Ghose, Indira

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Renaissance faith in the power of ¢gures to move in the sense of stirring the emotions.TryHieronimo’s outpouring of grief in The Spanish Tragedy, ‘O eyes, no eyes . . .’, for example(another example of a pretty epanorthosis), which was still cited as the model of a tear-jerking speech in the 1620s (seeThomas May,The Heire).What is much easier for us to understand is the persuasive power of ¢gures to move usto a particular point of view, since this is still very much in evidence in political speech-making (though it is of course also true that people may be persuaded by being emotionallymoved). Quentin Skinner’s brilliant discussion of paradiastole, which many readers willalready know, is a good example. This ¢gure works through redescribing a vice as a virtue,so craftiness may be relabelled prudence, and even murder may be presented as a manlydeed. Skinner cites Peacham here, though it is Chapman’s version (‘Manly slaughter/Should never bear the account of wilful murder’) that perhaps takes this ¢gure to thelimit of its credibility. In a di¡erent vein, Ian Donaldson’s essay on syncrisis outlinesa ¢gure that o¡ers a side-by-side comparison, as in Plutarch’s Lives, in order to convinceus of the superiority of one subject over another. One of the implications of the essay is toshow that the modern idea of criticism, which emerged in the eighteenth century, doesindeed have a speci¢cally rhetorical source.To distinguish between two versions of movere does not mean that rhetoric makes nocontribution to the vitality of literature, as the essays by Gavin Alexander on prosopopoeia,which brings things to life through the spoken voice, and by Claire Preston on ekphrasis,the ¢gure of vivid description, demonstrate. Alexander makes the important point thatprosopon (Greek) and persona (Latin) are both words for mask and that ‘personhood inRenaissance ¢ctions is built on the rhetorical idea that a self is the word it speaks’. If thisworks at the expense of the modern concept of interiority, Preston’s essay shows how thecomplementary ¢gure of ekphrasis can use pictorial e¡ects to convey psychologicalinsights.There are further subtle and engaging contributions from Janel Mueller on the period,Sophie Read on puns, R.W. Serjeantson on testimonia, Katrin Ettenhuber on hyperboleand Brian Cummings on metalepsis; Patricia Parker’s well-known discussion of hysteronproteron also reappears. Since this is the ¢rst modern study speci¢cally devoted toRenaissance ¢gures of speech, as the editors justi¢ably claim, it is a pity that there is nomention of George T. Wright’s classic essay on hendiadys or of David Colclough’s morerecent work on parrhesia. But this is an outstanding contribution to the subjectçthe mostrewarding book about rhetoric I have ever read and a very ¢ne tribute to the late JeremyMaule, in whose memory it was conceived.neil rhodes University of St Andrewsdoi:10.1093/res/hgn060Advance Access published on 18 April 2008MATTHEW STEGGLE. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres. Pp. xivþ158(Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Cloth, »45.Why do TV shows and sitcoms use laugh tracks to signpost the funniest gags?The answer is that they draw on audience research that reveals that laughter iscontagious. According to the ¢ndings of Matthew Steggle’s performance-based study, thiswas no news to early modern playwrights. He argues that the early modern theatre had asreviews 617sophisticated a set of theories about how to evoke audience response as the entertainmentindustry that caters to the emotional needs of a mass audience today.Nonetheless, Steggle is careful to point out that emotions have cultural histories.The ideas about laughter and weeping that circulated in the Renaissance were not thesame as those that prevail today. While Aristotle’s dictum that laughter was the mark ofhumanity was endlessly recycled, excessive laughter and weeping were deplored as poten-tially dehumanising and a sign of a loss of rational control. Steggle admits one needs todistinguish between early modern attitudes towards laughing and views of weeping.Weeping was regarded in far more positive terms, re£ecting as it did the belief that lifewas a vale of tears, while laughter was linked to the sin of pride and expressed inordinateenjoyment of the pleasures of this world.At the heart of Steggle’s book is a quantitative analysis of a corpus of around eighthundred early modern stage plays, utilising the most sophisticated databases at the dis-posal of literary scholars today: Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Literature Online(LION).With their help Steggle ascertains, for instance, the fact that the standard verbalform for representing the sound of laughter on stage is ‘ha ha ha’; ‘he he he’ is frequentlyassociated with the laughter of a fool, while ‘ho ho ho’ is the gu¡aw characteristicallyattributed to the Devil. Onstage laughter is also signalled through implied stage directionssuch as holding one’s sides or clapping one’s hands. Analogously, weeping was representedgesturally by wringing the hands, wiping the eyes, or with the help of props such ashankerchiefs.Steggle’s main interest lies in the question whether early modern plays aimed to movelaughter or tears and whether this was seen as a yardstick of success. He asserts thatnumerous plays pointedly staked their claim to a share of audience laughter, that earlymodern mirth was loud and boisterous, and that the clowns deployed both comic devicessuch as face-pulling and verbal humour such as puns and obscenity to elicit laughter.Similarly, he draws on a range of contemporary texts, including eyewitness accounts, com-mendatory verse and internal evidence from the plays themselves, that corroborate thenotion that early modern actors inspired their audiences to weep and that their ability todo so was regarded as an index of theatrical skill.Next, Steggle tackles those playwrights who explicitly distance themselves from audi-ence laughterçLyly and Jonson. Lyly’s programmatic emphasis on ‘soft smiling, not loudlaughing’ was shaped by a Sidneyan aesthetics that posited laughter as vulgar. In theneo-classical precepts outlined in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, decorum was the keyword.These ideas were enthusiastically endorsed by Jonson, who repeatedly draws attentionto the classical notion of laughter as a social corrective. However, as Steggle points out,despite the theoretical views both playwrights aired, their theatrical practice clearly aimedat inducing audience amusement and providing ¢rst-rate stage entertainment.Steggle uses the play Lust’s Dominion, probably a collaborative e¡ort by Dekker, Day,Haughton, and Marston, to test the vexed issue of a breach of decorum, as in the case oflaughter stimulated by tragedy. He uses the notion of contagious laughter to assert thatthe gleeful chuckles of the Machiavellian protagonist in the play would have provoked asimilar mirthful reaction from the audience. Indeed, he declares that as a general princi-ple, laughter and tears onstage trigger the same response with the audienceçonly to admitthat Shakespeare tends to complicate issues by pointing to the close proximity betweenlaughter and tears.It is when Steggle turns to entire plays that both the strengths and the weakness ofhis approach become visible. The study o¡ers a wealth of evidence about early modern618 reviewsperformance practices that has never been amassed before. But Steggle’s avowed aim tofocus purely on the physical phenomenon of laughter and weeping and to avoid all discus-sion of the comic and the tragic leads to a narrowing of focus that tends to overlook thecomplexity of the theatrical experience itself. Laughter is not only cued by the japes ofclowns, but also by the satirical representation of follies, by topical allusions or by scape-goat ¢guresçto name only a few varieties of humour that do not necessarily involveonstage laughter. Indeed, as the comedian Jerry Lewis would point out, comedy thriveson malicious pleasure: ‘the premiss of all comedy is a man in trouble’. Furthermore, theearly modern theatre was far too sophisticated to simply o¡er an early variety of cannedlaughter. Numerous plays explore the idea of laughter and its limits in onstage discussionsand plays within plays. Audience laughter at the gulling of Malvolio or the Nine Worthiesin Love’s Labour’s Lost, for instance, becomes increasingly di⁄cult to sustain and is calledinto question. It is to Steggle’s credit that he draws attention to an endlessly fascinatingtopic, one fraught with contradictions and ambiguities that reward further investigation.indira ghose University of Fribourgdoi:10.1093/res/hgn066Advance Access published on 29 April 2008GORDON MCMULLAN. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in theProximity of Death. Pp. xiiþ 402. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Cloth, »55.Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing is a major contribution tocriticism. Shakespeareans, but also readers interested in lateness as a critical trope or as amanifestation of creative genius, will ¢nd much to challenge and interest them in this book.The idea that Shakespeare had a ‘late phase’ is most often associated with the Victoriancritic Edward Dowden, who divided Shakespeare’s life into four periods: ‘In the workshop’,‘In the world’, ‘Out of the depths’ and ‘On the heights’. Shakespeare’s late plays belong tothis ¢nal period, when, according to Dowden’s model, Shakespeare emerged from his tragicphase, recognising the power of redemption and reconciliation and discovering a hard-won, late-blooming serenity allegedly evident in his romances. Dowden’s objective was tounderstand Shakespeare as an individual, extrapolating a psychobiography from the evi-dence found in his plays. As is often the case with Shakespeare criticism, Dowden’sShakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) and Shakspere (1877) expose at least asmuch about Victorian preoccupations and about Dowden himself as they do about theirputative subject. McMullan’s book is in some ways no exception to this general rule. LikeDowden, McMullan reveals much about the current state of criticism and about himself,particularly in his idiosyncratic, highly personal introduction. It is especially fortunate,then, that McMullan is both a knowledgeable interpreter of critical approaches and anextremely engaging personality in his own right. Guided by his roving curiosity and stylishprose, the reader is carried along through an analysis that ventures into art and music aswell as literary and cultural theory. The result is a rich and deep sense of lateness as acritical concept that applies not only to Shakespeare but also to Picasso, Rembrandt andBeethoven among the many other creative minds discussed in this wide-ranging study.McMullan explores the extent to which the idea of late style is a critical construct ratherthan, as has often been argued, a characteristic feature in the career of a certain kind ofgenius. In this sense, the book is a work of Shakespeare reception, tracing the myth ofreviews 619

matthew steggle. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

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