Milton and Gender (review)
through the play’s intertextual relation with Plutarch and Seneca. The second studies the Tragedy along similar lines with special attention to the Iliad. The final section relates the themes Forby has set in motion to contemporary issues as King James’s absolutism, memories of the Essex rebellion, and Prince Henry’s patronage. Having admired the complexity of this kind of interpretation, one still has to wonder whether the audience at the Blackfriars, which was, surely, not composed of scholars, could understand these plays this way. Is such an understander, whom Florby early on concedes would have to be “preternatually well-read” (12), actually possible? JOHN HUNTINGTON University of Illinois at Chicago