work of theater history in the manner of Marvin Rosenberg; Jones refers to no actual productions, and when he speaks of "audience" it is no particular group of people gathered to watch any particular production that he has in mind. Rather, he uses a conceptually generalized notion of "audience" to conduct a sort of focused technical criticism that has interested a number of critics recently (E. A. J. Honigman and Larry Champion, among others), perhaps because it seems to combine and reconcile the virtues of close textual reading and presentational analysis. The approach has pitfalls. It can, for example, direct a reader's attention to narrow concerns that are irrelevant to what gives a play value—in the way, say, that a concern with Aristotle's "unities" influenced earlier critics. Further, its central terms—like "audience," "experience," and "response"—are very slippery and imprecise indeed. In the hands of acute critics it can yield useful results, as it does here for the most part; but whether that represents a triumph of the method or is just the result of sensitive analysis is not at all certain. Still, the question Jones poses is certainly important both to readers Reviews101 of Renaissance drama and to those interested in broader questions of audience response. How do these villains manage to "engage" audiences composed of people who would in real life disapprove of their immoral and antisocial actions? As Jones sees it, a key element is the knavish character's ability to control events, to make others his dupes, and to get us to share the fun of gulling them. Through his zest for mischief and his power to shape the scene (winking our way all the time), the knavish hero engages audience interest in his activity, so long as he convinces us that he's in it for the same reasons we are—for fun and pleasure. In discussing these issues Jones perhaps rests more securely than he should on a distinction between engaging with a character's point of view and identifying with him: "We can share a knave's enjoyment of his own sport at a foolish victim's expense without likening ourselves to him" (p. 6), Jones says, citing Richard III as a good example of what he is talking about in that "his monstrous appearance . . . naturally works to preclude . . . identification" (p. 5). This is a plausible-sounding premise, until one recalls Freud...