Will: A Novel
By Grace Tiffany '80.
Berkley Publishing Group, 2004.
416 pages.
$21.95.
 After
a first novel written from the point of view of William Shakespeare's
youngest daughter, My Father Had a Daughter, Tiffany returns
to the Elizabethan age. She tells in rich detail the story of
the rise of young Will himself from mischievous Stratford schoolboy--the
son of a drunkard and a Catholic--to fame and adoration as England's
master playwright. Along the way, she imaginatively reinvents
sixteenth-century London and the path of her poet protagonist.
As Shakespeare finds success on the stage, he also draws the
ire of a rival, the baby-faced Christopher Marlowe, and the stage
is set for a duel.
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Ivy and Industry:
Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980
By Christopher Newfield.
Duke University Press, 2003. 290 pages.
$32.95.
A careful dissection of the ties between
higher education and corporate America reveals that the research
university has long played "a double role," writes
Newfield, both "sustaining and evading the remarkable rise
of large organizations." In charting their respective histories,
Newfield, an English professor at what he terms "the original
'multiversity,' " the University of California, with its "ties
to industry as elaborate as any in the United States," presents
an institution inherently at odds with itself--at once dependent
upon corporate financial support and governing models and yet "supporting
free inquiry and the pursuit of truth independently of what the
market will buy." His chief interest, though, is not the
complexities of the research university, but rather its most
important creation: an educated American middle class. Can they,
he asks, "really be the agents of history rather than the
servants of it--of the top executives and moguls and major decision
makers?"
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The Manly Masquerade:
Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance
By Valeria Finucci
Duke University Press, 2003.
316 pages. $24.95,
paper.
"I want to retrofit the past," writes
Finucci, professor of Romance studies at Duke, "and bring
it to bear on the issues of sex and generation." To a centuries-old
framework, she affixes the present-day theories of gender, a "construct
aligned with historical contingencies and prevalent socio-cultural
values through a process of constant retooling and watchfulness." In
light of current ideas about masculinity and femininity and the
boundaries between them, Finucci examines spontaneous generation,
cuckoldry, androgyny, and the manufacture of castrati that so
fascinated Renaissance Italians--and continues to fascinate us.
Plays, poems, novellas, treatises and travel journals, anecdotes
and myths--she revisits them all, mining the literature, which "has
always displayed an interest in the organization of gendered
identities," for clues to the values that shaped our own.
Among her findings: A man's man in the Renaissance wasn't a warrior;
he was a dad.
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