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Fated Sky: The Femina Furens in Shakespeare (review)

father and of Hal’s eventual rejection of Falstaff (102). The parody both contaminates and is contaminated by the serious business to follow. In Hamlet, Taylor argues, repetition becomes imperfect and enigmatic, with each echo or copy destabilizing the meaning of its original. The chapter begins with Hamlet’s uncanny transformation of words spoken by others, including those of Kyd and Marlowe, and then focuses on the complex doubling of the dumb show and the interrupted performance of The Murder of Gonzago. Both performances imperfectly replicate the narrative of the Ghost, who in turn imperfectly replicates Hamlet’s father. Taylor observes that the dumb show reworks moments from Shakespeare’s previous plays: when Lucianus removes the Player King’s crown before poisoning him, he reproduces Hal’s appropriation of his dying father’s crown, and the regicide’s wooing of the widowed queen imitates Gloucester’s seduction of Anne in Richard III. Taylor also discusses the tension between narrative (the story of Pyrrhus and the story that Horatio begins to tell Fortinbras at the end of the play) and drama (the dumb show, The Murder of Gonzago, and Hamlet itself ). The chapter on The Tempest examines parallels between Sycorax and Prospero— between Alonso’s delivery of his unwilling daughter to the king of Tunis and Prospero’s refusal to yield his daughter to another North African, and between the various usurpation plots, which include Antonio’s dethroning of Prospero, Antonio and Sebastian’s conspiracy against Alonso, and Caliban, Trinculo, and Stefano’s plot to overthrow Prospero. Taylor sometimes loses sight of his central concerns with language and artistic form, although he does briefly discuss the structural relationship between the conspiracy subplots: does Caliban’s conspiracy parody Antonio’s, or does Antonio’s conspiracy underline the genuine threat of Caliban’s? Taylor’s two-page epilogue generously offers suggestions to other scholars, showing how some of his findings can be used to develop readings of As You Like It, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. Discussing the quarto version of King Lear, for example, Taylor makes a few suggestive remarks about the juxtaposition of two distorted imitations of legal process: one in a hovel, presided over by Lear, his fool, and Edgar; the other in a castle, with Cornwall judging Gloucester. Taylor asserts that there is still much we do not understand about such doublings in Shakespeare’s drama. Shakespeare criticism often feels like a constricted and overcrowded space, with a shortage of possible topics, but this book will encourage many readers to revisit basic questions about the construction of Shakespeare’s plays.