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One's first reaction to this book is to wonder why it was needed. Surely we have enough books now on rhetorical backgrounds, especially in regard to the English Renaissance, which, despite its title, is where almost all of this book's emphasis lies. But one's first reaction is not infrequently wrong, and this turns out to be a pleasing case in point. Brian Vickers has provided what has been missing all along, a just, evenhanded, and comprehensive treatment of this subject.One reason such a book has been so long lacking is that until comparatively recently most criticism has hesitated to acknowledge the importance of rhetoric for the Renaissance, fearful (sometimes justifiably so) of a simplistic application of rhetorical concepts that would reduce Renaissance poetry to a dry-as-dust subject for pedantry from which critics who could not tell antimetabole from epizeuxis would be barred. The most significant treatments of rhetoric have until now lain chiefly either in those writers who discuss the topic while on their way to other pursuitsas does Madeleine Doran in her admirable Endeavors of Artor in tendentious treatments such as that which characterizes Rosemond Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery.Vickers manages neither to despise rhetoric nor to claim too much for it as an aid to our understanding. He is admirably aware of the twofold dangers in a mechanistic, too-technical approach to the interrelationship of rhetoric and poetry: that of losing sight of the poem and that of losing the interest of a large proportion of his readers. When he does bring his book to its natural climax in the final chapter, with rhetorical analyses of poetry by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Herbert, he is gentle to both poem and reader, even to the point of warning us that these "are samples and demonstrations, and suffer from the usual fault of demonstration pieces, that the points have probably been too myopically and laboriously