Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the Controversies of Self. John Lee
Vasari; a glance at Ambroise Pares Des Monstres andprodiges [1573] would have further illuminated the sixteenth century's fascination with grotesquerie). Thorne asserts that "Caliban's monstrously misshapen form is open to more than one reading," which perhaps begs the question since it can be argued that his form is not misshapen at all and is seen as such only because of the limitations of the perspective of the Europeans, or because of their self-interest; and she writes that "[a] strong Neoplatonic bias . . . leads Prospero to interpret his servant's outward monstrosity as a sign of inner spiritual deformity" (218). I think that Prospero dons and doffs this Neoplatonic bias at will; looking at Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian, he knows what, in Macbeth, King Duncan says after betrayal by the original Thane of Cawdor: "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face." Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare contains nearly fifty pages of notes, which conduct a learned, subtle, and provocative discussion with the book proper. These notes follow the book's final chapter, so the reader must choose a) to ignore them; b) to read them separate from the argument that inspired them; or c) to do as I did, which I'm sure under the circumstances the author would have one do, and flip back and forth continually (almost continuously) from text to notes, text to notes, text to notes — a procedure that probably triples the reading time of the book. May I close by declaring that Thome's publisher does her and her book no service by placing the notes at the end; in an age of computerized typesetting, notes to scholarly books should again, and always henceforth, be what they once were —footnotes. MARK TAYLOR Manhattan College