The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (review)

Parergon 25.2 (2008) of the play’ (p. 81). ‘Shakespeare is making a play,’ Burke reminds us, ‘not people’ (p. 84). 1951 seems rather late in the day to be offering a critique of A. C. Bradley, which is what Burke is doing here. But Burke’s intention is much broader than this. He is also performing and reflecting on the process of critical thinking. The problem with Bradley is that his critical thinking ends too soon. He is absorbed by Shakespeare’s characters and forgets that these are ‘an illusion arising functionally from the context’ of the play. This is an example of a critic ending where ‘he should begin’ (p. 85). Burke’s method in this essay is to proceed ‘from the logic of the action as a whole, to the analysis of the character as a recipe fitting him for his proper place in the action’ (p. 90). One implication of this is to consider how often we still read plays as ‘readers’, not as writers who are looking for dramatic explanations. When we read Shakespeare, we would do well to consider what traits a dramatist needs to invoke to make the next stage of the action plausible. This is the key to one of Burke’s most significant contributions to the ‘modernist’ study of Shakespeare’s dramatic forms: to make us read like a writer. This is a very complete edition not just because of the material Newstok has uncovered, but also because of the support he provides. I very much hope that, thanks to this work of dedicated scholarship, Burke will at last receive the attention from Shakespeareans that he deserves. It remains to be seen whether we are ready not only to acknowledge Burke’s influence, but to engage with, and even to extend, his ambitious project. Jennifer Richards School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Newcastle University, UK