Abstract
Reviews 347 Doctor Faustus, from the morality tradition; here one will find such scholars as Dover Wilson and David Bevington surer guides. What emerges, however tentatively, from this somewhat vulnerable study is an image of Shakespeare returning to medieval theological patterns in order to re-assert “Christian, positive, and now humanistic” values as a counterstatement to the cynicism of his age: “The structures of moral drama are it would seem perfectly suited to submitting the standards of the age to an ethical test” (pp. 169-70). Here, potentially, resides the greatest contribution of the work, and Creeth’s observations do lend some support to readers concerned with the religious and eschatological dimensions of Shakespeare’s art. Unfortunately, the im pact of the study is blunted by the author’s vagueness and indecisiveness about the relationship between theological/eschatological significances and “secular” dramaturgy. We are, for example, emphatically warned that Desdemona is “not a Christ-figure but the spiritual[?] equivalent in Othello’s concrete and particular experience of Christ-Wisdom in Mankynde’s symbolic and generalized experience” (p. 108). We are later told that Lear’s redemption is the “secular[?j equivalent to the King of Life’s spiritual redemption through prayer of Our Lady” (p. 150). The “secular” and “spiritual” seem to me so poorly defined as to suggest that Creeth, despite his appeal to medieval dramatic forms and pre-Reformation theology, is unduly intimidated by the secularists into viewing the secular and spiritual—or grace and nature—as two dis continuous realms. Surely what is needed is a more precise description of how the two realms interpenetrate in the work of a dramatist who is at once Christian and humanistic. RENÉ E. FORTIN Providence College Richard Fly. Shakespeare’s Mediated World. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976. Pp. vx + 164. $10.00. This is a confusing book on a confused and confusing subject. It requires a deal of patience and stamina to read. The difficulties are fundamentally two. First, Mr. Fly is interested in so many different kinds of relationships that he has trouble keeping the strands of his tangled skein separate from each other, even for the purposes of lucid presenta tion. Not content with attempting to analyze Shakespeare’s ideas of “mediation” or “between-ness” as these inform human relationships and styles of speech within particular plays (Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens), he makes such analyses the springboard for fuzzy speculations about Shakespeare’s supposed struggle with the act of artistic expression and hence with the difficulties and limitations of the dramatic medium itself. Second, Fly writes in a style so clotted with abstractions, inkhom terms, and modish jargon, so pretentious in its quasi-philosophical self-consciousness, so determined to embrace complexity and avoid plainness or common sense, that he mires the reader almost from the start in verbal quicksand. 348 Comparative Drama Shakespeare’s Mediated World exemplifies a melancholy irony of too much present-day literary criticism: it sets out to discriminate the stylistic nuances and subtleties of a great poet in the opaque and ungainly prose of a social psychologist—and a tone-deaf social psychologist to boot. Mr. Fly’s task requires grace and precision; he approaches it in a spirit of verbal elephantiasis that sends us to the dictionary once or twice a page. He is much given to such ugly neologisms as “life-medium,” “inter subjectivity,” “oxymoronic,” “creaturality,” “metadramatic,” “multi perspective,” and “ultra-extreme.” He pelts us with “parameters” and “paratactic sequence” and “ontological identity” and “transcendent instances of visionary break-through.” His persistently recherché vocabulary recalls Moth’s comment on the lingo of Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel: “They have been at a great feast of languages and stol’n the scraps.” Fly is for ever rebuking Mercutio, Nestor, Apemantus, or some other Shakespearean character for absurdly prolix or overblown expression in sentences that might well embarrass Osric or even Holofernes. He sums up the decorative and witty lyricism of the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, as “static exfoliations of various forms of linguistic mismanagement” (p. 7). Fly loves to make simple ideas sound complex. Juliet’s nurse cannot merely...
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