1. In his introduction to this volume Terence Hawkes usefully surveys the critical heritage of Shakespeare studies raising many of the questions which have become familiar through his important work elsewhere. The question with which he begins here is 'Alternative to What?' (1) and I find myself rather more in sympathy with Drakakis's view, tautological or not, that what we need are 'Alternatives to alternatives' (238) than with Hawkes's assertion that the 'general beliefs' of 'Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley and - to a degree - Tillyard' (9) 'still represent the common coin of responses to Shakespeare, both within and without the academic community' (10).

2. In a classic piece of understatement Hawkes argues that the 'earlier volume seemed to make an impression on Shakespeare studies' (15). Historicizing the project of Alternative Shakespeares will, I think, account for the reason why this second volume has had a much less powerful impact thus far. In 1985 'theory' was not widely taught on undergraduate courses in the way that it is today and, for many, Alternative Shakespeares was their introduction to theory. Ironically, then, the second volume will make less of an impact because it will be received by an already more theoretically sophisticated audience than its predecessor which had such a role in shaping this audience and some of its teachers.

3. Having said all this, Alternative Shakespeares Volume 2 deserves to be recognised as a hugely significant contribution to the field which it takes in genuinely new directions. Some of the essays are superb and the volume has a coherence which creates an engaging and highly productive dialogue between the contributions.

4. Steven Mullaney's chapter, 'After the new historicism', situates new historicism firmly within 'the broader field of cultural studies' (34) as part of his stated aim to 'combine, however successfully, a poetics with a politics of culture' (25). To this end, Mullaney provides a critique of Geertz's 'thick description' as a methodology which treats texts 'as expressions of a cultural essence or ethos rather than as ideological constructions of the collective or the essential.' (24) The synthesis of 'cultural and Marxist analyses' (25) which Mullaney promotes is derived from Foucault; and especially the Foucault of Discipline and Punish. One of Mullaney's most significant contributions is the challenge he offers to the view that resistance to power in the containment - subversion paradigm can be nothing more than a 'mere show of political dissension, a prearranged theater of struggle' (30). Foucault, he argues succinctly, 'deconstructs the notion of autonomy rather than agency' (31).

5. This chapter challenges the notion that cultural materialism is about politics whilst new historicism concerns itself with poetics. Mullaney is able to show that new historicism has a good deal to contribute once the radical implications of its lessons are learnt. When the binary opposition between 'literary text' and 'historical context' (21) is deconstructed, the active role of texts in the shaping of culture can be more fully appreciated. Uncharacteristically of this volume, however, Mullaney leaves it to others to examine specific examples of how 'once placed into circulation, any cultural practice, text, or representation is available for and subject to appropriation, for both licit and illicit ends' (37).

6. One chapter which clearly illustrates this point is Catherine Belsey's brilliantly illuminating and multi-layered 'Cleopatra's Seduction'. In a close reading of Antony and Cleopatra she provides a superb example of the ways in which theoretically informed analysis can provide totally new perspectives which have enormous implications for our understanding of early modern culture.

7. Belsey employs Baudrillard's Seduction because it 'has the virtue of making seduction seductive' (39); she is interested here in the playfulness of seduction, in the almost limitless possibilities of desire imaginable in a world of fiction and fantasy not structured by oppositions but, instead, in which 'the other repeatedly invades the self-same' (39). Shakespeare's Cleopatra 'is shown constantly exploiting the lack which is the cause of desire', Belsey argues, 'and she does it by promising what she frequently, but not predictably, fails to deliver, by being inconsistently elsewhere' (42). Derrida's notion of deferral is combined with Lacanian lack to show how Cleopatra 'exceed[s] the alternatives of presence and absence' (43) but Belsey stresses that it was the material conditions of theatrical performance on the Shakespearean stage which enabled such a strategy of seduction.

8. In a discussion of the function of putti in various well known paintings of the period, Belsey draws together the several strands of her argument. She uses the paintings to show how 'for more than a century, all over Europe, boys were involved, implicated, somehow incorporated into female seductiveness' (60). The stage, then, follows the same model; in representations of desirable women, boys were always already implicated because of the material conditions of that representation. This, however, also shapes the ways in which structures of desire were shaped off stage. As Belsey concludes, 'at that time seduction was a far more complex process than any system of sexual identification which is based on object choice and dependent on binary oppositions allows, or makes space for' (60). This is a criticism in which a poetics and a politics of culture are integrally linked.

9. Another outstanding example of such a criticism is Margreta de Grazia's 'Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes'. She traces a cultural history of the trope of imprinting in the period and shows how a resistance to the idea of imprinting was crucial to the emergence of the Cartesian subject. Rejecting the idea that he was a mere imprint of his parents, Descartes was able to assert that 'insofar as I am a thinking thing, [my parents] did not even make me' (71). This trope clearly has huge significance for our understanding of subjectivity in the period.

10. Moving from a discussion of the 'signet/wax apparatus' (67) for imprinting, de Grazia argues that the development of the printing press 'revitalized the ancient trope' (74). Importantly she shows how 'it was not simply that [ . . . ] reproductive machines generated reproductive metaphors. Reproductive metaphors structured reproductive machines, at least one machine: that huge, epochal, imprinting machine - the printing press' (82). The gendering of the various parts of the printing press linked ideas of mechanics with erotics and this leads de Grazia to the question which haunts her whole argument: 'Was the new mechanics of the press attended by transformations in how thought and sex were construed?' (91). Through a comprehensive survey of the plays and sonnets she shows that these ideas were certainly in circulation and were already 'available for, and subject to appropriation' (37).

11. Belsey and de Grazia's concern with desire and sexual identity is continued, though somewhat less successfully, in Bruce Smith's 'L[o]cating the sexual subject'. Smith argues that 'queer theory runs the risk of turning women into the disembodied absences they often occupy in early modern texts' (97) which seems a somewhat pessimistic argument following Belsey's contribution. Smith proposes a model for analysis which he calls 'Lust in action' which is read through 'a culture-specific configuration of time, place and body: time out, place beyond, body below, around, on, from, with, within, without' (110). This model 'is neither binary nor linear' (110) and asks us to think 'about sexual experience not on the body but through the body' (120).

12. Like Mullaney, Smith is very clear that what he proposes is a model which inscribes 'both politics and poetics' and he makes a grand claim to be making a 'dialectical move beyond post-structuralism' (121). Interestingly, for all his emphasis on thinking through the body, Smith's chapter make no reference to any of the French feminist thinking which would have provided a platform for his analysis. As Philip Armstrong's chapter later exemplifies, it might also have helped tackle some of the concerns he has about the relationship between feminism and queer theory.

13. The least illuminating essay in the collection for me is Alan Sinfield's 'How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist'. Sinfield raises an important question about how 'readers not situated squarely in the mainstream of Western culture today may relate to such a powerful icon as Shakespeare' (123); a question which itself seems somewhat naive when contrasted with more subtle understandings of cultural difference put forward later in the collection by Ania Loomba.

14. Picking up on the body as a focus for criticism, Keir Elam traces the recent shift as he sees it from 'the linguistic turn' to the 'Shakespeare Corp' (142). He argues that in much of this criticism the 'early modern body turns out to be more bookish than corporeal' (152-3). Through a sustained analysis of Twelfth Night, Elam shows how the actor's body was itself implicated in a 'dialectic of plague and purgation' (157) which gave the drama a metatheatrical significance. Arguing for a new semiotics of Shakespearean drama, Elam looks to Artaud to provide a model for understanding a 'pestilential theatre' (159) which implicates its audience in the performance. What we need in order to understand the workings of such a theatre and its implications for culture is a criticism where 'social history, dramatic history and stage history interrogate each other' (163).

15. Ania Loomba's chapter on 'Shakespeare and cultural difference' proposes a new direction for postcolonial criticism which must begin to 'revise the relations between text, critic and analytical method by inserting colonialism as the "boy" repressed by all three' (169). The 'boy' is Titania's Indian boy whose Indianness 'is often glossed over' (169). Loomba's analysis is based in a materialist criticism sensitive to the role of trade and cartography in the understanding of indigenous cultures. She recognises that 'Theorizing subaltern agency remains a genuine problem [ . . . ] largely because indigenous cultures are understood as unrecoverable after the colonial holocaust' (173) but stresses that the role of the postcolonial critic is to 'unravel the strands [of race and colonialism] and see how they are woven together' (171). Discourses of race and colonialism, then, have erased cultural differences which Loomba wants to see at the heart of postcolonial criticism. This chapter raises important issues for forms of criticism in which cultural differences are eclipsed by the category of 'the other'.

16. Dympna Callaghan argues in '"Othello was a white man": properties of race on Shakespeare's stage' that: 'On stage, whiteface was probably the primary way of signifying femininity. It was an impersonation, just like blackface' (202). Continuing the concern of this volume with the material conditions of performance, Callaghan's significant contribution comes in showing that 'it is not blackness and femininity that are the same, but the extra-diegetic white masculinity that underlies them both' (210). If Othello was a white man, then so was Desdemona! This important chapter shows how, in emergent capitalism, plays such as Othello had an important function to perform in promoting racist ideologies which legitimised slavery. 'Racism is the magic solution to the capitalist objective of minimizing the costs of production and the resistance of the labour force to that process.' (214-5) This chapter resonates with Mullaney's argument as Callaghan recognises that even whilst it 'dramatizes the possible consequences of not excluding the racial other from the community [ . . . ] the play reenacts the exclusionary privilege on which such representations were founded' (215).

17. The last chapter of the collection brings together the various strands of argument which run throughout Alternative Shakespeares Volume 2. In a Lacanian reading of Hamlet Philip Armstrong shows how the early modern stage acted as a mirror, 'forming, informing and reforming identity and behaviour' (220). Echoing de Grazia's argument, Armstrong shows how 'Drama works not only like a mirror, but like a mould, keeping the impression or imprint left upon it by contemporary society' but, through 'a movement of return from the mirror [ . . . ] An audience [ . . . ] also offers a receptive surface upon which the scene leaves its mark' (219).

18. Armstrong, like Belsey, is careful to pay close attention to the specific historical context of the first performances of Hamlet. Hamlet's '"distracted globe" implies that the identification between the image and the (mind's) eye remain radically dialogic and communal, rather than focused on a central and integrated ego: just as the Elizabethan theatre plays to a dispersed semicircle of gazes' (222). Once more, the material conditions of the Elizabethan playhouse are seen to shape and be shaped by the culture more widely. Armstrong is also able to address the debate raised in Smith's chapter regarding the representation of women on the early modern stage. He is critical of psychoanalysis's 'frailty' in its conception of 'feminine sexuality in terms of masquerade' (235) and uses the work of Luce Irigaray to counter this critical weakness. As he concludes, 'an identification with the traumatic place of the real within early modern theatre and psychoanalysis will provide, if not a "feminine" gaze then at least a critique of its absence' (236).

19. John Drakakis's 'Afterword' warns of the need to be ever vigilant against those that would seek to appropriate circulating critical discourses to conservative ends. What marks this volume off from its predecessor is its concentration on 'the specular economy of the theatre itself' (244). The critical dialogue in which the various chapters of this book are engaged reflects its recognition of the multiplicity of discourses circulating in and shaping early modern culture.

20. Alternative Shakespeares Volume 2 is an important book. It is not simply a collection of 'more "readings" of what are otherwise stable texts, but rather seek[s] to identify the complex conditions that ground reading itself' (241). The overall success of this volume is that it combines careful textual analysis with rigorous theoretical argument and pertinent historical context in such a way as to make us think again about our own subjectivity in relation to our object of study. The fact that such sophistication will be appreciated by undergraduates is in no small part due to the ground breaking impact of Alternative Shakespeares and the effect it has had on the teaching of Shakespeare and theory in our universities.

MARK DOOLEY
UNIVERSITY OF TEESIDE