Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play. Lynn Enterline, ed. The Arden Shakespeare State of Play 5. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019. x + 262 pp. £75

[...]they do not make up a species or category, a body of literature, or even a limb, so much as a set of poetic gestures. In an intriguing set of essays on sexuality and masculinity, Jessica Winston, John Garrison, and Stephen Guy-Bray focus on the young adult male writers of the Inns and the (literally) off-balance sexuality of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, advancing, within the general thematic of premodern sexuality, our understanding of the developmental category of an adolescent male of indeterminate or multiple sexual orientations, and the anxieties of transition from schoolboy into socially mandated adult masculinity. Eisendrath probes the limits of rhetorical training, finding at the verbal edges an emergent “non-instrumental understanding of art” that we normally associate with a post-Kantian world, a pre-poetics that appears as “a kind of shadow of rhetoric” (63).