Modern Shakespeare Offshoots by Ruby Cohn

Abstract

350 Comparative Drama to test a highly resistant and intractable medium, and with stern and dogged effort to define his own limited control over it. Fly’s Shakespeare sounds so bottled up, so costive in his confrontation with aesthetic and expressive complexities, that he begins to resemble a caricature of a nineteenth-century Romantic, a joyless egoist engaged in an unremitting battle to define the self through art. Fly is enough of an historicist to know what Heminge and Condell said about their colleague—that Shakespeare “was a happie imitator of Nature” and “a most gentle expresser of it,” also that “what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.” But he dismisses the testimony of the Folio as too simple-minded. Fly prefers to imagine a dramatist for whom writing is a prodigious effort, the kind of writer, perhaps, whose compositional throes might lead to a sentence such as the following: “Timon’s spiritual agon—his dynamic achievement of insight—takes place behind closed doors, and the new entity who finally comes crashing through those doors crosses, in an explosive instant, the threshold between one identity and another” (p. 127). Fly’s book is inelegantly written, but worse still, it is presumptuous. Instead of plumbing the depths, it merely roils the water. CHARLES R. FORKER Indiana University Ruby Cohn. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1976. Pp. xii + 426. $22.50 hardcover. $8.95 paper. On the propriety of meddling with masterpieces, G. B. Shaw wrote with tongue in cheek, The stage is still dominated by Garrick’s conviction that the manager and actor must adapt Shakespear’s plays to the modem stage by a pro­ cess which no doubt presents itself to the adapter’s mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author. This was in the 1898 Preface to Plays Unpleasant. So why do it? Is the temptation so great, the inspiration so irresistible, for an author to measure himself against the master? Perhaps the reason is more subtle, that Shakespeare’s plays have acquired the stature of universally known myths, whereby an audience can be assumed to share a common ex­ perience at rise of curtain and so also share the pleasure of recognizing a departure from it. For, as with Greek tragedy, it is not the similarity between one Electra or one Hamlet and the next, but the perceived difference which makes the point. We laugh at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead because we think we know what happens in Hamlet when Ros and Guil do not. If we have a strong image of the original in mind, we can strangely enjoy even Hamlet or Lear with a happy ending, irreverently ignoring the inevitable trivialization. In another way, any “offshoot” from a Shakespeare play should tell Reviews 351 us something about the source, and especially about the age in which it is offered up for the sacrifice, just as we learn more about any play the more it is performed. The assumption here is that no interpretation is the last word, no production definitive, but that a play is alive and growing as long as it is on the stage, offering new insights with each production, revealing to each audience what it is most able to see, and, since in the theatre we are spectators and actors, perceiving and being perceived, revealing to each audience a new truth about itself. Shake­ speare above all, it seems, survives each onslaught of fashion and style, the death of each audience. Professor Cohn chooses not to discuss the aesthetic reasons for departure from the original, nor the interaction of stage and audience in period, although on occasion she dispenses with a chronological catalog in order to trace a style, like that associated with Hamlet the gloomy Dane of nineteenth-century romantic sensibilities, attractive in madness, loneliness, and Weltschmerz, a sorry condition summarized by Laforgue’s word “hamlétisme” (we are reminded that Hamlet’s “shadow darkened” Büchner’s Danton, Chateaubriand’s René, Byron’s...