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158 Reviews Leggat, A., Shakespeare's political drama: the history plays and the Roman plays, London, Routledge, 1988; pp. xvi, 266; R.R.P. A U S $105.00 [distributed in Australia by the Law Book Company Limited, Sydney]. This book has two lines of enquiry: what views of politics, if any, emerge from the plays treated, and how these views are influenced by their medium, drama. The answer to thefirstquestion puts Professor Leggatt, who is a professor at the University College, University of Toronto, curiously in line with two wellknown Canadian novelists, Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood. It is that we must accept imperfection; here, in politicd leaders and structures. 'We are to accept the play, as Henry [V] accepted his unrewarding role and the Chorus his imperfect medium' (p. 138). The answer to the second question is that what the theatre can do best is to construct myths and then control them by, and test and authenticate them against, human reality. 'The myth of kingship as a divine office' (p. 60) is destroyed by Richard II and Henry, later IV. That is why Henry V is the play that best instances Shakespeare's view of politics; because we see Henry V constructing, and imperfectly living, his own myth. The play that shows the heroic myth and imperfect reality most nearly fused is Anthony and Cleopatra. If this double thesis sounds coherent, then it soundsright.The argument is coherent. If it sounds unexciting, then I have made it sound wrong. The book is very exciting, the most readable I know of on the history plays since Emrys Jones's Shakespeare's Origins. This is mainly due to the very high qudity of the dramatic comment, which is continuously and brilliantly perceptive, beautifully moral and alive. The book consists entirely of dramatic comment. There are no discussions of background, no passages of generdization. The style is dryly witty, laconic and very compressed. The main fault I see is related, for it is that of omissions. One wants to know more. W h y does Leggatt seem to see legitimacy as unimportant in the English plays, what does he think about Queen Margaret (in 2 and 3 Henry VT), dramatic structure [he treats, and at one point seems to refer to, the three parts of Henry VI as 'the play', (p. 11)], Shakespeare's view of war and of the mob. In the fashion of the new acting Bradleyanism, the record of performances is constantly drawn on. The notes, which are brief, show an impressive acqudntance with criticism of the last fifty years, and Dr. Johnson. Poststructuralism gets one mention, in the second paragraph of the preface, as a 'current tendency to see society as a structure of oppression and exploitation and to read Shakespeare accordingly'. It is characterized in note 1 (instancing Stephen Greenblatt's 'Invisible bullets', 'the work of a first-rate critic') as 'limited, as Tillyard is limited, by the sheer power of its myth, which produces a single-minded reading' (p. 245). Leggatt offers 'not a single, homogeneous view of Shakespearian politics' (p. x) but a series of Shakespearian explorations, Reviews , ™ ending in the vision and attitude of Henry VIII, which 'leaves us with no virtue higher than graceful surrender' (p. 237). Kevin Magarey Department of English Umversity of Adeldde Le Goff, J., Medieval civilization, trans. J. Barrow, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988; pp. xx, 393; 6 maps; 34 plates; 25 figures; R.R.P. A U S $49.25. Twenty-four years separate the initid publication of Jacques Le Goff s La civilisation de I'Occident medieval (Paris, 1964) from its English translation; a delay which in itself says much about the gulf separating English and French historiographical traditions in the sixties and early seventies. Times have changed since then. Monolingual history students have been able to keep up with Le Goff's more detailed studies in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980) and The Medieval Imagination (1988), both collections published by the University of Chicago Press three years after they had first been assembled in France. The Birth ofPurgatory (Chicago, 1984) was dso quick to be translated. Medieval Civilization provides an opportunity for...

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