Paul Dean

Full-field coherence-gated holographic imaging through scattering media using a photorefractive polymer composite device

We report full-field, retroreflective holographic imaging through turbid media using a photorefractive polymer composite as a coherence gate. A four-wave mixing geometry was used to record and reconstruct two-dimensional images of test objects through 6.5 scattering mean-free-paths in real-time. Images with a transverse spatial resolution better than 42μm were acquired in a few seconds using a 6.3mW helium neon laser at 633nm. The photorefractive devices used are based on a poly (N-vinylcarbazole) (PVK):2,4,7-trinitro-9-fluorenone dimalenitrile (TNFDM) charge transport network, doped with the electro-optic chromophore 1-(2′-ethylhexyloxy)-2,5-dimethyl-4-(4″-nitrophenylazo)benzene (EHDNPB).

Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre

punch when she leaves the realm of textual analysis and turns her attention to early modern theatregoers and their feeling bodies. In her introduction, she admits to the underlying problem which a project such as hers is faced with: “Certain important phenomena like the feeling of playgoing can elude obvious record [...]; very little pertaining to playgoers’ felt encounters with drama has been preserved in the ‘official’ record of Renaissance theatre” (p. 3). Hobgood tries her best to make up for the scarcity of historical records by discussing the early modern plays of her choice in the context of Renaissance theories of passions, medical discourse on humorality, and anti-theatrical tracts commenting on the dangers that theatre allegedly poses for its audiences’ moral and emotional well-being. In the end, however, much of what she says about playgoers’ affectivity remains speculative. While it is certainly intriguing to contemplate whether Macbeth conceptualises fear as being able to “seep out, sometimes even lethally, into the world beyond the stage” (p. 37), the idea that “visually recognizable fear and fear-sickness [...] could have incited panic terror in humorally susceptible audience members” (p. 55) is mere conjecture. Quoting Heywood’s Apology for Actors, Hobgood offers two stories as proof of how theatrical performances caused audience members to admit to the murders they had committed, but these accounts are “unverifiable historically” (p. 192), as she puts it when commenting elsewhere on the use of eye-witness reports’ in anti-theatrical writings. Taking into view early modern playgoers as vital partners in making emotional meaning from the theatrical performances they attended, Passionate Playgoing indeed “proceeds from a place of openness and new curiosity” (p. 31). But although there is much food for thought in Hobgood’s claims about theatregoers’ affectivity, her argument is too circulative to be fully convincing.

“Your Affectionate Friend”: Gerard Manley Hopkins as Correspondent

In 2005 it was announced that Oxford University Press was bringing out a new eightvolume edition of Hopkins’s works, which would all be issued by 2012. Publishers should know better than to make such predictions. Before these two splendid volumes, only Volume IV, Oxford Essays and Notes, edited by Lesley Higgins, had appeared, in 2006; Volume VII, a facsimile with transcription of the Dublin notebook, edited by Lesley Higgins andMichael F. Suarez, S.J., has appeared subsequently. Kelsey Thornton and Catherine Phillips’s edition replaces the hitherto standard collections edited by C. C. Abbott: The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (1935, revised 1955), The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1935, revised 1955) and Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1956). They bring together all of the letters which are known to have survived (a survey of what has been lost is given in the editors’ introduction, pp. lxxvii–lxxxi). Abbott’s arrangement of the letters by recipient is replaced by a single chronological sequence, with a bibliographical description of each manuscript, a diplomatic transcription of the text (including erasures and additions) and annotation; there is also a biographical register of correspondents. Forty-three items which have come to

The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (The Revels Plays)

tion to the relationship between space delineated in charter boundaries, and space revealed in some of the most familiar Chronicle poems. Ryan Lavelle, similarly, demonstrates the various applications of the Chronicle in revealing the land interests of those who were responsible for its compilation. Moving further north, Alex Woolf reflects on what the Chronicle reveals about the relationship of early England with Scotland, and the possible applications of this new approach. The third and shortest part of this volume, on the language of the Chronicle, is no less weighty for it. Jayne Carroll’s dense study of the mint-signatures of Anglo-Saxon England offers an ingenious reading of the many possible ways in which numismatic evidence, in confluence with the Chronicle, may serve as an invaluable source for preConquest England. Equally, Sara M. Pons-Sanz, considering the Norse-derived vocabulary offered by the “very rich corpus” of the Chronicle, draws attention to the way in which its language appears to have been gradually shaped over time as Anglo-Saxon England endured, or benefitted from, increased interaction with its Scandinavian neighbours (p. 303). This volume is particularly successful and interesting not only because of the range and quality of its papers, but also because its interdisciplinary stance will further encourage those not naturally inclined to engage with material outside of their discipline to do exactly this. In particular, it shows that the Chronicle can be seen to lie at the heart of a vast convergence of scholarly themes and interests, and rightly demands no less than that it be approached as such in future scholarship.

Shakespeare: The Medieval Modern?

Much virtue in ‘‘and’’! What kinds of connections, exactly, are being proposed in these two titles? When Shakespeare read the literature of pre-Reformation England, still available to him in considerable quantities—not just Chaucer, but also Gower, Lydgate, Langland and a host of romances were printed in his lifetime, not to speak of works circulating in manuscript—what did he think? What Helen Cooper, in her new book, beautifully calls Shakespeare’s ‘‘palette of sound’’ (p. 36) had many hues, and he obviously recognised that their language, while still intelligible to him, was not that which he and his contemporaries spoke and wrote—in Gower’s speeches in Pericles there is a conscious attempt to mimic fourteenth-century idiom, together with Gower’s metronomic metre, in a conscious use of linguistic archaism—but he did not think of it as ‘‘Middle English’’. Again, he obviously knew that the social, political and religious world he lived in was completely different from theirs, but he did not think of it as ‘‘the Middle Ages’’. The past must have seemed to him simultaneously close and remote, a feeling which comes through strongly in the three Henry VI plays. It was both familiar and strange, available for evaluation but too intimate for final judgement. His was a Protestant country which had not yet made a clean break with its Catholic past; how did that shape his feelings about nationalism and cultural identity?

Shakespeare's Companies: William Shakespeare's Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594

example, reads the play in the context of the divergent demands made by humanist educators for imitatio and improvisation in order to show how university students gained the cultural literacy necessary for them to rise to positions of power in Church and state. This attention to both performance texts and performance circumstances is shared by most of the contributors, and is a key component of the volume’s success: it enlivens what can sometimes be quite dry primary material, and reinforces the connection between drama and lived experience that the plays themselves repeatedly make. Knight’s chapter is particularly successful at this, as it shows how several plays that might at first glance appear to be nothing more than whimsical fantasies in fact deal with pressing contemporary anxieties about graduate unemployment and the university’s role in the commonwealth. The quality and variety of essays presented in Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert’s collection is commendable, and one leaves the volume energized by the groundbreaking material it contains. Walker closes his introduction by looking forward to ‘‘the work of others who will extend and enhance our conclusions’’ (p. 15). Such writers have a difficult act to follow.

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare

foundations, for example, are not uniformly listed: Benedictine monasteries for England, Scotland and Wales (maps 86, 87 and 89); Benedictine nunneries for England and Wales (map 88); Cistercian monasteries for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (maps 90, 91 and 94); Cistercian nunneries for England and Wales (map 92) and Scotland (map 93); and so on. The user of AMB is not given an explanation of why these data are provided, why they are given only for some parts of Britain in some cases, and why comparable data sets are treated in various ways. Some maps suffer from typographical errors, others from inconsistency or visual clutter. The typographical errors are easily remedied in a new edition, but inconsistency leads to potentially unreliable information. The Battle of Neville’s Cross, for example, is variously dated to 14 and 17 October 1346 (maps 35 and 36). What is more, the site of the battle is located some seventy kilometres NNW of Durham (map 35) or circa ten kilometres SSE (map 36); neither location is correct. Visual clutter, finally, is a serious issue because it affects the communicative value of a map. A map of eight Benedictine monasteries in Scotland (map 89) is clear and effectively communicates its visual message. It is considerably less effective, however, to have a map of over 140 Benedictine monasteries in England and Wales (map 86), identified by place name and completed by an additional legend and an explanatory note. In conclusion, AMB is an auxiliary resource for those investigating the geography of the medieval history of Britain. The collection of material gives the impression of a somewhat idiosyncratic effort on the part of Daniell, whose enthusiasm in compiling historical data visually is manifest upon browsing through AMB. It does not seem to matter what the topic is, as long as it can be converted to a map. This approach gives those who are not looking for specific data an adventurous opportunity of getting to know British medieval history by opening AMB at random, to find a detailed visual report of Glyndwr’s revolt (maps 39–43), or to discover that Yorkshire gained fortyone new boroughs in the period 1066–1500 (map 77). Most readers, however, will want to use AMB as a tool for historical research and come to the book with a specific research question, many of which AMB will be able to answer.

Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England

awkwardly long way round. Another is that ‘‘Insular’’ ideology doesn’t determine the characterisation of the sea as directly as the argument requires: the sea is friendly because it protects us—but then it is menacing because it connotes the enemies beyond it; it appears as a medium of communication because we are a mercantile people—but then it appears as a barrier because it is the guarantor of our separateness; and so on. It is not possible to get directly from the geopolitics to the adjectives, and that is why the cultural history of a literary image is difficult to write. It is a difficulty which this book, full of interesting stories though it is, doesn’t altogether surmount.

Was this the face

If it is true that, as J. A. Downie flatly declares, ‘‘We know next to nothing about Christopher Marlowe’’, we have had much ado about nothing in recent years. Park Honan’s biography comes hot on the heels of Constance Kuriyama’s Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002), the revised version of Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning (2002, first published 1992) and David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004). Honan is cool about these predecessors. Kuriyama’s, he says, is ‘‘a thoughtful biography with debatable interpretations’’ (as is his own); Nicholl’s is ‘‘not a biography’’ but has useful material on the Elizabethan espionage network (fair enough); Riggs’s is ‘‘intelligent on Marlowe’s art’’ but is elsewhere disdained anonymously as ‘‘a recent book’’ purveying misinformation. Honan corrects Riggs’s factual errors, as he should, but, for many, Riggs’s will be the more convincing account of the formation of Marlowe’s mind and personality, and of his distinctive achievements as a writer. Writers on Marlowe have always had to be wary of circularity; the man is deduced from the works, which are then used to interpret the man. ‘‘Scholars who claim to know the ‘real’ Marlowe’’, Lukas Erne points out in a recent trenchant essay, ‘‘claim to have access to the personality that it would have been Marlowe’s regular business

Current Literature 2001. Literary Theory, History and Criticism

1. General works There is a proud tradition of the poet-critic in English literature, and here, in succession to Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot, are Larkin, Fenton and Raine. Philip Larkin’s Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-85, edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber, £25, 0 571 20945 9), which supplements Required Writing (1983), includes a number of lightweight items, but there are some lethal turns of phrase, on John Heath-Stubbs, for instance: ‘It was not that I thought his poems bad, I just could not see why they had been written’, or his sly description of a biography of Auden, ‘base camp’. He is predictably good on Hardy and Betjeman, for whom, as for himself, ‘the modern poetic revolution has just not happened’ (yet he could discern the combination of lightness and tension in Lowell’s Life Studies, and the ‘dramatic projection ... like brilliant film-shots’ of Eliot’s best lines). Larkin can even respect Betjeman’s religion, because ‘it is written from his feelings and no one else’s’; and, while finding Hardy’s letters dismayingly bland, he could understand the underlying reticence. The chapter on Larkin in James Fenton’s The Strength of Poetry (OUP, £25, 0 19 818707 6), drawn from his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has the questionable advantage of coming after Andrew Motion’s biography and Larkin’s published letters, both of which have precipitated a torrent of abuse. Fenton has little to offer beyond a vague suspicion that Larkin’s father was partly to blame for his son’s psychological wounds. ‘This feeling of transience, this is the great Larkin feeling’, Fenton awkwardly concludes; but if, as he believes, it rests on sham and evasion, where is its integrity? Much of the thinking and writing in this book is lazy, taking too far the aphorism he quotes from Auden, ‘Criticism should be casual conversation’. It is inadequate to say of Heaney, ‘I don’t much care for what he fishes out of bogs’, or to commend Lawrence for celebrating ‘a darkly sparkling democratic sodomy, a sodomy of the open road’, which sounds like an arrestable offence to me. There are moments of crystallization, but too often the material veers away into port-and-nuts musing. Craig Raine’s In Defence of T.S. Eliot (Picador, pb £9.99, 0 330 4855 8) reprints fifty-six pieces, mostly on twentieth-century subjects, written between 1989 and 2000. Given such productivity, the quality is remarkably sustained. Raine’s microscopic eye for detail yields some startling insights: The Catcher in the Rye as a modern In Memoriam, Emily Dickinson and Pinter as specialists in the pause, Scott Fitzgerald’s debt to Joyce, Chekhov as poet of torpor, Frost’s ear for dialogue compared to David Mamet’s, Beckett’s asceticism as a form of Gilbert Osmond’s aestheticism, Kipling’s use of dialect as a modernist mask akin to Picasso’s use of African art ... The title essay is an answer to Anthony