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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Shakespeare and Violence, by R. A. Foakes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii, 224 pp.. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.99.
By many accounts (including that of this reviewer), R. A. Foakes, although nominally retired, remains one of the premier Shakespearean scholars working in this country today. He has touched all the bases: he has written brilliant interpretive works (Hamlet versus Lear, Cambridge, 1993); he has edited complex texts with scrupulous attention to all the variant readings that changing dramatic productions necessarily involve (see his Arden King Lear, 1997), and he has engaged the historiography of Shakespearean criticism (Coleridge's Criticism of Shakespeare, 1989). His contributions are marked by detailed, reliable information, and while trenchant in his criticisms of fashionable cant, he has shown a remarkable openness to the approaches of younger scholars, for whom he has served as model and mentor, gladly learning and gladly teaching.
He follows these works with a new monograph, Shakespeare and Violence, which benefits from his expertise on practically every page. His essential argument is that in his depiction of violence--a violence that is meaningless and arbitrary because it is bred in the testosterone--Shakespeare heralds a modern situation: Shakespeare is still our contemporary. Violence is endemic to human nature, particularly showing itself in hierarchical, male-dominated societies. As a biological...
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