Pseudo-Martyr by John Donne (review)

150 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 have been delighted to serve unwittingly in Borachio's plot, playing the engaged heiress and in her mistress's gown.' Such thinking has textual implications as well. The well-known puzzler when Borachio outlines his plot to climb to Hero's chamber window and let the onlookers 'hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio [editors frequently emend to Borachio]' (nj.43-4) is explained thus: Margaret, suspecting no harm, has been persuaded to play at life upstairs. Her calling Borachio Claudio follows from her allowing hers~lf to be called Hero.' It is a small example, but it displays the kind of thinking Zitner does about why these people behave as they do, and what that behaviour has to do with their sense of their social positions. Beatrice's wit, delightful in itself, is considered within the context of its target: the cult of war and male alliance, which breeds misogyny and the treacherous honour that motivates the testimony of Claudio and Don Pedro against Hero. Beatrice's 'engaging self-deprecation' reflects her understanding of the game of wit - 'to be listened to at all, a woman must amuse,' but it also reveals her anxieties, about marriage and about remaining single. Benedick's witty misogyny may be a mask, but it 'is evidently difficult to remove,' linked as it is to 'the self-serving cliches of male victim and persecuting virago'; still, there is an intimation that his views are 'not deeply held, and mask both his fear of marriage and an attraction to Beatrice so great as to need disguising, especially from Benedick himself.' Such is a sampling of the discriminations of Zitner's polished introduction . As for the text itself, the editorial choices are judicious, and the annotations deft. The only quarrel I occasionally have with it is the rather too liberal sprinkling of stage directions, a few of which I found either questionable or intrusive, although even there one can appreciate the pedagogical impulse. The whole edition teaches us a way of reading, and of imagining, this sceptical and witty social cornedy. (ANTHONY B. DAWSON) John Donne. Pseudo-Martyr. Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Anthony Raspa McGill-Queen's University Press. lxxxix, 427. $65.00 The modern editor proposing an edition of Pseudo-Martyr cannot afford to labour under any illusion about this work's potential for popularity. Not even an enthusiastic coterie of scholars in the field should be anticipated. Professor Raspa reminds us that even Sir Geoffrey Keynes, author of the indispensable Bibliography of Donne, finds it 'dull reading,' and that the nineteenth-century biographer and editor of Donne, Augustus Jessopp, remarked that only a 'monomaniac' would read it through. HUMANITIES 151 Evelyn Simpson, student and editor of Donne's prose, no less, found it 'almost unreadable.' What odds, then, on a modern readership? Possibly Donne entertained doubts about the stamina of even his contemporaries , accustomed as they were to exhaustive theological controversy : in his 'Advertisement to the Reader' he explains his intention of placing it in the position of epilogue by the admonishment that no 'man might well and properly be called a Reader, till he were come to the end of the Booke.' Then, apparently relenting this severity, he decides to move it to the front of the nearly three hundred pages of dense, immensely erudite, argumentative text which tends towards the conclusion 'that those which are of the Romane Religion in this Kingdome, may and ought to take the Oath of Allegeance.' But this seeming change of plan also accomplishes a thoroughly characteristic and dramatic manoeuvre: it presents Donne Agonistes at the entrance to his discourse: I have beene ever kept awake in a meditation of Martyrdome, by being derived from such a stock and race, as, I beleeve, no family, (which is not of farre larger extent, and greater branches,) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, than it hath done. This is Donne's driving passion in his first significant, but belated - as Raspa stresses - entry into printed publication. It has the same note of urgency as his contemplation of...