Book Reviews 101 rative pattern of Middle English romance, the texts that King discusses in the first part of the book tend to drop out of sight while he talks about Ireland and Queen Elizabeth. In general, this is not a bad thing, because King has good observations to make about both subjects. His comments on Radigund, the Amazonian virago of book 5, are a case in point: although students of the poem’s historical allegory usually identify her with Mary Stuart, King argues (persuasively, I think) that Radigund functions more effectively as a representation of Elizabeth’s emasculating power over her courtiers and deputies. In short, King is a thoughtful reader of Spenser’s poetry, even when he is not talking about the poet’s debt to his medieval predecessors. David Scott Wilson-Okamura East Carolina University Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. vii+ 240. “For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” With this epigraph from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, Sovereign Amity announces its object of study: the early modern association between same-sex friendship and monarchy. “Sov-- ereignty” is the term that Renaissance writers used to describe both the state of idealized friendship and the prerogatives of regal power; the coupling of “sovereign” with “amity” in this book’s title makes the connection explicit. According to Shannon, the exaltation of intimate masculine friendship—initially expressed in classical texts and reartic- ulated by Renaissance political theorists, writers of conduct books, and playwrights—expresses a “fantasy of private agency,” of self-possession, that is “calibrated through a figure of regal political power” (p. 9). The monarch, however, is not merely a metaphor for friendship in Shan- non’s study, for she materializes kingship in order to argue that the literary personage least likely to enjoy the private sovereignty experi- enced in friendship is the king. As the later chapters of her book demonstrate, the rules of amicitia and the rules of proper monarchy conflict; thus, representations of a good king depict him as, despite the presence of counselors and advisers, essentially solitary and friendless. Because many of the texts Shannon interprets have been, since Laurens Mills’s 1937 study One Soule in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tu- dor Literature and Stuart Drama, part of the masculine friendship canon This content downloaded from 141.211.4.224 on Tue, 12 May 2020 18:24:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms