The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance by Rosalie L. Colie, and: Shakespeare’s Living Art by Rosalie L. Colie (review)

368 LETTERS IN CANADA Bouquet's Bre! et sommaire recueil, on the other hand, vividly conveys the pomp and palette of the dignitaries and retinues in motion. Obviously, if one wants to visualize the over-all effect of the setting and the action, one has to combine the various sources that are offered in this volume. The descriptive details lavished upon people and horses, costumes and arms, and intricate confections that were hardly meant for eating - or so it seems - are at times a bit cloying. But the very minuteness of the inventory can lead to humorous effects and perhaps this reader will not remain alone in having been reminded, in several passages, of the procession of the Ligueurs in La Satyre Menippee. (The presence of the Cardinal de Pelleve at the coronation also served as a memento.) It all adds up to a rich tapestry where the individual stitches sometimes are showing too much. The psychological interest of Jodelle's unhappy involvement in his ill-fated project is lacking here. While Bouquet's language certainly is not flat, it is full of mistakes that suggest a hasty redaction and no time for proofreading. These errors add a dimension of immediacy, if one wants to be charitable. The editors have fully alerted us to the negligence shown by the mastermind although a few of the mistakes we see probably cannot be ascribed to him, eg, 'pere du people' (p ~65), 'un table,' 'Les sceptre' (both p ~94), and certainly Bouquet has the right to plead immunity with regard to the footnotes ('vitrue,' n 124, p 1 37; 'une certain hauteur,' n 222, p 171). But these are no more than misplaced specks of mortar in a resplendent edifice that is highlighted by many new facets of Renaissance life on lofty occasions. Perhaps the red nylon carpet is all that is left of this past magnificence. (BODO L.a. RICHTER) Rosalie L. Calie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance. Barbara K. Lewalski, editor. University of California Press 1973, 128, $6.00; Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 370, $18.50 The Resources of Kind: Genre Th eory in the Renaissance is a set of four lectures Rosalie Colie delivered at Berkeley shortly before her death in ~972. In large part the lectures are an unashamed cento of insights and arguments the author developed in other works and at greater length, but for that very reason they may stand as an excellent introduction to, and characteristic sample of, the work of a most distinguished and idiosyncratic intellectual historian. And certainly, this slender volume is a learned, urbane, and persuasive plea for recognizing the Significance of genre in the literature of the Renaissance, which for her purposes the author defines as stretching from Petrarch to Swift. In talking about genre in the Renaissance, the author firmly establishes HUMANITIES 369 a very wide framework, in which official genre theory plays only one part. She draws our attention to the importance of classification systems developed by librarians (going back to Alexandria), and to the genre theory implicit in the encyclopaedic and subject-oriented practices of a rapidly expanding publishing industry. She writes well about the exclusionist tendencies, so common in literary theoreticians, who had an insatiable appetite for quarrelling about the nature of modern works that did not fit the limits of ancient genres. But her real interest is in the encyclopaedic and inclusionist tendencies of the age, and her work at its best - in this little book as in her larger works - is an exploration of the diverse and surprising mixtures of genre that underlie the great literary achievements of the Renaissance. Her lectures deal for the most part with 'inclusianis!' forms. One lecture is given over to small forms and to the encyclopaedic ambitions that are manifest even in the microcosms of the adage, emblem, sonnet, and epigram. New and mixed forms are the subject of her third lecture, and in her final lecture she glances at Bruno's Heroic Furies, Paradise Lost, and King Lear as pre-eminent examples of such mixtures. Shakespeare's Living Art is a collection of thematically related essays that...