Choice Review

Lynch (Providence College) examines Shakespeare's intertextual alterations, which often subvert source-texts in the interest of Shakespeare's dramatic purposes. Lynch's method is to choose only those plays for which Shakespeare had sources "closely in mind, if not in hand" (interestingly, he gives no attention to the histories or the Roman plays, whose immediate sources are as familiar as those he reviews). His comments on As You Like It revisit ground tilled by feminist critics, but his more provocative discussion of King Lear argues that it is an anti-Calvinist rather than anti-Christian reworking of the older King Leir. Unlike his "authoritative" counterpart in the Confession Amantis, the choric Gower in Pericles is a self-effacing persona testifying to Shakespeare's "authorial limitations." The Winter's Tale destabilizes the patterned language of Greene's Pandosto into a dramatic comment on the unreliability of language and mimetic art. A concluding chapter summarizes Shakespeare's "textual complexity." Despite its narrow scope, Lynch's is the only book-length study of the dramatist's intertextual practice offering a clearly written example of the virtues of this critical approach. For upper-division undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. C. Baker; Armstrong Atlantic State University