Patricia Parker has long been one of our field's most brilliant critics, skillfully deploying the tools of philological and lexicographic analysis to shed light on the political and sexual obsessions of early modern English poetry and drama. In Shakespearean Intersections, readers travel with Parker through a complex allusive network that is anchored by single words or single names. In each chapter, glosses for those words or names develop with increasingly filigreed detail, resolving into powerful readings of whole plays. Indeed, one of the great successes of Shakespearean Intersections is the way it demonstrates the dense connectivity of Shakespeare's linguistic art by actively participating in it and furthering it.

The network created here begins with one word: preposterous. Readers of Parker's work will remember her influential 1993 essay on Love's Labour's Lost, which used that term to identify patterns of linguistic and orthographic inversion in the play, patterns that in turn pertained to or made possible sexual, political, and social rearrangements. In the introduction and first chapter of Shakespearean Intersections, Parker expands upon the brilliant outcomes of that essay and shows us how its ideas might help organize a broad-ranging analysis of other historical and linguistic engagements in Shakespeare's plays. In chapter 1, for example, we see how the foundational elements of the social world mocked in Love's Labour's Lost and in Shakespearean comedy more generally—the modes of normative heterosexuality, patriarchy, linguistic capital, and rank embodied by the King of Navarre and his friends—are all “deformed” by the force of the preposterous. Parker's clever undoing of the ideological underpinnings of the play, or, to put it another way, her portrait of linguistic and cultural reversals, mirrors back to us the play's own undoing of elite masculinities, its own diffuse sexual, cultural, and textual multiplicity.

Ensuing chapters each take up the potential of the preposterous in different ways. A chapter on The Taming of the Shrew uses the disguised Lucentio's jibe at Hortensio (he calls him a “Preposterous ass”) to reflect on the “arsy-varsy exchanges of place and position” (105) in the play and to demonstrate, among other things, its relevance to ongoing discussions about the homoerotics of early modern pedagogy. In another chapter, an extended gloss on the interlinguistic resonance of the name Quince reveals what Parker calls the “disfiguring” of the marriage plots in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Again, comedy's presumed dependence upon or reproduction of hegemonic sexualities is critiqued through the laying out of rich lexical networks.

One might assume that Parker's remarkable eye (or ear) for jest, pun, and erotic reference would be most effectively applied to Shakespeare's comedies, but the chapters here on history plays (specifically, Henry V and its backward-looking recall of previous depictions of English history) and tragedy (Othello, and the global perspective enriched by the name Brabantio) are equally suggestive. The work on Othello is less directly tied into ideas about the preposterous, which feels like a missed opportunity, given the racist menace built into Brabantio's famous line about nature “preposterously” erring in Desdemona's attraction to Othello. But the discussion of the interplay between Brabant, the bourse at Antwerp, Ottoman Turks, and the draperies trade is rewarding in itself. The book concludes with a discussion of a missing name—Ganymede in Cymbeline—in which Parker returns to the homoerotic scenarios and significations that played the main role in the opening chapters. This final chapter's gloss on the word part encapsulates perfectly the pleasures of Shakespearean Intersections as a whole. A familiar term enmeshed in Parker's vibrant referential context glows with new energy.

By the end of the book, the preposterous has become knowable as more than just a signpost for the kinds of social and linguistic reversals that interest Parker: it is also, clearly, a critical method. Classical philology, for all its debates, often sought out authoritative or potentially singular glosses in the form of clarifying definitions or explications that obviated the need for further explication. In this sense, Parker's book enacts a preposterous philology, one that encourages more networked meanings, rather than shutting them down, tracing out ever more relations of history and language that require further thought and further investigation. There is a certain generosity built into all this, one shared by recent books by Jeffrey Masten (Queer Philologies) and Roland Greene (Five Words), whose methods chime with Parker's. The conclusion one draws from Shakespearean Intersections is that a lifetime of study in classical and early modern literature, multiple languages, philosophy, and world history might foster a critical perspective that invigorates our most familiar texts and makes them speak to the pressing issues of our time. This is the true promise of creative, inspiring literary criticism. It is a promise made good in Shakespearean Intersections.