uncertainty. He considers the plays not only as portrayals of past events and dissections of the functioning of the contemporary political scene, but also and especially as proph- ecies of what the future might bring. So, surprisingly, Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays ad- dress issues and anxieties also prominent in Catholic tracts of the period: just as the tracts portrayed Elizabeth’s reign as illegitimate, so the plays stage a series of usurpations of the throne that erode the prestige of monarchy and explore a possible future of interminable wars of religion in England like those raging across the Channel in France. Lake shows how Richard III explores a topic not without interest to us in the present day—how tyr- anny can emerge out of seemingly legitimate political structures and processes. The equivocal figures after whom Richard of Gloucester patterns his political behavior— Catiline, Ulysses, Sinon, and Machiavelli—are precisely those that the Catholic tracts attributed to Bacon, Cecil, and Leicester in the government of Elizabeth. In a strikingly original discussion, Lake shows how the nearly contemporaneous Richard III and Titus Andronicus work out “similar political and moral problematics” (171), probing into ar- cana imperii that under normal circumstances would be off limits to all but the queen’s closest counselors. He discusses King John and Richard II as studies of how one might actually go about removing and replacing a weak, tyrannical monarch, and is particu- larly good on Falstaff, Oldcastle, Henry V, and the rise of Essex as a potential successor to Elizabeth. Essex looms large also behind Lake’s Hamlet, which he interprets, in part, as a “relatively charitable judgement on the Essex fiasco,” followed by Troilus and Cres- sida, a cynical account of the wreckage left after the usurping lord’s execution (594). Despite the reductiveness of the over-formulaic summaries offered here, one of Lake’s great strengths as an interpreter is that, with few exceptions, he avoids pinning the plays down to a fixed political message, emphasizing the array of possible applica- tions that audiences could draw from the drama on stage. Insofar as Shakespeare can be read as predicting a series of dire futures for England, he repeatedly got things spec- tacularly wrong. For Lake, “all that proves is that it is not necessary to be politically correct, or at least correct about politics, to write plays that last” (603). Leah S. Marcus, Vanderbilt University Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood. Jeffrey Knapp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 298 pp. $35. Its title notwithstanding, Jeffrey Knapp’s bold and meticulously crafted study does not aim to please everyone. Knapp aims instead to challenge and correct cherished ortho- doxies, but whereas his previous works questioned broadly shared assumptions within Shakespeare studies, Pleasing Everyone targets many of film studies’ founding theoret- ical assumptions. REVIEWS 427 This content downloaded from 070.103.053.035 on March 26, 2018 07:21:16 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).