Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England. Luke Wilson
vincing notion, O'Connell's evidence for its validity lies partly in the ending of The Winter's Tale, where the incarnation presumably represented by the statue of Hermione displaces religious ritual but nevertheless provides viewers with an idolatrous moment directed not at religious experience but to an affirmation of hope and renewal in human life. Although this reading has the merit of compatibility with many other readings of this play, a better way to complete the thesis of his book might have been to read this moment as one in which Shakespeare, while representing a supposed image of the miraculous, relied on the force of iconoclastic assumptions to make his final skeptical point, that transformation and restoration cannot be depended upon to occur after moments of crisis and failure. That would be a better reading, especially if one considers the play, as I do, a commentary on the failed union of England and Scotland. But whatever one's interpretation, the scene reminds the audience that miracles do not happen and that the audience does not believe in them. Despite these quibbles in interpretation, The Idolatrous Eye ranks with the books I have found the most valuable in the past two years. O'Connell makes us think again about a subject which we thought we knew. His discussions of the representation of the body of Christ and of the textualization of that body are unique, provocative, richly instructive, and useful. His emphasis on literacy and print as the driving force behind an increasingly logocentric religious culture is not only timely given our current preoccupation with the history of the book but is profoundly challenging to some of the commonplaces we reiterate about word-centered Protestantism. DONNA B. HAMILTON University of Maryland