Renaissance Drama, n.s. 10 ed. by Leonard Barkan (review)

286 Comparative Drama his naivete about life, Hamlet . . . fails to experience the classical enlightenment of the tragic hero that Oedipus exemplifies with the expunging of his outer physical eye and the opening of his intellectual eye, and that Aristotle designates the moral climax in a narrative of thought” (p. 195). The problem of naivete is, I think, more with the critic than with Hamlet. The conclusion about the film I find no more enlightening: “it specializes in cultivating the conjunctive, as opposed to the disjunctive, forces that prevail in the universe of relativity among inescapably related individuals” (p. 203). In the last essay Homan explores “five general theories on the possibility of translating Shakespeare’s plays to a primarily visual medium such as the cinema” (p. 207). Without rehearsing the theories, I can report that they range along a scale from impossible to possible— all of which is followed curiously by a “Coda” which says in effect that movies “prove unsuitable for the expansive nature of Shakespeare’s plays” (p. 235). It is unfortunate that in this essay, published several years earlier, Homan did not revise to take account of Jack Jorgens’ Shakespeare on Film (1977). One factual error: Homan cites Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” as being from Q1 (p. 221), but, of course, this reading is from the Folio text. The disappointment that I feel about this book as a whole is itself perhaps more than words can witness. DAVID M. BERGERON University of Kansas Renaissance Drama, n.s. 10. Ed. by Leonard Barkan. Evanston: North­ western University Press, 1979. Pp. 216. $22.95. Comedy is the subject of this volume, with which Renaissance Drama enters its twenty-fifth year of publication. Two of the essays of the varied collection examine plays of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is represented twice again in comparisons with Marlowe and Jonson, respectively. Jonson and Massinger are next with two articles for each. Chapman and a forgotten sixteenth-century Italian writer, Bernardo Accolti, have single essays devoted to them. That on Accolti by Howard Cole is by no means the least significant, and it is certainly one of the most fascinating because of the intimate picture it provides of the life and times of an author once celebrated as único Aretino, the unique man from Arezzo. Cole argues persuasively that Accolti’s comedy Virginia is not a negligible analogue to Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, since it anticipates the Shakespearean qualities of a problem play; it is “witty, ironic, skeptical, and sometimes even cynical in its handling of fairy-tale motifs and virtue-story conventions.” Even Shakespeare’s nontraditional dramatization of the old tale had something of a tradition. Several essays challenge or modify the standard interpretations of particular comedies, most successfully perhaps Michael Neill’s “Mas­ singer’s Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” Reviews 287 Without denying loose ends in Massinger’s city comedy, Neill shows that its social criticism is more inclusive than that of a Jonsonian satire of the extortionate arriviste Sir Giles Overreach; rather, it conveys quite generally the pangs of the Jacobean transition to a capitalist, cash-nexus society. While Massinger, like Shakespeare, took “a fundamentally con­ servative attitude” toward this process, the play also points up through Overreach “the nightmare projection of the emergent capitalism, . . . the new social order whose perfection Marx was to describe.” It should be said that Shakespeare’s conservatism, just as his attitudes in general, is subject to doubt; but Neill’s claim for Massinger’s gains persuasiveness by the parallels to tracts of the time he quotes. Challenging though less convincing appears to me Lee Bliss’s reinterpretation of Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears as conforming to Chapman’s usually gentle Christian humanism rather than being a cynical, disillusioned piece. Bliss seems to me to make too much of the non-prominent servant Lycus by declar­ ing him to be the spokesman for the moral norm the play is alleged to propagate. Tharsalio’s cynical perspective is surely more congruous with the drama’s topsy-turvy world than Lycus’s benevolent normalcy. Chap­ man was not so benign a moralist that...