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Book Review: James II. The Triumph and the Tragedy

The metaphors, after all, lingered on, long after the ideas which had originally informed them had faded, not only in evaluative descriptive words, but in the ways they continued to be used to characterize gender and the weakness of women. Central to medical discussions was the problem of how far physiology determines who we are and what we do. Evidently, disease and cure rested and rest upon a largescale observation of patterns. Whether the patterns were projections of social control is another issue. Paster uses metaphors and analogies of her own to help situate her bodies in space and time, and the body in its environment, and finds ‘ecology’ particularly useful. She also remains aware of a fruitful contradictoriness in her juxtaposition of modern sociological work by Deleuze/Guattari and her interest in organicist metaphors of bodily materiality. These ideas have been treated before (one thinks of C. S. Lewis, Hardin Craig, Walter Clyde Curry or, at a later stage, Michael MacDonald’s brilliant Mystical Bedlam), but not at such length or with such richness of detail. Paster largely avoids the risk of reducing the complexities of poetry as of motivation to mere mechanical reactions to involuntary forces. She calls our attention to the limits of psychophysiology, offering no explanation for individual hatreds, such as Iago’s, or for the significance of Othello’s blackness. Indeed, Othello is central for her in part because of what Shakespeare refuses to explain. It is not only human voluntarism that she explores. Donne’s mankind was not yet alone in a godless universe, and human beings were animated by spirits and appetites shared by other created beings, above all emblematic animals such as lions or bears or horses. By calling our attention to the complex discourses of traditional medicine, Paster distances us from our own assumptions that we know why and how characters believed and behaved and invites us to think again about authors who describe phenomena which they derive from sources so remote from our own.