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humanities 365 fashioning, but it also suggests that `successful self-fashioning, especially in the context of a ruthlessly Machiavellian society may be only an act; only the creation of a complex illusion.' The play's instability, and that of the other plays, McAdam suggests, is attributable to an Augustinian Christianity that haunted and divided the parallel selves of their author. That dividedness is manifest in all the plays, in their representations of the confused desire for sexual and religious surrender. McAdam writes with eloquence and feeling of the nightmare conclusion of Edward II: `However artful [its] resolution, this poetic drama's most memorable and affecting utterance ... is unquestionably the horrible scream with which Edward dies, an utterance which in effect deconstructs the text ... the dream of premature self-surrender turned into nightmare, the incomplete soul screaming in agony.' Among the manifold strengths of this impressive book are its oldfashioned scholarship, its bold encounters with contemporary critical theory, and its illuminating and trenchant new readings of each of Marlowe's dramatic texts. (DEREK COHEN) Lynne Magnusson. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters Cambridge University Press. x, 222. $81.20 Lynne Magnusson has written a short book whose importance stands in inverse proportion to its size. Focusing on the shaping power of forms of social discourse in both Shakespeare's dramatic texts and the Elizabethan language of letter-writing, Magnusson takes aim at a presupposition that has bedevilled Shakespeare criticism for at least a century: that speech issues `from within the character rather than from interactions among characters,' and that the personality of the speaker is a preordained constant that wholly determines the nature of that speaker's utterance. This presupposition flies in the face of what modern discourse theory has revealed about the anticipatory and determinative nature of social exchange B that, as Bakhtin puts it, the word in living conversation `is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word,' and that the speaking subject is itself `formed partly out of this unceasing play of dialogue.' In other words, as much as we shape our speeches, we also speak each other into shape. The older presupposition also contradicts what modern criticism has shown of the changeable, problematical nature of dramatic character in Shakespeare. Why has it taken so long for someone to challenge it, then? Because, as Magnusson demonstrates, linguistically oriented criticism of Shakespeare's style has pursued its course in isolation from historical criticism of social discourse. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue sets out to bridge this gap between `close reading and 366 letters in canada 1999 cultural poetics' by applying social science research on politeness discourse and theoretical research on linguistic exchange to the social situations that unfold in both Shakespeare's dramatic texts and the epistolary texts of his contemporaries. The result is a highly original and fruitful study that defines its goals with admirable modesty (`to identify some productive points of intersection that can take the practical criticism of Shakespeare's language in a new direction') but that outstrips these goals and persuasively offers a major reorientation of critical perspective and the potential for a new alignment of plays in the Shakespeare canon. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue gives equal attention to Shakespeare's plays and to Elizabethan letters and books on letter-writing; yet, while Magnusson's discussion of the relation between verbal exchanges and power dynamics in the latter texts provides fascinating evidence of thèbaroque and complicated' ways in which social discourse helped to creatècomplex forms of subjectivity' B and convincing evidence that the generative dialogues of Shakespeare's characters reflect actual conditions of the world in which the playwright lived B it is her treatment of these processes in the plays themselves that constitutes the most far-reaching contribution of this book. Most especially, her interpretations of the role of social discourse in Much Ado about Nothing, King Lear, and Othello open significant and exciting approaches to these plays. In attending to `the maintenance work of language' in Much Ado, means by which the conversational exchanges of its characters sustain and repair the social fabric, Magnusson demonstrates how the Dogberry and Beatrice-Benedick scenes liberate the productive resources of language that...

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