ESC: English Studies in Canada

not have been so jarring, and indeed a precedent can be found in a recent edition of Mother Goose that combines the work of a variety of illustrators. What interest do the stories themselves hold for the modern reader? For those who have never encountered an early Jane Austen story, Jack and Alice, as Tara Hamelin observes in her introduction, shows the keen wit and satirical tendencies of thirteen-year-old Austen. Hamelin disagrees with major critics who see this story as “a mere trifle” and views it as more than “burlesque entertainment.” That Austen was capable of parodying so cleverly at this early age the fiction she had read, leads Hamelin to conclude “that Jane Austen’s skills as an author, though perhaps not fully developed, were quite evident in her youth” (ii). Charlotte Bronte’s The Twelve Adventurers gave the students food for thought, and necessitated considerable detective work in tracing Bronte’s historical sources. The twelve-year-old Charlotte, perhaps unknowingly, bur­ lesques travel literature in this story, which is the first in the series of stories she and Branwell composed about Angria. Stovel and Barach in their in­ troduction indicate how well-read and imaginative the Bronte children were, and attest to their penchant for incorporating not only romance and fantasy but also real people in their youthful writings. Furthermore, they suggest a strong affinity between this early short story and Charlotte’s novels Jane Eyre and Shirley. The introduction, annotations, and appended bibliographical sources in both the Austen and the Bronte volumes represent a conscientious and wellco -ordinated effort, and deserve commendation. BARBARA Ca r m a n Ga r n e r / Carleton University John O’Meara, Otherworldly Hamlet: Four Essays (Montreal: Guernica, 1991). 112. 1 illustration. $12.00 paper. The title of this book invites initially passive assent: Of course Hamlet en­ counters the otherworld, as critics since Stoll have discussed at some length. Their arguments have favoured either the pagan, the loosely Protestant, or the Catholic side in respect to the identity and command of the Ghost. But if the reader had missed Raymond B. Waddington’s essay “Lutheran Hamlet” in English Language Notes XXVII, 2 (1989): 27-42 (acknowledged by O’Meara), he/she finds here with some surprise a critical analysis of Hamlet’s dilemma from a comparison of Martin Luther’s experience of the supernatural. After the Preface (Hamlet and Luther), the essays deal respectively with Sorrow (Sackville, Kyd, and “sorrowful imagination”); Sexuality (Luther and 501 the “lust in all love”); Revenge; and finally Death (encounters with both of which spring from Hamlet’s Luther-like visionary experience). Citing Luther’s statement, “nothing can cure libido, not even marriage” (52), O’Meara develops his thesis along the lines of King Hamlet’s polluted marriage—polluted by Gertrude’s adultery. It is this “lust in all loves” (52) that accounts for the Ghost’s present torment and his plea for his son to purge the royal bed of Denmark through his act of revenge. Inevitably, O’Meara argues, the father’s murder was linked to his wife’s sexual transgres­ sion, recognition of which causes the son’s “later hysterical preoccupation with sexuality” (53). In other words, Hamlet “is coming to grips with the dis­ turbance at the very heart of the play: with the horror of a sexual judgment which leads directly to punishment in the otherworld of Hamlet’s father” (54). Hamlet’s rejection of marriage (ill.i.147) springs from this recognition. The “illusion that marriage necessarily sanctifies love” (58) is shattered by the supernatural revelation and therein lies Hamlet’s profoundly tragic ex­ perience. What is even more impressive is the author’s analysis of the cause of Hamlet’s delay: his revenge is “tragically complicated, posing the problem ofa violent action to be done in ‘perfect conscience’(v.ii.67), perfect integrity of being” (71-72). O’Meara shows Hamlet’s dilemma in the prayer scene to be different from what earlier critics have thought. He writes: The normal, rational limits of human knowledge are inadequate to com­ plete the tragic complexity of Hamlet’s experience into the moral unity required for Hamlet to fulfil...