Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays by Joseph Addison (review)

145 representation of the powers and fallibilities of vision might do something other than respond to ‘‘assigned’’ conventions that Merritt takes for granted. Her opposition of ‘‘female visual agency’’ and ‘‘a voyeuristic male sexual economy’’ generates Beyond Spectacle’s conclusion that ‘‘within Haywood’s canon, attempts by women to alter their specular position have tentative results at best’’; these familiarly equivocal ‘‘results’’ may, however , comment most trenchantly upon the analyticrubricwhichproducedthem.Ms. Merritt thus demonstrates the challenge Haywood poses to contemporary genealogies of feminism, a challenge that demands configurations of agency attuned to the capacities of persons who are both modern and not. Helen Thompson Northwestern University JOSEPH ADDISON. Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. Pp. xxviii ⫹ 282. $24; $12 (paper). For some time now, Liberty Fund has been producing (and reprinting) at most reasonable prices superb editions of great interest to eighteenth-century scholars— works by Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hume, Adam Smith, Johnson, and Edmund Burke. The low prices and other titles in the series indicate the strongly conservative economic and political agenda (and its subsidies) that underwrites the enterprise, but as Smith somewhere notes, capitalism does have its virtues : good books at reasonable prices are worth the compromise. This edition of Cato is beautifully printed on quality paper (as are all Liberty Fund books), accompanied by Theobald ’s ‘‘Life and Character’’ of Cato, derived from Plutarch and other sources, and designed for readers of the play, along with 32 Addison essays, primarily from the Spectator and the Freeholder. The essays are pertinent, and among the annotations to the play are directions to those particular essays most relevant to certain passages. The Introduction is certainly serviceable, if not particularly insightful ; a Foreword by ForestMcDonald calls attention to the play’s significance to leaders of the American Revolution. While the editors have done no major editorial work, they have sought the best texts, using Donald Bond’s edition of the Spectator, for example, and choosing judiciously among available contemporary texts for their own versions. The play itself is generously and handsomely presented in Caslon typeface, with much white space; I found only one typographical error, ‘‘Portia’’ rather than ‘‘Portius.’’The annotations are slight,primarily cross-references to the accompanying essays, to words deemed unfamiliar to a modern audience, and to passages cited by American patriots. One can always quibble: when Juba says: ‘‘perhaps / I’m too officious, but my forward cares /would fain preserve a life . . . ,’’the notes define ‘‘forward cares’’ and ‘‘fain,’’ but much of the passage would seem to hinge on a now obsolete meaning of ‘‘officious ’’ that should also have been noted. Or, while it is nice to know that Benjamin Franklin used a line from Cato’s famous soliloquy at the opening of Act V for a section of his Autobiography, it would have been useful to note that Sterne borrowed from it as well for a most significant passage in A Sentimental Journey. Without doubt, however, this edition would serve instructors and students well in many eighteenth-century courses; it is good to be reminded, if nothing else, of 146 a timewhen pro patriadidnotmean‘‘love it or leave it.’’ Melvyn New University of Florida CHERYL WANKO. Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lubbock: Texas Tech, 2003. Pp. ix ⫹ 258. $37.50. Rendering human lives in textual form was an eighteenth-century passion: central in that it elevated forms like the journal , the letter, the biography, and the autobiography to prominence; and complicated in that it attests to and documents the era’s anxieties about power and representation . How can a human life be represented on a printed page? And whose lives are worth representing? In the case of the lives of actors, Ms. Wanko’scentral example, the problems of representation and power were acute. The essence of a performance—the performer’s gestures, voice, bearing, and body—do not translate well to the page. And the very act of taking on the role of another, imaginary person, of feigning to be something other than who you really are, undermines the sense of a settled, unified subject. Ms. Wanko’s book...