Sympathy Of Audience Research Articles

Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Introduction by Dieter Mehl

268Comparative Drama Dieter Mehl. Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. ? + 272. $39.50. Intended for students and general readers rather than specialists, this volume is a "rather free translation, updated and revised," of a book published in German in 1983 (p. viii). There is also a cheaper paperback version. A brief introductory chapter on "Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy" is followed by a chapter on "The Early Tragedies" (Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet), another on "The 'Great' Tragedies" (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth), and a final catch-all discussion of "Romans and Greeks in Shakespeare's Tragedies" (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and more surprisingly Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida). Chosen for convenience rather than to serve any overarching thesis, this scheme permits Mehl to develop an interesting distinction between earlier protagonists and Antony and Coriolanus: unlike the former, who are destroyed or corrupted by personified or generalized forces of evil, the Roman heroes combine "heroic greatness . . . with an absolute [and self-destructive] claim to self-determination" (p. 199). Mehl acknowledges his use of the commentary of recent editors and critics in endnotes and has added a briefly annotated "Select bibliography." Mehl devotes about two dozen pages to each of the major plays and somewhat less to the others. Each discussion is self-contained but includes occasional observations about the evolution of Shakespeare's tragic writing and its relationship to the histories. He ignores linguistic concerns, social and intellectual contexts, and (except in passing) performance choices. His essays begin by outlining some of the general issues of the play under discussion and then proceed in a methodical, more or less scene-by-scene fashion to analyze dramaturgy, plot, and character— primarily that of the tragic hero. Mehl focuses on the ways in which Shakespeare presents and explores his protagonists' dilemmas, poses their relationships with their social world, and manipulates the ebb and flow of the audience's sympathy. Mehl's strongest points usually emerge from close study of the plays and their primary narrative sources, as in his illuminating contrast between Shakespeare's and Chaucer's handling of Troilus and Cressida. He uses the same comparative approach to advantage in placing Hamlet beside other revenge tragedies and in juxtaposing the two plots of King Lear. Following Bradley, Mehl defines Shakespeare's tragic vision in aesthetic and emotional rather than philosophical or ideological terms. These plays raise large questions about the nature of evil and the significance of human suffering, but leave "much of the moral evaluation and application to the individual member of his audience" (p. 4). Instead of providing answers to these questions, Shakespeare's tragedies, as Mehl reads them, like those of his contemporaries, elicit the audience's sympathetic engagement in the fate of a hero: "The unmistakable dynamic quality of Elizabethan tragedy comes from the discovery of the individual human character, from a burning interest in its potentialities for good or evil, its corruptibility as well as its exhilirating power to inspire and impress" (p. 5). Reviews269 In writing on specific plays, Mehl protects what he takes to be Shakespeare's deliberate vagueness against the narrowness of doctrinaire approaches—Christian, skeptical, sentimental, moralistic. Romeo and Juliet, he argues, sanctions neither "an attitude of superior moral censoriousness " nor "a triumphant glorification of 'Liebestod'," but should be seen as typical of Shakespeare's "provocative inconclusiveness and . . . unresolved juxtaposition of divergent points of view" (p. 28). In the chapter on Lear, he warns that "the absence of any unequivocal moral lesson" does not signify "arbitrariness or lack of orientation." He affirms the presence of "a general idea of humane behavior implied in the tragedy as a whole" (p. 103), but does not articulate that idea. Mehl's vision of a transcendent Shakespeare beyond the intellectual commitments of his or our time will strike some readers as refreshingly liberal and humane and others as naively ahistorical. The book can serve students as a reliable guide serves novice mountain climbers, one who is thoroughly familiar with the traditional pathways and suspicious of more exciting but riskier approaches. For that very reason, some teachers of Shakespeare may prefer to expose their...

Shakespeare’s Tragic Perspective by Larry Champion

260 Comparative Drama the gap between language theory and dramatic strategy, yet delivers far less than it sets out to do. The topic Quigley has chosen is suggestive in­ deed, but the thesis itself never becomes more than that. One misses, too, an argument that goes beyond the first decade of Pinter’s playwriting to incorporate the more recent explorations of stage language in Old Times, Monologue, and No Man’s Land. Quigley’s argument (as well as his source material) seems to stop somewhere around 1971 and, though it is always difficult to keep pace with a drama in the making, the book might have been more vital had it been updated. As it now stands, it reads too much like a text which might have been prepared a few years ago. Quigley, nonetheless, has set Pinter criticism in the right direction. It is time indeed to look at this material in the ways in which it allows itself to be discussed: why search for meaning in a script which refuses to give it to us? After all, as Frank Kermode has suggested, the theater is not the post-office, primarily established for the conveyance of messages. There is an art as well as a craft to writing dialogue for the stage and Quigley’s new book, like Andrew Kennedy’s recent Six Dramatists in Search of a Language, pays homage to the word made flesh on stage. ENOCH BRATER University of Michigan Larry Champion. Shakespeare’s Tragic Perspective. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Pp. 279. $11.00. One could do worse than recommend this study to a graduate student in search of a book to read on Shakespeare’s tragedies in preparation for an examination. But one should probably warn him that while he will find here a great deal of what he ought to say, he will get less of what to feel, and he is not likely to encounter much that will make him think or feel in a new way. Champion offers an explanation for this lack of novelty when he asserts that his study supports “what might be called the current consensus” and that it “helps to explain the existence of a consensus among those who have examined Shakespeare’s work more specifically in terms of character, theme, or language” (p. 269). Champion’s desire to remain above partisan squabbles has led him to write rather blandly if safely and competently. Controversial positions are banished to the relative obscurity and constraint of the footnotes, where they jostle each other, kept, as it were, from subverting the con­ sensus. One might wish that the number of authors here noted and quoted had been reduced and those remaining given a longer hearing of their cases so that their sometimes refreshing deviationism had be­ come more apparent. Champion’s text itself, although a little heavy in summaries of plot situations, is cautiously and mostly judiciously formu­ lated; but it quickens its pace only occasionally, such as when he argues in defense of Romeo and Juliet against the minority claim that the lovers are too guilty to deserve audience sympathy. Reviews 261 The avowed first purpose of the book is to trace the development of Shakespeare’s “tragic vision,” but Champion does not fly off, as one might expect after such an announcement, into philosophical or esthetic inquiries; he even keeps genre considerations to a minimum and focuses primarily on analysis of character and action. In fact, he appears to me best in the more technical pursuit he announces as his second purpose, the examination of a developing sophistication in Shakespeare’s dramatic technique. By technique he understands what he calls “structural de­ vices,” that is, means by which the spectator’s view of the tragic pro­ tagonist and of his dilemma are manipulated (but not the scene and act articulation, which he rather neglects). Shakespeare provides such structural devices through secondary characters used as parallels and foils to the protagonist, through subplots and diversionary episodes that reiterate issues or give perspective to them, and through analytical asides and soliloquies that illuminate the tragic struggle by anticipation, emphasis, or contrast. Shakespeare’s skillful use of these devices...