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DEEP RIVERS RUN SMOOTH 87 It is arrogant to assume that our productions of Shakespeare necessarily give us more than those of seventy or a hundred years ago. We find the old style amusing, but this is not because we know more about Shakespeare. If the sense of the plays lives in their words, as long as the words are reaching an audienceand they do not always do so in modem productions-then the plays are alive. In a declamatory tradition an audience will expect and listen through an operatic style; in the tradition that Peter Hall describes in the interview quoted above the audience will expect a delivery which responds to its own 'cool' and 'intellectual' perceptions. To judge from the texts, Elizabethan actors and audiences were capable of a wide range of styles of delivery and modes of response within the space of one play, and I do not see that either we or the Victorians have rediscovered that cultural breadth. Perhaps this should be the 'invisible vanishing point' for which we should aim in reading and performing the plays, but we should certainly not comfort ourselves that we have arrived there; our search for the fully realized Shakespeare will continue. Deep Rivers Run Smooth WYMAN H. HERENDEEN John Seelye. Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature New York: Oxford University Press 1977. ix, 423, illus. $18.25 There are strong and subtle currents in these waters, and the reader must travel them cautiously. For John Seelye's book is very alluring and all humanity is inclined to love its rivers, however unpredictable they may at times be. Prophetic Waters reflects the evolving interest, particularly in American studies, in the interdependence of geography and society's intellectual output. And one of the main strengths of Seelye's approach is that it avoids the rigid schematization that troubles other major works in that critical tradition, such as Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). For Seelye, the myths and cultural self-images that influence our approach to reality are themselves modified by their encounter with that reality. As the author explains; 'It is a self-evident truth that fiction mirrors reality, but it is equally true ... that fiction is reflected in reality, that historical episodes have a tendency to assume the terminations ofFreytag's pyramid' (p 5). Rivers uniquely embody the paradoxical defining and metamorphic quality in the early settlers' response to the American landscape: a response which had to reconcile 'Old World traditions ' with 'New World occasions' (p 4). Seelye's principal interest is in literature rather than landscape, although he clearly wants to mediate between a primarily literary study - such as R.W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955) -and one which is primarily geographic-such as E.C. Semple's American History and its Geographic Conditions (1903). While 88 WYMAN H. HERENDEEN Seelye's technique is perhaps closer to Lewis's, some of the finest parts of Prophetic Waters are his readings of the 'anthropogeography' of the colonial period, Perhaps the most important recurrent idea in Prophetic Waters is that the direction of American culture has largely been determined by the clash between preconceived ideas and the realities of early life in America. It is the demonstration of this relation between idea and action that determines the materials that Seelye has chosen to examine. Thus he writes about the 'narratives, histories, and poetry with which ... writers gained metaphoric mastery over the landscape ,' and in so doing he succeeds admirably in showing the 'literariness of literal events' (pp 4, 392). His materials cover the period from Ralegh (unfortunately spelled 'Raleigh') to William Byrd, and include much that is quite minor and ephemeral and all but omits some things considered central to early American literature, such as the works of Edward Taylor, Thomas Hooker, and Anne Bradstreet. But Seelye's plan warrants these omissions just as it creates a context that justifies his inclusion of so much that is minor. This perhaps above all else makes Prophetic Waters such an important and successful work, for it is a revisionist 's view of early American literature...

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