Christian Irony in Shakespeare’s Histories by Roy Battenhouse (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 335 for salvation, when understood in the light ofChrist" (84), his eschewal of pictorial representations of biblical narratives, and the surprising elevation of the book of Tobit, which promoted marriage and family, all of which foreshadow similar concerns among the sixteenth-century reformers. And in chapter 5, Dove carefully outlines the lineaments of a Wycliffite hermeneutic that subtly intertwined the understanding of the Bible as an open text, accessible to all readers, with one that, following Augustine's lead in De Doctrina Christianarequired careful attention to figurative language, authorial intent, Christological interpretations, and fidelity to the law of love. As she notes, "[t]he first English Bible encourages its readers to engage with the full complexity of the biblical text, trusting them to work as hard at interpreting God's law as the faithful throughout the history of the church have worked on their behalf" (197). The First English Bible is a magisterial accomplishment-the bibliographie appendices alone are worth the price of the book-but it is also quite clearly the fruit of loving, sustained scholarship. In this, Mary Dove emulates the Wycliffite translators she studied, engaging with the full complexity of the manuscript archive, working hard on our behalf, and offering us the gift of her supple and nuanced interpretations. Susan M. Felch CalvinCollege Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories. 2 vols. By Roy Battenhouse. Edited by Peter Milward. Tokyo: Renaissance Institute. No ISBN. 149 pp. and 106 pp. respectively. ¥2000 (approximately $20-not readily available in traditional U.S. markets). Long before the current "turn to religion" in literary studies, Roy Battenhouse made the turn himself. Born in 1912, he was educated between the world wars, earning his doctorate at Yale in 1938 and going on to train for the Episcopal priesthood, in which he was ordained in 1942. He practiced his priestly vocation by pursuing his avocation, which was the study and teaching of literature. After brief appointments at three other institutions, Battenhouse was hired by Indiana University, where he taught from 1950 to 1982. His first book, published in 1941, was on Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which he analyzed as a "study in Renaissance moral philosophy" (the book's subtitle), and his proudest achievement was Shakespearean Tragedy: ItsArt and Christian Premises, published in 1969.In 1994,the year before he died, he published a digest of edited articles and book chapters with the descriptive title, Shakespeare's ChristianDimension: An Anthologyof Commentaries. As a tribute to Roy Battenhouse, his friend and fellow priest, the Jesuit scholar Peter Milward has edited and published ten essays by Battenhouse on Shakespeare's 336 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE history plays, all but one of them previously published as journal articles or book chapters. Issued in two slender paperback volumes by the Renaissance Institute of Sophia University, the essays include a brief foreword by Battenhouse's widow, Marian, explaining that she asked Milward to edit her husband's essays on the history plays in response to a final request from Battenhouse himself. Milward added a complementary eulogy and a short editorial introduction, but for the real introduction (and the first of the ten essays) the editor chose Battenhouse's own introduction to his digest of essays on the history plays in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension. The editor chose well, because the introduction accurately reflects the strengths and limitations of Battenhouse's particular turn to religion. Beginning and ending with divine providence, the essay outlines a sense ofhistory that is indebted about equally to St. Augustine (Battenhouse edited a collection of essays on Augustine in 1954), E. M. W Tillyard, and Lily Bess Campbell. "I had the good fortune in the 1930's;' Battenhouse acknowledges, "that the prevailing horizons of scholarship had begun to be challenged by a historicist named Lily B. Campbell" (1.20). Both Tillyard and Campbell reacted against nineteenth-century character criticism by interpreting Shakespeare's plays about English history against the background of Elizabethan ideas about history, which were strongly providential. Tillyard eventually carried the day with generalizations about "the Tudor myth;' which he argued was the principal shaping influence in the sequence of eight plays that Shakespeare wrote on English history from the reign of Richard II...