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426Comparative Drama positioned him to confront "the great creative task now facing him" (p. 202), though it employs evidence like the St. Lo broadcast that has come to light in the intervening years, is as sentimentally wrong as the original Times Literary Supplement review of Godot which interpreted the play as Christian allegory. Gordon's book is a curious testament to the continued mystification which surrounds Beckett and to the hunger of readers and audiences to be reassured this author is nonetheless "a man of courage and resilience" (p. 3), "sensitive and courageous" (p. 203). I believe he was indeed these things, as well as others, but his writing is thankfully never so simple nor so wholesome. J. C. C. MAYS University College Dublin Katharine Eisaman Maus. Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. ? + 222. $14.95 (paperback). In Inwardness and the Theater Katharine Eisaman Maus takes on the vexed and ongoing question of Renaissance notions of interiority by focusing on the theatrical, religious, and legal writings of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Since Stephen Greenblatt broached the question of interiority in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the tendency among Renaissance scholars has been to debunk modemist projections of genius and individuality by projecting poststructuralist notions of flatness and antisubjectivity onto Renaissance writings. Maus' point is that this reading of Renaissance interiority (or lack of it) is as extreme and anachronistic as is the modernist perspective; indeed she points out that comments about interiority during the Renaissance were as common as they are today. What distinguishes early modern concepts of interiority from contemporary concepts are, she suggests, the particular political and religious crises of the late Elizabethan period which led a number of thinkers to question whether interiority was, after all, a good thing. Maus brings to focus the Renaissance crisis of interiority by investigating a crucial rhetorical crux of the period: she notes how a large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean works at once take the idea of interiority for granted, and yet insist on its existence. This insistence on the obvious, Maus argues, gestures to the Renaissance as a period during which interiority undergoes a kind of crisis of definition and ethics. Specifically, the growing conflict between suspicion of hidden (interior) Catholic and radical Protestant views, juxtaposed with a growing affirmation of interiority as the location of integrity, yields conceptualizations of interiority as at once a site of deception and as a crucial locus of truth. Focusing on interiority as a crux, Maus contends that the theater is Reviews427 the preeminent place for addressing cultural fantasies and fears about interiority, since the theater makes the interior manifest. As such, the theater becomes a space within which Renaissance writers might explore religious and legal concerns about interiority—namely, anxieties about court flattery, hidden treasons, and heresies. It is in her attention to local details of late Elizabethan and Jacobean treatises on law and religion, as well as on Renaissance theater, that Maus shows herself to be making exemplary use of new historicist and cultural studies. Like Lisa Jardine' s Still Harping on Daughters or Patricia Fumerton's Cultural Aesthetics, Maus in Inwardness and the Theater resists the temptation to privilege narrowly the influence of historical events on the plot of a play. Instead, law, religion, and theater are seen as symptoms of larger cultural cruxes about the nature of selfhood that often yield discrete, even contradictory readings of interiority. Maus' facility with both traditional and postmodem theories of the body, law, and interiority enables her to move ably between Sigmund Freud and Judith Butler, William Empson and Eve Sedgwick without in the process disrupting her focus on Renaissance subjectivities. The early chapters exemplify Maus' reading of theater in light of religion and law by contextuahzing familiar readings of the plays within larger cultural crises. While Maus makes an innovative correlation between notions of interiority and class structure in Kyd's Lorenzo, her studies of Shakespeare's Richard 111 and Marlowe's Tamburlaine are concerned with showing why the well-known figure of the machiavel was so fascinating to late Elizabethan audiences; she suggests that these figures are projections of...

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