A Bastard 39;s Tale
Urbano Bozman
Don't be discouraged by a confusing hawk-hunting scene introducing numerous characters at the start of Frazer's 14th Dame Frevisse mystery (after 2004's The Hunter's Tale), because what follows is a smooth and absorbing saga of conspiracy and treachery in 15th-century England. In 1449, landowner Edward Helyngton lies on his deathbed while his jealous cousin Laurence waits raptor-like to swoop down and seize his estate. Soon after Edward's demise, his widow, Cristiana, is banished to St. Frideswide's nunnery, where she's forced to do penance face down on the cold chapel floor for unspecified sins alleged by Laurence's agents. Living on bread and water, the embittered Cristiana eventually tells her sad tale to Dame Frevisse, who is at first only a sympathetic listener, but later takes a more active sleuthing role. A tantalizing secret confided to Cristiana by her dying husband turns out to have stunning political implications. The suspense builds steadily toward a visit from King Henry VI in this well-wrought tale involving murder, treason and "layers of ambition and betrayal." Agent, Nancy Yost. (Jan. 5)
FYI: A two-time Edgar nominee, Frazer is also the author of A Play of Isaac (2004), the first in a new medieval mystery series. "Margaret Frazer" is the pseudonym of Gail Frazer, who collaborated with Mary Pulver Kuhfeld on the first six books in the series.
Reviewed by:
- Adoption Politics, Bastard Nation and Ballot Initiative 58 Michael Grossberg
Carp's story focuses on the individuals and organizations that fought over the initiative. He describes the range of individual motivations and tactical decisions that animated the conflict. Particularly compelling is his ability to convey the hopes and fears both of adoptees seeking birth information and of birth mothers and adoption agencies worried about the impact that the release of that same information might have on [End Page 299] them. This clash of rights and interests serves as the centerpiece of Carp's story, as they did of the campaign itself. Equally important, the book reveals the intricacies of interest-group politics in present-day America, especially the power of organized groups like Bastard Nation, an adoptee rights organization, to frame critical public-policy issues.
Throughout the narrative, Carp highlights the significance of individual actions and choices in the creation of public policy. Most notable is his explanation of the campaign organizers' crucial decision to present adoptees' access to birth records as a fundamental issue of civil rights and equal protection rather than one of psychological need and medical necessity. In its discussion of the determinative role played by those hired to obtain signatures on petitions in getting the initiative on the ballot to the critical role of the internet as an electioneering tool, the book becomes a case study of grassroots politics in America.
Adoption Politics is a work of social history rendered in clear, direct prose. It's most critical source is oral history. Carp's success in giving voice to those on all sides of the initiative demonstrates his skill as an interviewer while also giving his analysis depth and credibility. The interviews are also placed in context with conventional institutional sources, most notably legislative acts, judicial rulings, agency records, and newspaper articles. These materials allow Carp to situate the 1998 campaign within a larger framework of debates about adoption that arose during the twentieth century. Carp's determination to place recent events in a comprehensive context marks Adoption Politics as a work of history.
In the end, the primary subject of this book is captured in its title. Carp's is a story with a clear moral: The successful Oregon initiative should be recognized as a model act that effectively balances the rights and duties of all those involved in an adoption. As a result, Adoption Politics is addressed most directly to those concerned about adoption. Yet, lingering in its pages is a second, less directly articulated argument about the nature of political action in early twenty-first century America. At a time when every political season brings a bumper crop of initiatives and referenda, Carp offers a cautionary tale about the possibilities and problems of making policy through ballot measures.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
King John is a play that constantly surprises--and occasionally frustrates--expectation. It offers the audience scenes of high emotion and of dramatic debate, but it is not easy to categorize the overall effect or appeal. Its isolation in period from the other history plays means that critics look in vain for the prophetic sweep of those plays comfortably located within the larger narratives explored in the two tetralogies. If the play is approached as a tragedy, the protagonist, King John, is likely to disappoint, as he shares the stage with several other significant characters and fades into weakness as the action progresses; in addition, his death is never shown to be clearly or directly the result of his own actions. Nor is the play in any sense a comedy, though the Bastard has his moments of witty commentary. Partly because of this uncertainty of expectation, King John has been characterized as a "transitional" play, fitting neatly between the two tetralogies (Vaughn). The concept of two tetralogies is deeply engrained in critical studies of the histories, despite the remarkable lack of evidence that Shakespeare thought of his historical dramas in this way. As I discuss in my Textual Introduction, the three plays on Henry VI, followed by Richard III, might have some claim to have been conceived as a sequence since they share so many characters, and some structural characteristics, but even the Henry VI plays seem not to have been composed in chronological order, and the title page of the first version of Henry VI, Part Three suggests that it is the second part of a two-part play--a much more common authorial strategy. Similarly, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V work well as a sequence of three, with the first two explicitly linked. Richard II, however, is a clear outlier, with its deeply poetic language, its focus on one central character--despite the structural importance of Bolingbroke--and its carefully focused, single plot. If King John is to be seen as a transition it is at least as likely that it was written between Richard II and Henry IV, Part One. Like Richard II it is composed entirely in verse; like Henry IV, Part One, it features a fictional character as one of the major sources of entertainment and commentary on the historical plot.
2There is nonetheless some insight in the approach that sees King John as a transitional play. The term suggests experiment, as the author moves from one mode of writing to a different one; if at times King John challenges and frustrates our expectations, it is in part because it is experimental. Whatever its exact date of composition, the mid-1590s was a period when Shakespeare seems to have been constantly exploring a remarkable range of genres and sources for the plays he was writing: Love's Labor's Lost (comedy of manners and words with a non-comic ending), Romeo and Juliet (domestic tragedy with a comic structure), Richard II (history, with an elevated, almost epic style), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (multi-layered comedy like nothing before or since). There are, of course, many similarities within this group of plays: all seem at times drunken with language; three are preoccupied with young love, two explore metatheater in plays-within-plays. The scene in King John where the Citizens look on the battles of the antagonists comes close to the same kind of metatheatrical structure. The Bastard wittily points this out:
3Shakespearean criticism has been profoundly influenced by the choices his fellow actors, Heminges and Condell, made as they organized the bundle of plays they were preparing for publication by genre, choosing comedies, histories, and tragedies. We are now acutely aware that the their three genres were a compromise. The late arrival of Troilus and Cressida, for example, forced the printer to sandwich the play between the histories and tragedies. This is not a bad place for it, we might think, but the inclusion of Cymbeline among the tragedies is a clear sign that the pattern they saw was somewhat blurry. So too is the cross-categorization of Richard II from the quarto's Tragedie of King Richard the Second to a history in the Folio, and Lear from the quarto's True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters to the Folio's tragedy. More recent critical approaches have refined the threefold pattern of the Folio to include convenient categories for at least two of its anomalies, as Troilus and Cressida is slotted into the group of "problem plays" and Cymbeline into the group of late "romances."
4But what all these decisions, from Heminge and Condell onward, tend to do is to smooth over the extraordinary angularity and variety of the work that Shakespeare has left us. Even within traditional genres no two plays look alike: in the tragedies, for example, we move from the tight construction of Macbeth with its central anti-hero to the sprawling dual plot of King Lear (in both versions); and no theory of dual authorship in the surviving version of Macbeth or of extensive revision in King Lear will paper over the differences. If we choose to create a subcategory for Roman tragedies, we are similarly left with the chasm between the restrained language and compact structure of Julius Caesar and the sprawling riches of Antony and Cleopatra, with its episodic structure and dense imagery. There are, of course, overarching changes in Shakespeare's craft between early and late plays, but at the granular level as we look at groups of plays we are left with variety rather than regularity and consistency; with experimentation as much as with anything we might label "genre," or "development."
c80f0f1006