Parergon

Short notices 267 The more complex issues mentioned earlier are sketchily treated, but the overall impression received from this booklet is that the 1995 St George's Cathedral Lecture was well worth attending. Carole M . Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Wilkins, Nigel, Music in the Age of Chaucer (Chaucer Studies I), Woodbridge, D. S. Brewer, second edition, with 'Chaucer Songs', 1995; cloth; pp. xiv, 210; 54 plates; R.R.P. £39.50. Chaucer's works are full of descriptions of music-making and his poems abound in musical imagery. There are frequent references to his having composed songs (Balades, Roundels, Virelayes) and he consciously used as a stylistic model the verse of his French contemporary, the composer-poet Guillaume de Machaut. 'Now welcom somer', the rondeau which comes towards the end of The Parlement ofFoules, is introduced with the line, 'The note, I trowe, imaked was in Fraunce'. Unlike Machaut, Chaucer was not a musician, nor, so far as we know, were his lyric works set to music by contemporaries—hence the inverted commas around the title, 'Chaucer Songs'. In comparison with the rich chanson repertory of fourteenth-century France, exemplified in the works of Machaut, Britain appears to have produced very little in the way of secular polyphony. Thefirsteditions of Nigel Wilkin's Music in the Age of Chaucer and its companion volume 'Chaucer Songs' (Chaucer Studies I and IV, 1979 and 1980) were politely received fifteen years ago and have been largely ignored ever since. Intended as a general guide to the music of fourteenth-century France, Italy and Britain, the text volume was stronger on visual appeal than analytical insights. It presented little more than the standard textbook overview, supported by a disproportionate number of references to the author's own published work. Most valuable were the chapters 'Minstrels' and 'Chaucer', the latter providing an exhaustive compilation of musical references. The music volume, 'Chaucer Songs', was an imaginative and admittedly speculative attempt to create such 'songs' by fitting Chaucer's poetry to contemporaneous chansons, mostly by Machaut. Brewer's decision to issue a second edition of these two titles bound in one attractively presented volume has not provided the occasion for rectifying shortcomings, revising and updating. N o attempt been made to 268 Short notices integrate text and music by providing, for example, a table of in-text references to the fourteen musical items. Certainly the reproduction quality of the plates is much improved over the first edition; the more's the pity therefore that these appositely chosen illustrations remain unnumbered and without page references in the general listing (pp. xi-xii). It was never clear for what audience Music in the Age of Chaucer was intended. Its reissue fifteen years later, in an unrevised second edition, is doubly puzzling. Robert Curry Western Australian Conservatorium of Music Edith Cowan University Wood, Nigel, ed., Henry IV, Part One and Two (Theory in Practice), Buckingham and-Bristol, Open University Press, 1995; paper; pp. 224; R.R.P. £10.99, AUS$35.00. This is amongst the first batch of volumes in a new series whose title proclaims its intention: Theory in Practice. The essays are new and specially commissioned, and each describes a literary theory and then uses it to interpret Shakespeare's text. After the editor, Nigel Wood, provides some essential textual, critical and staging information in his Introduction, Jonathan Goldberg approaches the two-part Henry IV through gender theory, Ronald MacDonald through Bakhtin's theory of utterance, Kiernan Ryan through the Marxism of Fredric Jameson, and Peter W o m a c k through Benjamin's account of Brechtian epic theatre. The idea behind the series responds to a need of teachers of English in the 1990s. W e have all heard the cries that literary theory is too self-sufficient and does not lead back to texts, while teaching which addresses texts neglects the advances of theory. A tactful editorial hand insists that the essays should not be uncontested, by following each with a brief interview with the author. The common (and obvious) strategy adopted by each essayist is to present a theory and then to give a reading of the plays...