Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres by Lawrence DansonReview by: Sujata IyengarThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 220-221Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2671447 .

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220 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXII/1 (2001)

Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres. Lawrence Danson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. vi + 160 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0198711735. Part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series aimed at undergraduates, Lawrence Dan-

son's overview of Shakespeare and Renaissance genre theory is divided into six chapters: "The Genres in Theory," "The Genres Staged," "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies," "History," "Tragedy," "Epilogue." It self-consciously borrows Samuel Johnson's argument that part of a work's literary meaning comes fi-om its expansion or subver[sion] of previous conceptions of genre, and it begins by contrasting the classifications of modern Shakespear- eans with classical and Elizabethan genre-theory. Danson maintains the First Folio's distinc- tion of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, throughout the volume, finding the terms "romance" and "problem play" unhelpful; he instead discusses these plays as comic or tragic variations. He demonstrates both the hypothetical Renaissance ideal of pure genres and their simultaneous breakdown through the images of tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy on the title page of Ben Jonson's Folio: tragedy and comedy display their crown and buskins respectively, but that strange turn-of-the-century hybrid, tragicomedy, totters uneasily above Jonson's pyramid. Jonson's classicism leads us to useful summaries of Aristotelian genre-theory, and to Donatus on comedy.

"The Genres Staged" connects Shakespearean characterization to the mixing of genres, arguing that many of Shakespeare's plays create dramatic tension by portraying a comic character who may still seem to own an interior self (like Antipholus of Syracuse in Errors). It also broadly contextualizes Shakespearean tragedy alongside Marlovian and re- venge-tragedy, and Shakespearean comedy alongside university interludes, Euphuism, and Middleton's city comedies.

Having outlined the distinctions critics make between the "apprentice" or early come- dies, the "festive" comedies, and the "dark" comedies, Danson then asks what these very different plays have in common, concluding that they "[license] sexual desire, where 'li- cense' means both to allow and to control," through "the comic feminization of authority" that he connects to Queen Elizabeth's controversial rule. Even Love's Labors Lost, he ob- serves, draws attention to its unconventionality and sets up an expected marriage to occur later. Readers may disagree with Danson, however, when he claims that Shrew displays the conflation of personal love and "social power" through the magical transformations later apparent in the tragicomedies. Finally, Danson characterizes comic language as game, battle, and courtship.

The difficult-to-define genre "history," Danson asserts, is worth retaining because it was clearly a useful category for Shakespeare's early editors and audiences. He imagines the history plays displaying kingship through generic experimentation: the episodic Henry VI plays, lacking either tragic disaster or comic resolution; the predestined, individual tragedy of Richard III; the personal tragedy of a victim-king in Richard II; the "dialogue between tragedy and comedy" in the Henry IV plays, where the young prince is simultaneously a morality Machiavel and a mythical scapegrace; the seeming romantic comedy of Henry V- with its perversely pessimistic epilogue. Critiquing Tillyard's "providential" model of the histories, Danson argues that Shakespeare's histories interrogate their sources to link insolu- ble questions about sovereignty with genre itself, just as Shakespeare turns the Protestant hero KingJohn into an ambiguous protagonist in his eponymous play.

Danson's discussion of Shakespeare's tragedies encompasses not merely A. C. Bradley's "Big Four" but also what Danson calls the historical, Roman, revenge, domestic, and "dy- nastic" tragedies, and even the tragicomedies, all of which he considers united by a great

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Book Reviews 221

individual or pair of individuals whose "autonomy" is bounded by social or other con- straints. After employing Northrop Frye's argument that tragedy is unfinished comedy, while comedy is averted tragedy, to good effect in analyses of Romeo andJuliet and Antony and Cleopatra, Danson demonstrates in Macbeth the limits of predestination and character- driven plot. Danson intriguingly proposes that all the "Big Four" are revenge tragedies, where revenge is misguided justice: the tragic hero seeks to control the world around him, and women often become emblematic victims of his desire for power. Danson selects the "silencing of women" as a feature distinguishing tragedy from comedy. Again, some femi- nist readers may be unconvinced, even given Danson's exception, Measurefor Measure: too many of even the romantic comedies also end with silenced women (think of Beatrice's mouth, finally "stop[ped] with a kiss" in Much Ado). The final discussion of language in Shakespeare remarks that if comic language plays games, then tragic language "express[es] the inexpressible." The Epilogue weighs reasons for tragedy's disappearance in the modern world alongside the "proliferation" of other genres, and acknowledges the influence of Frye on post-New Critical understandings of genre.

Reading this book is like listening to a good teacher talk: it is clear, organized, and comprehensive (although we miss discovering how the jointly authored Henry VIII might fit into Danson's development of the history plays-I think it would fit, and quite nicely, too). While the book's breezy tone is meant to make it accessible, its occasional vulgarity ("Fal- staff eats time and screws the instruments of its measurement") is jarring, especially when rapidly followed by measured, scholarly analysis. Students may find the opening chapter and the overview of Shakespeare's histories particularly useful. Sujata Iyengar. ......... University of Georgia

State and Society in Early Modern Scotland. Julian Goodare. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1999. xv + 366 pp. $90.00. ISBN 019820762X. This well-written, insightful study provides an account of how in early modern Scot-

land "out of the parcellized, localized, fragmented authority structures of the late middle ages, a sovereign state arose. Political power now had a single focus." In short, Goodare traces the rise of an "absolutist state" in Scotland, or more precisely, the process by which the Scottish state became substantially more absolutist in the late sixteenth and early seven- teenth centuries than it had been previously.

The text's ten chapters fall into three broad categories.The first three chapters discuss loci of authority that competed with the central government for the loyalty and obedience of the people of Scotland. Chapter 1 presents supranational authority figures, in particular the pope and the emperor, and outlines the Scottish state's triumph over these external ri- vals in the early modern period. The second chapter focuses on internal loci of authority, in particular the landed magnates, who posed a threat to the full sovereignty of the Scottish crown, and the third chapter traces the process by which these internal rivals were "over- come by being recruited and incorporated into the institutional structures of the emerging centralized state.

The next five chapters discuss various aspects of the development of the centralized Scottish state between 1560 and 1625.The fourth chapter sketches financial aspects of the newly centralized state-both trends in routine raising and spending of capital and also con- trivances that were employed to meet financial crises.The fifth chapter considers warfare in Scotland, showing that James VI laid the foundations of a modern military force in Scotland and, more importantly, presided over a decline in the ability of Scottish nobles to wage pri-

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