Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority by Derek Cohen (review)

REVIEWS 232 broader conclusions that Coakley draws about medieval Christian notions of sanctity and gender. Even beyond Coakley’s contribution to understanding the roles and relationships between holy women and men—which is substantial— the book proposes a much-needed model for using hagiography critically as a source for historical inquiry. JESSICA ANDRUSS, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University Derek Cohen, Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003) 232 pp. However the ideas of memory and history are defined, it is indisputable that Shakespeare’s plays are all touched with unique structures of anteriority—the notion of a world or worlds which preceded the events shown onstage. A few such cases have been extensively explored—as in the case of multivalent, personal and international pre-play worlds of Hamlet and The Tempest. But there are many others—in The Winter’s Tale, for example, where the proleptic calm of the prior domestic lives of Leontes, Polixenes, Hermione, and Autolycus all belong in the category of histories only adumbrated by dialogue. Even—or perhaps especially—in history plays, prior events are an especially visible manufactured presence onstage, subject to multiple perspectives and significations . Indeed some events seem paradoxically positioned both in the past and in the future, such as when the epilogue of Henry V references past dramatic renditions of events which follow the play’s action. In the present volume, Derek Cohen proposes to explore “the proposition that within each play there exists verbal and visual evidence of a past that precedes the opening scene” (xiii). Cohen begins by tracing the deployment of histories in Othello, culminating in the final scene of that play, in which Cohen suggests that Othello “knows that he has been grossly deceived and made a fool of by Iago, and he knows that the Venetians who surround him and look on his tragic disgrace know these things too” (15). The next chapter discusses the ways in which Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays both stage history and stage the creation and retelling of history. In these plays, we see that “The king simply is; his monarchy survives until his death or until he is usurped” (22). Cohen goes on to suggest that Richard II’s “post-mortem power turns out to be greater than that he possessed alive and figures significantly in the various constructions of the English nation of these histories” (19). Many readers will find these claims obvious. The complicated question of the presence of the past in The Tempest is the next topic; for Cohen, both Caliban and Ariel can be seen as slaves to Prospero. In the following chapter, he suggests that Othello is ostracized because of his race, and that in “The Merchant of Venice, the barrier to the Jew’s salvation is his religion” (80). Repetition hampers Cohen’s prose, as do unsupported claims such as the assertion that Othello “has slept with Desdemona” (90) and that “Iago believes that Othello has slept with Emilia” (91). In King Lear a variety of limited windows on the past serve to explain and understand the present, whereas in Macbeth, the past is still more selectively glimpsed. Finally, an exploration of the figures of messengers and assassins is followed by a discussion of dismemberment (actual or threatened). Critical perspectives are referenced intermittently, and Cohen’s critique of the deployment of the past is at REVIEWS 233 times quite interesting—as in the discussion of the uses of history in King Lear. MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University C. R. Conder, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London, New York, Bahrain : Kegan Paul 2005) vii + 443 pp., 2 maps. This volume is published by Kegan Paul in the series Library of Chivalry. The author, Claude Regnier Conder (1848–1910), was a descendent of the Frenchborn Louis François Roubillac, the foremost sculptor in Britain in the eighteenth century. In 1872, Lt. Conder was appointed by the British government to the command of the Survey of Western Palestine, the first survey of the southern Levant. He returned to England, and for the next few years, between 1881 and 1884, he published the material that he had brought...