Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (review)

Abstract

Newstok, Scott L., ed. 2007. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press. $65.00 he. $32.00 sc. Iv + 308 pp.Willis SalomonTrinity UniversityIn Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, Scott Newstok brings together all of late Kenneth Burke's surprisingly voluminous Shakespearean criticism, including appendix of references to Shakespeare in Burke's major works and, perhaps most excitingly, Burke's previously unpublished, extensive notes on Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida. Yet, as Newstock's clear and wellinformed introduction suggests, given Burke's critical strategies and temperament, volume and depth of Burke's lifetime of work on Shakespeare should not surprise us. Newstok understands Burke rightly as Aristotelean at his critical core, as analyst of a given text seeking a deeper structural rationale for its development (xviii). And he offers a list with definitional commentary of some crucial concepts that play a generative role in Burke's Shakespearean (xix).A cursory glance at these terms would show even a newcomer to Burke's work just how deeply Burke thought about texts, and how deeply rhetorical were his unceasing engagements with them. As Newstok points out in no uncertain terms, Burke's grounding in Aristotelean principles, especially affect-based concept of catharsis, allows him the latitude to posit formal principles without falling into formal rigidity (xxix). This latitude, moreover, theorized in Burke's concept of dramatism-the famous pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose - seems an ambitious elaboration of theatrum mundi conceit, and may taken shape in Burke's thinking, Newstok provocatively suggests, as a result of his enduring familiarity with Shakespeare; indeed, Newstok contends that Shakespeare may been the core motivation (xxv).Ironically, Burke's characteristic latitude with formal principles, perhaps most engaging feature of his critical work and one most consonant with contemporary ideas about intersection of texts and cultural contexts, has also marginalized him from academic critical mainstream, both within Shakespeare studies and without. Newstok's introduction tackles squarely issue of Burke's place in contemporary criticism. He acknowledges that Burke's lack of scholarly engagement with academic criticism, though clearly a virtue, has been impediment to circulation of his work in academia (xxx) . But he also acknowledges fundamental absurdity of lumping Burke in with New Criticism because of his inventions with concept of form, preoccupied as those inventions always are with speakers' motives and a range of potential authence reactions; that is, not with static form but with a rhetoric of emergent form (xxxi). Moreover, as Newstok recognizes, Burke has shown, perhaps as a consequence of grand heuristic sweep of his dramatistic method, ability to have been here before - that is, to already framed readings of Shakespeare later pursued, as Newstok shows, by such recently influential Shakespearean critics as Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Frank Whigham, and Michael McCanles (xxi-xxii).Newstok organizes Burke's Shakespearean criticism chronologically, and introduction also reminds us that we must place Burke's early Shakespeare essays ... in a fraught center: between activists politically to his left, and fellow critics who found Burke's own politics too radical (xxviii). …