Choice 评论

An exceptionally well-focused and significant reading of gender in The Rape of Lucrece and in the five Roman plays (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline), this book goes far toward explaining why the genre of the Roman play enabled Shakespeare to explore the barbarity of male kinship and of the emulous struggle for dominance and to reveal the secret but powerful role of women in setting the terms for this deadly strife. Building on the work of Janet Adelman (Suffocating Mothers, CH, Jul'92) and Gail Kern Paster (The Body Embarrassed, 1993), Kahn (Brown Univ.) deciphers the fetish-like form of Shakespeare's poetic sense of masculinity as the manifestation of the castrating but empowering wound of heroic sacrifice. He demonstrates that Shakespeare's engagement with Roman themes evidences "a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to fix, stabilize, delimit masculinity as a self-consistent autonomy free from the stigma of the feminine." In addition to offering numerous insights into, for example, the weaknesses of fathers in Titus Andronicus and the depths of rivalry in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Kahn points to the need for a new understanding of Shakespeare's relation to the ancient world and of how it determined his depiction of English history. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. N. Lukacher University of Illinois at Chicago