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Shakespeare and Multiplicty. By BRIAN GIBBONS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 243. $57.95 cloth.
Reviewed by JILL L. LEVENSON
Brian Gibbons's book Jacobean City Comedy (1968; 2d ed. 1980) broke fresh critical ground. Much of his work since has resulted in new critical editions of English Renaissance plays, and as General Editor he oversees both the New Cambridge Shakespeare and the New Mermaids. With Shake.speare and Multiplicity he offers an anthology of his critical thought over more than two decades about Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries. The volume gathers together four studies published between 1968 and 1991 (chapters 2, 5, 6, and 7), revising three of them; it also includes two new essays (chapters 3 and 4), as well as a theoretical introduction and conclusion. Through most of the book, Gibbons addresses issues of theatrical composition and genre which have long interested him. The essays are divided into sections that signal not only new topics but new approaches to the material at hand. In the introduction Gibbons suggests that his criticism will carefully engage the dialectic between postmodernism and Shakespeare's plays (10-13). But he spends little time on recent theory, and the best chapters of his book reveal the deep structures of Shakespeare's drama with the old-fashioned tools of historical and New Criticism.
The second chapter, "Fabled Cymbeline," is divided into five sections that concern different aspects of the play's style and historiography. Beginning with Act 4, Gibbons interprets the cave as a version of prehistoric Britain and Belarius as a mediator between this phase and cin,ilization. The fourth act, with its disjunctions of narrative and style, becomes a model of the play, which, according to Gibbons, is designed as a Baconian fable-heterogeneous, based partly on British chronicles but incorporating folklore and myth, requiring the audience to sift through the "variegated stuff" of transmission (21-22). Its heterogeneity turns Cymbeline into "a cultural history, public and private. . ., of Britain" (25). Correspondences throughout the play, from images to episodes, create patterns that the audience perceives from the start but that the characters perceive only at the end. Through the role of Iachimo, the effects of the shifting and ambivalent Spenserian narrative become apparent. Finally, "the play's insistent concern with multiple possibilities...