1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare's "Henry V.". Nina Taunton
As anyone familiar with Berry's previous work might expect, he is at his best with the comedies. In chapter 2 he offers a sophisticated discussion of the conflation of hunting and the erotic in Love's Labor's Lost. Chapter 5 approaches The Merry Wives of Windsor through a very interesting discussion of poaching and social conflict. In chapter 6 he examines the tensions between hunting and pastoral in order to draw out a subtle reading of the paradoxes of As You Like It. But while the readings are at times very strong, Berry remains somewhat reticent in articulating what both hunting and the metaphorics of hunting tell us about early modern culture more broadly. Despite the subtitle of the book — "A Social and Cultural Study" — Berry is clearly primarily interested in using the culture of the hunt to illuminate Shakespeare's plays, and has less to say about hunting culture itself. He draws on the hunt for the imaginative resources it offered Shakespeare — "raw material" as he once calls it (127) — but he doesn't always make the plays speak back to their culture, or when he does, it is primarily with the object of assessing, as he tries to do in the final chapter, Shakespeare's attitude toward hunting, not what hunting and the drama together can tell us about the hopes, fears, and conflicts of a culture. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it is, I think, a fair assessment of Berry's interests. Although the broader cultural argument of the book remains somewhat underdeveloped, the readings of the plays are compelling and sophisticated, and Berry's practice of setting them alongside works like George Gascoigne's The Noble Art ofVenery produces genuinely surprising insights. The book is a pleasure to read and should be valued by anyone interested in Shakespeare or in "country" culture in England more generally. BENEDICT S. ROBINSON State University of New York, Stony Brook