Slander in Drama

Abstract

0 be plausible, slander successfully addressed to noble, intelligent person, whether in drama or other story, requires, I think, postulate as well as supporting structure; and it is one of the strangest things in the history of Shakespeare criticism that the late illustrious Granville-Barker, amply A4,_ recognizing the importance of the postulate in general, should, like nearly all the other critics dealing with Othello and Edgar, where it is explicit, entirely ignore it. Of Edmund's deception of Edgar and Gloster together he says that Shakespeare asks us to allow him the fact even as we have allowed him Lear's partition of the kingdom; and fifty-seven pages earlier, while defending the partition according to the daughters' avowals, he maintains that a dramatist may postulate any situation that he has the means to interpret, if he will abide by the logic of it after. Still, on the page just before the remark about Gloster, in his case, at any rate, he does not himself allow Shakespeare the fact of Edmund's deception: an egoist, and blind, knowing least of what he should know most, of his own two sons. Thus he nevertheless endeavors to interpret realistically, psychologically, not profiting by the postulate, in Edmund's own words: