Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy

Reviews / Votes

Original, absorbing, persuasive, and beautifully written: throughout this book, Publicover reveals tragedies' recurring preoccupation with the uneasy experience of stumbling on, or near, hidden mysteries. Even more important, he shows why a language of depth and descent matters for our thinking about tragedy more broadly: it reflects the genre's fundamental investment not simply in affective power, but also in an epistemological abyss that triggers a more all-consuming disorientation. His readings are not only beautiful but moving: this is a rare and unforgettable achievement. * Tanya Pollard, Brooklyn College, CUNY * Laurence Publicover's lucid, elegantly-written book offers fresh and intelligent insight into Shakespeare's major tragedies and some of the most important tragedies of his contemporaries, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Through its focus on imagery of marine depth, the book shows how tragedy sends metaphorical plumb-lines into aspects of experience not normally available to the human senses. If there are more things in heaven and earth than standard philosophy dreams of, Publicover shows there are other, still-more troubling things below the oceans, and tragic experience may be the only way of accessing them, for good or ill. Fathoming the Deep will be stimulating and useful for students of these plays at all levels, and will prompt much interesting thinking among scholars. * Tom MacFaul, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford * [Publicover shows how] the rich and striking metaphors strategically placed throughout The Duchess of Malfi serve less to explain the action of Webster's tragedy than to point to the horrifying, unexplained depths that surround our existence, 'no more than a rug placed over a trapdoor' - an image that demonstrates that the critic is alive to the power of the literature he studies. * Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement * The first thing Publicover tells us is that he has tried to aim at student readers as well as academics, and that the chapters are therefore intended to be freestanding as well as part of a developing argument. This promise is fulfilled; not only does each chapter provide a handy summary of the critical backstory on the play under discussion, but in this as in other respects the book wears its learning lightly and remains clear, readable, and engaging. * Lisa Hopkins, Shakespeare Journal *