Judith Haber

“True‐loves blood”: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander

Earlier venions of this essay were presented at the Third International Marlowe Conference 1993, a seminar chaired by Dympna CaUaghan at the 1994 meeting of the Shakespeare Associatic of Amenca, the 1994 conference on “Contextualiang the Renaissance” at S U N Y Binghuna and the Renaissance seminar ofthe Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard Univcni would like to thank Emily Bartels, Richard Burt, Kevin Dunn. Julia Genster. Jeffrey Masten, Dq Riggs. and the readers at ELR for their helpful comments and criticism. I . I make this argument at length in “Submitting to History: Marlowe’s Edward 11,” in Encfq Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modem England, ed. Richard Burt and John M. (Ithaca. 1994). pp. 170-84. See also Patricia Parker’s discussion ofnarrative and dramaric “poina] Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987). and “Preposterous Events,’’ Shakes‘ Quarterly43 (1992). 186-213. i

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (review)

wrote of his frequenting of the theater in his unsettled and free-thinking youth, even of his playing a woman’s part in a performance of Dr. Faustus. Whitney speculates intelligently on what may have been the shattering agony of Faustus’s tragedy for youths who may have shared his trials. While there is scant evidence of non-royal women’s responses to individual plays before the Restoration, Whitney finds four significant examples of the ways women responded to plays and applied them, wittily, to their own circumstances. Perhaps the most interesting is that of Dorothy Osborne, future wife of William Temple, who in a letter to him alluded to Richard III to characterize her bullying brother’s reproaching her with the suitors she had refused. A final chapter compares the posthumous uses to which Jonson and Shakespeare were put in the years leading up to Restoration. The most remarkable (and prophetic) use of Shakespeare may be that by Henry Cromwell, who in 1659 referred to the induction to The Taming of the Shrew to express his own feelings of inadequacy in succeeding his father, Oliver. He imagined himself like Christopher Sly, made to think himself a lord, then cast out again as a plain tinker. The brilliance of Whitney’s book, however, lies not only in the examples of response he collects but in his analysis of the character of that response. It is, in short, a work that no one concerned with the effects of early modern theater before 1660 can afford to neglect. MICHAEL O’CONNELL University of California, Santa Barbara