Haber is a superb close reader and her book consistently resists conventional readings of the plays she examines, many of which are non-Shakespearean and have only enjoyed detailed critical attention in more recent decades. Her early chapters on Christopher Marlowe's Tamberlaine and Edward II are particularly impressive in this regard, while her keen eye consistently notes the telling detail or the repeated use of a word or phrase whose cumulative effect bolsters the argument she is making. The book's overall thrust seems to be towards queering and feminizing Renaissance dramatic form; Haber claims in her introduction that ‘one of the implications of [this] work is that narrative “history” necessarily partakes of the same culturally created connections to patriarchal, heteroerotic masculinity as all narratives, and needs to be radically reconceived if it is really to represent other positions’ (p. 2). She is also interested in rescuing a more aesthetic view of gender and sexuality in texts that historicist criticism has tended to overlook.

In doing so, however, Haber calls upon theory to an extent – and without sufficient elucidation – that tends to render much of her text obscure and often fails to persuade the reader of the truth of her argument. Haber's chapters are sprinkled liberally with phrases occasionally leading to dubious conclusions or obfuscations. For example, Haber asserts that in The Changeling the playwright locates a form of imperfection in Beatrice as if she were ‘castrated’ (p. 99), and she tangentially suggests that ‘Hero and Leander . . . operates on the (il)logic of the fetish’ (p. 40). A further claim concerning The Revenger's Tragedy that the ‘characteristic movement of the play pointedly recalls contemporary descriptions of the male orgasm’ (p. 62) is neither convincingly argued nor capable of evincing more than a surprised raising of the eyebrows. Conversely, the indeterminacy or ‘pointlessness’ apparent to Haber in some of Marlowe's works is well discussed, but often difficult to follow, calling upon formalist narratology and on theorists such as Luce Irigaray to underpin much of the argument.

These drawbacks suggest that the book may only appeal to a limited scholarly population and its importance in opening out the discussion regarding early modern desire may be partly negated by the difficulty of comprehending such arguments as ‘the culturally defined and despised sodomitical and feminine, both . . . possess the capacity to interrogate the phallic point upon which [the] dominant fiction [of reality] rests’ (p. 4), a sentence whose unravelling takes a lot of effort for little reward.

Nevertheless, the importance of the work needs to be emphasized. The relative brevity of the book (133 pages) is made up for by the breadth and depth of Haber's insights and the wide variety of texts she explores. For Haber, erotic desires in early modern texts interrupt the normally recognized patriarchal status quo, and through them conventional narrative is faced with new disruptive forces of gender and sexuality.