1. Like all the best works of literary criticism and analysis, this book is a substantial literary achievement in its own right. Michael Neill uses considerable rhetorical artifice in alluring his readers to share his insights. He also writes with sufficient clarity and panache to keep an impressive freight of ideas moving steadily forward. His book's key themes and arguments may be summarised without too much difficulty, though no brief outline can do justice to the range and subtlety of their detailed application. Neill's starting point is the well-established notion that the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance experienced a heightened awareness of death. This was above all because of the coming of the plague, which ended individuals' lives suddenly, subjected their bodies to exceptionally unpleasant disfigurement, and wreaked unique havoc in the cities which were its prime targets. Among other things, it curtailed the funeral rites which served as such important markers of individual and social distinction. The danse macabre made grim play with the horror of indistinction, a response echoed in the work of several dramatists. The mortal body, whose vulnerability was so dramatically underlined by epidemic disease, was subjected during the Renaissance to more penetrating examination by the practitioners of the reinvigorated science of anatomy. (They demonstrated their skill in public, theatrical performances.) Dissection came to involve moral as well as biological discovery, and psychological examination was characterised as a species of anatomy. In Othello, Iago 'opens' the Moor, and reveals the blackness at his heart. Middleton and Rowley in The Changeling take us inside Vermandero's seemingly secure castle and show how the pervasive disease of lust corrupts trusted members of his household. In this connection, Neill investigates at length the implications of the castle/body metaphor.

2. The Reformation transformed relations between the living and the dead by destroying the intercessory rites by which (the Catholic Church had taught) the former might help the latter. A heightened fear of the dead and sharpened anxieties about their claims on the living resulted from this momentous change. 'More consistently than any other form' (245), revenge tragedy addressed these anxieties. Its heroes had to redeem their dead from the shame of being forgotten and lay their spirits to rest. Yet this redemption was itself tainted by revenge; the violent exaction of recompense for violation begot fresh violation. Hamlet, best known of all revenge plays, 'dramatizes its hero's resistance to the entrapment of this all-too-familiar narrative' (244), and creates 'the sense of a plot-narrative having worked itself out in a fashion that leaves the hero strangely uncontaminated by the end he nevertheless helps to bring about' (239).

3. It was a commonplace of the decades on which this study focuses that it was death which made sense of life: the end crowned the work. The manner in which the individual met his or her end was the supreme yardstick of true worth, and the ability to achieve a 'good' death depended upon preparedness. (This was an important reason for dreading the suddenness of the plague's onset, and its disordering of the senses.) For all those who die in Hamlet's last act 'the end comes not as narrative consummation but as a violent aposiopesis' (238). The hero is cut off 'tormented by a sense of all that remains untold, as though his life were an unfinished story still struggling for expression' (240). The splendid funeral rites and monuments which figured so largely in English Renaissance culture served in some measure to fill the void left by sudden, obscure or shapeless ends. Funeral pageantry is especially important in Hamlet 'as a sign of human order rescued from the jaws of chap-fallen death itself' (304). The original audiences of this and other plays would have been keenly aware of the impropriety involved in the stinting or neglect of funerals and sensitive to their dramatic implications. Tombs also play prominent parts in English Renaissance tragedy. Cleopatra's suicide, in her own tomb, is a 'pageant of royal distinction' and 'an act of transcendent self-fashioning, transforming mortal flesh to marmoreal sculpture in a fashion wholly fitted to its monumental setting' (322). In Webster's Duchess of Malfi, the heroine's tomb stands for individual renown, earned by true worth, as opposed to inherited or purchased distinctions. In his last chapter, Neill expounds Ford's The Broken Heart as a play which draws together most of the key themes explored in his book. 'With its transformed Dance of Death, its displays of surgical violence, its loving elaboration of funeral motifs, and its précieux celebration of the crowning end, The Broken Heart offers what now seems like a nostalgic retrospect of Renaissance drama's confrontation with death, even as it writes a ne plus ultra to the path of tragic discovery' (374).

4. One closes this book with a sense of having witnessed a distinguished performance in which several important but overlooked meanings and connections are demonstrated with confident dexterity. In some cases the significance or link in question may appear rather less substantial once the spell woven by the author's virtuosity has worn off. A historian may occasionally receive the impression that the complex and fluid realities of social history have been treated as too solid givens in order to act as props for the show. More might have been made of the religious context, of the opposition between pagan or secular ideas and Christian beliefs, and especially of the tension between Catholic and Protestant doctrines of the hereafter. An early modern Christian was convinced of the immortality of the soul, and knew that this life was a mere prelude to eternity. Revenge and suicide, such prominent themes in English Renaissance drama, might be honourable in a pagan classical setting. But the rigorous prohibitions of the Church should be explicitly considered when discussing Hamlet, in which intimations of the next life play so important a part. What would the Elizabethan audience have guessed to be the destination of the prince of Denmark when they heard Horatio's valedictory prayer? Perhaps such issues and questions might have been explored further in a study of death in English Renaissance tragedy. But Neill has given us so much that it would be churlish to ask for more.

RALPH HOULBROOKE
UNIVERSITY OF READING