Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (review)
giving voice to a tragic act that demands a grander rhetoric. George Walton Williams, also dealing with Macbeth, suggests that the “verbal echoing” that resonates throughout the play — especially the “fair” and “foul” of the Witches — has a contaminating force that, when uttered by characters like Banquo, reflects the deterioration and degeneration of a moral will. Russ McDonald’s closing essay argues that plays like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest deliberately evince the laconic avoidance of ornament found in plays like Coriolanus, concluding that the romances reflect Shakespeare’s restoration of the feminine as a creative utterance rather than its denigration as a virago force found in a character like Volumnia. His essay is a fitting coda for the expansive, rewarding essays collected in this volume. HARDIN AASAND Dickinson State University