Shakespeare Survey 28 ed. by Kenneth Muir

Abstract

REVIEWS Shakespeare Survey 28. Edited by Kenneth Muir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. vi + 187. $19.95. Shakespeare Survey 28 is devoted to Shakespeare and the ideas of his time, a topic encouraging interdisciplinary approaches and a variety of responses to them. The volume contains fourteen essays (though not all directly on the theme) by distinguished scholars from America, Eng­ land, France, Canada, Germany, and Africa. It also has the usual annual review of Shakespearean studies—-critical, historical, and textual. Pride of place rightly goes to S. Schoenbaum for his “Richard II and the Realities of Power.” Marvelously wide ranging, Schoenbaum’s essay examines the contradictory portraits of Richard in narrative sources and in contemporary drama to prove how chimerical are the orthodox norms claimed for Elizabethan England. In relating Shakespeare’s play to Essex’s rebellion, Schoenbaum convincingly shows that the dramatist was not the Earl’s advance man and cautions that the detailed analogies seen between Richard and Elizabeth would not automatically win con­ spiratorial sympathizers in an audience more interested in the play than the details of politics. Especially noteworthy is Schoenbaum’s fresh read­ ing of I.iii, seeing Richard not as the capricious weakling but as the “politic realist” who rids himself of two enemies at once. The next two articles are by a historian and a philosopher, respec­ tively. Writing on “The Politics of Corruption in Shakespeare’s England,” Joel Hurstfield discusses the career of Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley, to illustrate the differences between Elizabeth’s “potentially” corrupt gov­ ernment and James’s actually debauched state. The elements of cor­ ruption—bribes, patronage, power plays—were controlled by Elizabeth’s shrewd manipulation of court rivalries; James’s “favouritism, a travesty of patronage, brought the government into disrepute.” Hurstfield has little to say about the plays, but what few parallels he draws between politics and drama are instructive. Corruption of another sort governs Morris Weitz’s “Literature Without Philosophy: Antony and Cleopatra.” For Weitz the play contains philosophical themes but it “is not a philo­ sophical drama: it neither makes nor includes any general claim about man and his world. Rather it is a tragedy of two particulars who instance no universal applicable to all.” Using copious (and cloying) quotations from the play, drawn from Roman and Egyptian language, Weitz claims that the theme of “perfection that destroys” (how “one thing generates its opposite by being its opposite”) makes the lovers unique. Despite Weitz’s interesting scrutiny of ideas, I have trouble seeing the play in terms of a philosophical disquisition (or lack thereof). Even so, Cleo88 Reviews 89 patra in her infinite variety and Antony with his abject lessons in politics do express universal truths. Doubtless Weitz would agree with Bradley’s choice of plays in his Shakespearean Tragedy. Robert Ellrodt’s “Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare” is more a piece of phenomenological criticism than a source study. Show­ ing a healthy skepticism for Shakespeare’s direct indebtedness to the French writer and giving little credit to numerous phrasal echoes of Florio in Shakespeare, Ellrodt prefers to concentrate not on specific ideas but on shared “faculties of the mind.” (He disregards his own advice in seeing that three of the Essais “offer some of the closest par­ allels and may have suggested both the characters of Hamlet and Fortinbras.”) In both writers Ellrodt finds an “intense self-conscious­ ness” that seeks expression not in rhetorical or logical terms or through self-dramatizations but by an introspection that “may dissolve identity.” I think Ellrodt is wrong to exclude Macbeth, Othello, and Lear from the same process (seeing Hamlet and Measure for Measure as exemplary of it) and I believe that some of Ellrodt’s argument loses its impressive­ ness when we consider that what he applies to the two writers (and Donne as well) was a cast of thought common to the age. In the next article, a provocative and learned approach to a difficult play—“Measure for Measure: The Bed-Trick,” A. D. Nuttall claims that before any considerations of character arise, the very plot disturbs us. He tries to minimize our anxiety by showing the parallels (as against the differences emphasized...