CHAPTER 9 - Commentaries on Individual Plays

Abstract

This chapter presents a discursive account of some of the work on the individual plays that happens to interest the present writer. Osbert Lancaster, in his introduction to the Folio Society edition of the play, finds little to recommend it apart from the contrast of the two main settings. On the one hand Rossillion and the Court of France, medieval, old-fashioned, and hierarchic; on the other, Renaissance Florence, tough, realistic, modern. Norman Sanders, in his introduction to his edition of this play in the New Penguin Shakespeare, writes that critics have disagreed frequently in trying to define what kind of play it is. Fortunately, J. C. Maxwell in Shakespeare Survey 10 has written a Survey of criticism 1900–56 and Professor Sanders's own short chapter on Further reading in his New Penguin edition of the play brings this survey up to date.