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HUMANITIES 197 Patricia Parker. Shakespearefrom the Margins: Language, Culture, Context University of Chicago Press. x, 392. US $52.00 cloth, us $19.95 paper In Shakespearefrom the Margins, Patricia Parker gathers, revises, and greatly expands essays on Shakespeare she has written in the 1990s. The book's seven chapters all focus on the .Imatter' of language, that is, on 'the contemporary contexts and historical resonances of Shakespearean wordplay .' By attending to language, she sets aside the emphases on authorial intention, character psychology, chronology, and logical consistency that Wltil recently had dorrrinated Shakespeare criticism for a couple of centuries. Still her readingpractice is powerfully inclusive; it draws up into itself the New Criticism's 'close reading' and, with the exception of New Historicism's subversion-is-containment model, most of what has since appeared on the critical scene: deconstruction; feminism; the cultural materialism inspired by Raymond Williams; studies of race, class, and gender; queer theory; and postcolonialism. No matter how sophisticated the practice and how wide-ranging the research, Parker's readings are marvellous1y accessible; even the undergraduate reader can be, in the words of Hamlet's Horatio, edified (Le., aided) by her Margins. Chapter 1 is devoted to an exploration of the 'Shakespearean preposterous ' - hysteron proteron, putting the cart before the horse - with all its potential to disrupt aculture founded on precedence. Beginning,preposterously , at the end and then the beginning of the canon with the marginal plays The Winter's Tale and Love's Labour's Lost, Parker follows inversions of 'proper' order across the canon, to conclude that reading Shakespeare's plays as a canon is itself preposterous since they did not become one until the eighteenth century. The whole of chapter 2 is lavished on The Comedy ofErrors in explicit defiance of critical tradition, which dismisses this play as Shakespeare's unskilful -'prentice work. Parker ponders how, although Errors is saturated with bibHcal allusions, the myriad allusions are dislocated from the play's action, which is governed instead by post-Christian commercialstructures. Another earlycomedy,A Midsummer Night's Dream, is" the primary but not exclusive object of study in chapter 3. Parker's reading enters Dreambyway of the relativelyneglected subplot ofthe 'rude mechanicals,' inductingSnug the joiner; her novel attention to the wordplay based on Snug's material craft of joinery subverts the dominance usually enjoyed in criticism by aristocratic characters in that it demonstrates how inseparably the nobles' exalted figuration is joined to the mechanical arts. From this concern " about class, chapter 4 turns to the issue of gender through a reading of another marginal play, The Merry Wives ofWindsor a reading that begins with the play's most marginal scene, the grammar scene (IV.i), which parodies the art of translation. Parker traces the broad early modem semantic network of translation, which embraced, among other discourses, transporting property, construing texts, and translating LEITERS IN CANADA editor. Textual and Theatrical f::>l1czke:;pel':lre: Uu:estl,ons 1 ..... :;~T£1,..'OTh, of Iowa Press. X, 268- us of offers a assimilation or at mE~oretlcal ideas. For many Theatre scholars llistoricists to dJs,cm;s can or count as evidence the claims we of the ..""...",.......,........"'4-",. the stance the theatre historian as ...

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