Book Review: Alan Shepard. Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Abstract

The summaries of previous scholarship on the history, composition, and performance of the plays discussed here are thorough and accurate.Dr. Rastall sets out conflicting views and matters of scholarly debate judicially but does not hesitate to draw his own conclusions from the evidence he provides.There may be a regrettable tendency to anachronism (see, for example, the parallel drawn between P.G.Wodehouse and the Norwich dramatist in their use of Latin tags) and to drift from cautious suggestion to assertion (the tentative 'may be' becomes 'is' in the space of five pages during the discussion of a stage direction in the Norwich play), but Dr. Rastall's concern for comprehensiveness in the scope of and approach to his project could indeed lead to such lapses.The two volumes of this monumental work are a noteworthy achievement, broaching and solving historical, theoretical and practical problems in the fields of early drama and music.

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