Review by Choice Review
This book of literary criticism focuses on the idea of conscience as reflected in 16th-century and 17th-century English plays. Situating this idea in the doctrinal controversy in which the Reformation slowly displaced medieval scholasticism, Wilks analyzes its changing forms first in a chapter on Tudor interludes and morality plays, then in successive full chapters on Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, The Atheist's Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Unnatural Combat and The Renegado, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. This is diachronic intellectual history, which assumes that plays reflect ideas more explicitly expressed elsewhere in the culture; it assumes that the word "evolution" when applied to history is unproblematic; and that Shakespeare (and his England) is so umproblematicized that one can speak of doctrines that in his day were "still more or less unchanged from the Middle Ages." Although the argument is consistently and logically pursued, the ideas are not novel. Absent from the 17-page bibliography are the main figures in contemporary critical and theoretical debate. In sum, despite its virtues, there is no well-defined audience for this book. Its language is too full of allusion, its subject too specialized for the undergraduate or general reader; for graduate students and faculty there is little here that seems crucial. -J. R. Howe, University of Vermont
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review