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88Comparative Drama enough. As suggested earlier, the play's triumphal ending should not have been lopped off unless accompained by the scene in which Satan tries vainly to prevent that ending. Likewise, in modernizing the dialogue, Schell could also have rid the text of other distracting archaisms, including "thee" and "thou" as well as those that litter lines such as these, from one of the torturers: "We greet you well on your new jett,/ And make on you a moue" (p. 25). Even the actors seem unsure of these lines: the first is left unintelligible in performance, while the second is followed by—and is presumably explained by—the torturers saying "oo" in chorus; however, the original lines ("we grete jou wel on be newe gett/ and make on 30U a mowe") would probably best be translated as "We greet you well in the new fashion, and make a face at you" (or, both clearly and in rhyme with the rest of the stanza: "We'll greet you fashionably yet/ by grimacing at you"). An audience familar with the original or with Middle English will be baffled by the interpretation of the lines, while any other audience is likely simply to be baffled. Ultimately, then, I am not certain for whom this video has been produced. I would very much like to have seen the original stage performance , and would have found as much to admire as to criticize. However, I fear that as educational material this package adds all too little to the meager pool of resources for the medieval drama scholar. GARRETT P. J. EPP University of Alberta Larry S. Champion: "The Noise of Threatening Drum": Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. Pp. 172. $29.50. Larry Champion does in this book what has not been done for many years, indeed since the late 1950's, when Irving Ribner published The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare—that is, he considers Shakespeare's English history plays in the context of other contemporary plays about English history. This is a salutary undertaking, no matter who does it, for Shakespeare did not write in a cultural or literary vacuum. Champion's assumptions, moreover, are very different from Ribner's, and they make this book much more than a mere update of its predecessor . The influence of E. M. W. Tillyard is strong in Ribner's book, which Champion quotes at one point: "there can be no doubt that Shakespeare believed in this almost universally accepted concept of degree, and that he accepted the Tudor doctrines of absolutism and passive obedience" (p. 100). Far from subscribing to this assumption himself, Champion takes it as his principal point of opposition. He argues, in contrast, that "what Shakespeare believed" cannot be derived from the plays, because they present multiple perspectives on history and politics, in such a way as to appeal to a broad social cross-section in the Elizabethan popular theater. To be sure, Champion's task is less ambitious than Ribner's, since Champion does not discuss as many plays as Ribner, and he does not Reviews89 attempt to trace the history of the genre or to construct a theory of it. He excludes two of Shakespeare's English history plays (Richard III and Henry VIII) without explaining why, and he includes just five nonShakespearean plays: The Famous Victories of Henry V, Edward III, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Edmund Ironside. Treating the first four of these plays in a formulaic manner, Champion discusses each in a separate chapter. In each case, he briefly summarizes issues of date and authorship (where relevant) and critical responses to the play, outlines the "traditional" view of it—i.e., the view represented by Tillyard, Ribner, M. M. Reese, and others who were influenced by Tillyard—and finally offers what he calls "a realistic ideological perspective " (p. 120), designed to "deconstruct" the "traditional" view and to reveal how someone might have seen the play who did not come to it with the ideologically idealistic blinders of social privilege, wealth, and power. The word...

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