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292Comparative Drama negotiation. She concludes that "for male and female viewers alike, these texts offer a multiplicity of possible spectator positions running the gamut of resistance, affirmation of subjection, or contradictory combinations of the two, depending on gender, racial, and class factors" (p. 250). In sum, Yarbro has brought a wealth of poststructuralist theory to bear on the honor plays of Lope de Vega. In so doing, she opens up many new avenues for considering his work and that of other Golden Age playwrights as well. I am sure that her work will pave the way for future feminist studies of these and other comedias and that her book will be a benchmark for feminist criticism of Spanish Golden Age theater. MARGARET RICH GREER Princeton University Grace Tiffany. Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Pp. 237. $37.50. Grace Tiffany's Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters is an ambitious, learned, and stimulating contribution to the discussion of gender issues in Renaissance drama, particularly the comedies of Shakespeare and Jonson. Its signal undertaking is to locate Renaissance depictions of androgyny as part of a bipolar tradition reaching back to classical Greece and Rome. The beasts and monsters of Tiffany's title signify those two views of androgyny, the positive and the negative, "mythic androgyny" and "satiric androgyny." Mythic androgyny identifies a "principle of relatedness: of potent human connectedness and progress" (p. 12). It is "eros" not so much as sexual libido but as "a metamorphic power that compels human creativity, procreation, and personal and social growth through intimate connectedness" (p. 12). Here bestiality expresses a larger urge for relatedness. Thus mythic androgyny constitutes a basic psychic principle: "the capacity—indeed, the compulsion—of members of both sexes to sacrifice private identity to powerful, progressive relationships" (p. 13). By contrast, the "satiric androgyne" defines the reaction against that prior and primary mythic urge. The satiric androgyne —a mockingly portrayed masculine woman or feminine man— "emerged from a masculine ethos of distrust in personal and social relationships, particularly in relationships with women" (p. 14). Satiric androgynes appear as "vain, morally reduced, and socially monstrous"; they reflect a rationalistic and skeptical attack on myth and an authorially detached attack on corrupt society. Around these large, competing valences Tiffany would organize the gender issues in Renaissance drama and the classical tradition anticipating it. Reviews293 Those distinctions have the advantage of allowing Tiffany to connect representations of androgyny to literary genre and form. More broadly, Tiffany's privileging of the mythic androgyne facilitates her attack on "the a priori assumption that patriarchal norms held universal sway over Renaissance minds" (p. 17) and her claim that the mythic figure evidences not a relentlessly gendered culture but "the suspension of gender roles" (p. 18). Tiffany, then, would oppose viewing Renaissance literature as always and inescapably gendered. The mythic androgyne will thus be the hero (and heroine) of Tiffany's study, but the expansive powers attributed to the mythic androgyne (relatedness, connectedness , creativity, procreation) will require it to do some heavy lifting. To her credit, Tiffany's remarkably wide range of references and stimulating commentary make for an engaging argument. The first chapter of Erotic Beasts surveys the androgyne dialectic from classical literature through the Renaissance. The burden is historically "to distinguish this ancient mythic androgyne and the nonindividuated human community it represents from the newer satiric androgyne " (p. 23) so as to establish the "originary status" and "transcultural value" of the mythic androgyne. Here Tiffany passes deftly through a considerable amount of classical material, particularly Greek figures such as Athene, Odysseus, Tiresias, Dionysus, and Hercules and works such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and particularly Plato's Symposium. Tiffany is at pains to demonstrate that the mythic androgyne offers "a fluid, interactive model for human identityin -relationship" (p. 33) rather than another version of an "isolated or stable self (p. 29). While much of her argument is compelling, I must admit to lingering doubts that bestiality in classical myth should be understood as a principle of human relatedness and community. The rational, skeptical, satiric, defensively masculine treatment of androgyny Tiffany finds emerging in the...

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