The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors by Molly Smith, and: Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology by Cynthia Marshall (review)

Reviews261 Given the wealth of manuscript and printed sources cited or mentioned in the notes, a bibliography at the end of the volume would have been very informative and welcomed. Similarly, all long Latin quotes should have been translated into Italian (the days of general scholarly fluency in Latin are—alas—long gone, even in Italy). In spite of such observations , any other criticisms or regrets that could be levelled at this volume are truly overshadowed by the enormous contribution it makes to the history of theater and spectacle in Renaissance Florence. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto Molly Smith. The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. Pp. 193. $32.50. Cynthia Marshall. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology . Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 142. $24.50. The representation of humanity's seemingly endless capacity for nastiness, commonly known as evil in former times, is undoubtedly a dominant phenomenon in drama of the early Stuart period. Molly Smith's study centers quite strongly on the phenomenon of evil in Shakespeare's plays, though it also gives space to Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Kyd, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton , Shirley, Tourneur, and Webster. Of these others, Middleton is given the fullest treatment. Smith's thesis is that what may be called evil is best understood in terms of a range of socio-cultural paradigms. She singles out three and gives a substantial chapter to each. In the first of these, "Evil as Nonbeing : Physical and Mental Fragmentation," Smith argues that "Renaissance theories about the body . . . reiterate the Augustinian notion of evil as lack of essence" (p. 38). She makes a very convincing case for physical dismemberment and mental fragmentation as being much more than sensationalist exercises in lurid indulgence in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy as well as in several of Shakespeare 's plays. There is also some interesting recourse to James I's own writing in Basilikon Down: she sees James as asserting a political dimension to imagery of the body's wholeness in order "to reaffirm hierarchy" (p. 40). Whether in fact the imagery of negation—imaged in terms of fragmentation, incompleteness, and absence—derives (for Renaissance dramatists) from Augustine is a moot point, and Smith does nothing to demonstrate it. It is equally likely to come from other early medieval sources such as the Consolation ofPhilosophy, wherein Boethius proclaims that "evil is nothing" (Ill.xii; p. 112 in the convenient Penguin translation). 262Comparative Drama The second paradigm of "Evil as Corruption and Decline" focuses on parricide as the symbolic form of decline within patriarchal structures . For this chapter Smith works on the concept of evil as a kind of defilement and concentrates on René Girard's development of Paul Ricoeur. Here Smith sees it as being in the nature of tragedy to "deconsecrate , question, and re-evaluate patriarchal authority and responsibility " (p. 84). Once again the case is attractively argued with reference to a wide range of plays. One encounters the familiar New Historicist contention that literature subverts political authority. Smith goes so far as to imply that Stuart drama formed public opinion rather than reflected it, but she backs away from this position towards the end of the chapter, for "in the final analysis, theatrical destruction of patriarchal power is both subversive and revertive" (p. 104). In exploring "Evil as Deviations from the Norm" in her third main chapter, Smith, interrogating Durkheim's thesis, applies it to Bakhtin's concept of carnival and the carnivalesque. Aware that social phenomena are capable of sustaining more than one interpretation, Smith echoes Bakhtin's view that in "any epoch and any social group, there is not one, but several mutually contradictory truths, not one but several diverging ideological paths" (p. 109). For many readers this will be the most satisfying and thought-provoking chapter in the book. The section on "Images of the 'Woman-on-top'" contains a particularly fine analysis of The Taming of the Shrew. New Historicism is one of the most vital and valuable forces in contemporary critical writing. Molly Smith works impressively within this mode. However...