Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles: Verse into Drama by John Baxter

Abstract

of the Hand and the Child tale enough striking parallels with Part i of Beowulf to establish probable influence is undercut by the fact that the pronounced differences seem, as least to me, even more remarkable than the analogies. Puhvel does not even make as good an argument for his thesis as he could with the evidence available. At no point in the chapter, for example, does he pull together a list of all the connections he sees; the already sceptical reader is left scrambling more than once to add up Puhvel’s cumulative case for him, in an attempt to see why some Celtic motif is even being discussed as part of the Hand and the Child tradition. In conclusion, Puhvel’s presentation of his ideas and conclusions is ad­ mirably undogmatic but it is also unconvincing. Part of the problem of course is the notoriously difficult task of getting hold of reliable facts for a period whose literary history is largely unwritten and in many of its major questions may always be so. Even beyond that large problem, however, there is a nebulousness about this book’s thesis, its mode of arguing, and its docu­ mentation that leads me to the conclusion that the case has not been made. alvin a. lee / McMaster University John Baxter, Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles: Verse into Drama (London, Bos­ ton and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). ix, 255. $22.50 Given their many other kinds of greatness, the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are compounded of great poetry is a miracle easily overlooked. Studies of stages and stage effects, acting styles and audiences, sources, devices, and conventions can divert attention from this primary instrument used by Shakespeare to make dramatic meaning. As well, those studies that do treat Shakespeare’s poetry often proceed by lifting patterns and tropes out of the immediate situations through which they receive their definition and their dramatic life. Discussion of how his dramatic poetry actually works usually tours the country of Shakespearean scholarship in a sidecar, attached when the driver feels the need for respectable if somewhat stodgy company; and discussion of the aesthetic implications of his poetic forms rides even more tenuously on the back of the driver’s seat, when it is not altogether pedes­ trian. There is reason, then, to be grateful for John Baxter’s purposeful and stimulating book. Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles: Verse into Drama examines Shakespeare’s various styles as the strategies he employs to shape dramatic experience, as he defines both his characters and the views of human exis­ tence to which their actions relate. The book roots its approach in Yvor Winters’s distinction between the Petrarchan style and the plain style in sixteenth-century poetry, a distinction 37i first propounded in an essay of 1939 and later refined by J. V. Cunningham, Wesley Trimpi, Douglas Peterson, and by Winters himself in Forms of Discovery (1967). Like Winters, Baxter prefers the plain style, arguing its centrality to the major achievements of English Renaissance poetry. Baxter faces an obstacle, however, in attempting to extend this approach from lyric poetry to drama: In The Function of Criticism, Winters had asserted that drama was inherently a defective medium for poetry of the first order. Using Macbeth as an example, Winters claimed that the dramatist, obliged at times to depict characters inferior to himself in perception and expression, must in consequence write badly or express unworthy ideas or sentiments if his characterization is to be accurate. Part of Baxter’s task, then, is to address Winters’s doubts about the kind of poetry that is possible within the compass of dramatic form. Ultimately, he refutes Winters’s criticism of “imitative form” by showing up the de­ ficiencies in Winters’s view of drama. If one replaces Winters’s (and the Chicago critics’) notion of drama as a merely imitative form with a more accurately Aristotelian view of dramatic mimesis, one recognizes that making rather than imitating is essential to the playwright’s art. Building on George Whalley’s lucid interpretation of mimesis as an exploratory process by which characters and actions are brought into being, Baxter demonstrates how Shakespeare can employ a...