ESC: English Studies in Canada

was the increase of the stanza to five lines, thus allowing the poet to con­ clude with a forceful statement of the transitoriness of all human existence. Her commentary on the literary qualities of this stanza is first-rate. Halsall, not surprisingly, finds the R u n e P o em Christian in attitude and purpose. She writes that the author “puts the good things of the world in proper perspective” : thus, though the poem extols wealth and giving, sees hail and ice as natural, if mysterious, miracles, and praises fellowship and the life of the hall, the image of the grave, upon which the last stanza rests, makes of the whole twenty-nine stanzas something of an “ubi sunt” sequence. Such an insight, and the argument in its support, provides a counter-check, somewhat quarrelsome, to those critics who regard the poem as a repository of arcane Germanic paganism. The poem is attractively laid out in the edition, with the translation of the Old English facing the text. The translation appears to be a combination of the “word for word” and the “idea for idea” technique. And while I might take issue with the semantic range of some terms, the translations on the whole are unexceptionable. The “Explanatory Notes” are full and in­ formative, often elegant in their explication of the poem’s literary qualities. The commentary for each stanza is prefixed by a brief description of the rune which heads that stanza, tracing it, and its meaning, through Old English and continental usage. The book contains a sufficient glossary and an impressive bibliography. The R u n e P o e m will never, I think, be regarded as one of the major works in the corpus; there are simply too many works to put before it on the scale of perfection. But Halsall has done Old English studies a service in rescuing, and I use the term advisedly, this difficult poem from the critical obscurity in which it has resided until now. Her arguments for its poetic value, if sometimes overstated, are always plausible, her scholarship sound, the cloak of her learning lightly worn. The poet would have been pleased with her attentions. Robert emmett finnegan / U n iversity o f M a n ito b a G. R. Hibbard, T h e M a k in g o f S h a k esp ea re’s D ra m a tic P o etry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 192. $17.50 cloth, $7.50 paper Who would expect a book with the title, T h e M a k in g o f S h a k esp ea re’s D ra m a tic P oetry, to begin with the sentence, “A modem audience is likely to find Ancient Pistol somewhat tiresome” ? Professor Hibbard does not claim to have discovered a new chronology that makes Pistol an early point 502 of departure, nor does he for a moment suggest that this character proves for Shakespeare a climactic achievement. Instead, in his introductory chap­ ter that leads primarily to discussion of plays written between 1589 and 1598, he genially argues that Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences found Pistol much more appealing than we do because they knew many of the lines, tags, and allusions he so unwittingly parodies. Hibbard then argues, for the most part convincingly, that such specific knowledge differs from the more imprecise and general references to texts, perhaps including some of Shakespeare’s own, that are alluded to in “the poetic cheese with which ‘The Mouse-Trap’ is baited” (17). Hibbard proposes as his main thesis that Shakespeare’s plays convey a sense of an art that is constantly building on itself, drawing strength from its failures as well as from its successes, and moving towards some kind of stability. . . . It is precisely this sense of continuity and of a deep underlying unity within its apparent diversity, lacking from Marlowe’s work, that Shake­ speare so abundantly and confidently gives. (7) More fully in his second chapter, Hibbard argues: He not only knew his dramatic heritage inside out, but he also studied in a fashion that can best be described...