Play's Action Research Articles

Hedda Gabler: The Past Recaptured

MOST SCHOLARLY CRITICISM of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler inevitably focuses on an analysis of Hedda's character and motives. But a dramatic consideration prior to the why of character and motive is: what is Hedda doing? Plot, the most important element of tragedy according to Aristotle, is an imitation of an action. Yet the character of Hedda is so compelling that the action of Hedda Gabler has been denied even by Henry James: his drama is essentially that supposedly undramatic thing, the picture not of an action but of a condition and has been severely de-emphasized by a critic of such stature as M. C. Bradbrook. As, however, the centre of the play is not a problem but a personality there is less emphasis on the story-on the links of cause and effect.Obviously it is not readily apparent what Hedda is doing. However, an analysis of the structure of the play, and in particular the structure of the four dominant image patterns, reveals the nature of Hedda's actions and that, together with an analysis of the secondary characters' actions, establishes the unity of the play's action.

Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism

M OST CRITICS ARE UNITED IN PROCLAIMING that and Cleopatra is a magnificent achievement; unfortunately, they are not united on question of exactly what play achieves. It is difficult to think of another Shakespearean play which has divided critics into such furiously warring camps. A. P. Riemer describes, fairly accurately, positions defended by two main critical factions: Antony and Cleopatra can be read as fall of a great general, betrayed in his dotage by a treacherous strumpet, or else it can be viewed as a celebration of love.' Derek Traversi also speaks of this interpretive impasse: The student of and Cleopatra has, in offering an account of this great tragedy, to resolve a problem of approach, of author's intention. Sooner or later, he finds himself faced by two possible readings of play, whose difficulty is that they seem to be mutually exclusive.2 A significant difficulty indeed; however, I would suggest, not only difficulty. Both reduction of play's action to the fall of a great and definition of play's major interest as transcendental love make impossible a reasonable assessment of character of Cleopatra. There is a word for kind of critical bias informing both approaches: it is sexism. Almost all critical approaches to this play have been colored by sexist assumptions critics have brought with them to their reading. These approaches, I believe, have distorted meaning of what Shakespeare wrote. Before I take up sexist criticism in its particulars, I have one general

Strangers in a Room: A Delicate Balance Revisited

Strangers in a Room: A Delicate Balance Revisited

Cymbeline: "Lopp'd Branches" and the Concept of Regeneration

HAKESPEARE'S Cymbeline is a regrettably underrated and overlooked play. Misunderstood and evaluated upon false grounds, it is far better than many commentators recognize, for it embraces a multeity of Shakespearian devices, themes, and structural principles, with an energy of fusion characteristic only of the dramatist's maturity. Part of the trouble with the typical analysis of Cymbeline would seem to result from the fruitlessness of applying methods of critical realism to this type of play. In the gossamer tissue of the play's action, the dramatist did not attempt full-scale psychological portraits; nor did he foresee the malignant motive hunting of some of those literalists of the imagination who currently infest the standing pool of literary criticism.1 Too much, therefore, can be made of a lack of realism in the treatment of action and character in Cymbeline, for the play is dealing with romantic materials exclusively, and it is processing them with the emotional logic of the folk, the cohesive inner reality of fairy tales, of folk ritual, and of the folk-drama. Perhaps a brief look at D. A. Traversi's discerning commentary on the late plays will help to illustrate the prevailing critical attitude toward Cymbeline:

The Fall of Othello

then more than ever we understand how subordination of is directed towards concentrating our attention upon thought and sight of a man alone in his own mind-It is cause, my soul.... It is such a direction of our attention that defines final effects of play, so that we shall be less moved by conflicts of war and politics than by conflict of love and honor in most noble and royal of men. It is this direction of our attention, I think, that justifies Granville-Barker's criticism of Othello when he says that the play's essential lies in processes of thought and feeling by which characters are moved and story is forwarded. And deeper springs of these less do time, place and circumstance affect them. The contrivances of plot are also of such a nature as to make this internal matter the essential action of play, and this one can also estimate rather well through a comparison with Macbeth, where change in mind of leading figure is also central to tragedy.

Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement

A recent editor of Shakespeare describes Measure for Measure as “strange and puzzling,” “the despair of commentators.” No play, it would seem, has met with estimates more conflicting. Even common sense (in the person of Samuel Johnson) has voiced disapproval; and the insight of Coleridge, which so often probes deeper, has registered here a pained dislike. Complaints against either the play's subject, its plot, its hero, or its heroine have been heard from critics as eminent as Hazlitt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Sir Edmund Chambers. In opposition to the disparagers, however, there has appeared within the last century a strain of favorable criticism, lately almost enthusiastic. The rehabilitation may be said to have begun when certain Victorian commentators proclaimed Isabella a sweetly noble heroine, defying Mrs. Lennox's judgment of her as a “mere Vixen.” Yet these same Victorians disapproved the Duke; so that the recent and brilliant apology for the Duke by G. Wilson Knight, comparing the Duke's words and deeds with those of Jesus Christ, has come as a remarkable advance in the reappreciation of the play. At the same time W. W. Lawrence, by his study of medieval custom and analogue, has helped recommend the play's action and enhance its theatrical plausibility. Despite these defenses there are critics who continue to read Measure for Measure as a portrait of disillusionment,‘ negation, and the playwright's supposed cynicism. But two recent Annual Lectures before the British Academy take up boldly the opposite view. C. J. Sisson declares that “Far from being rotten, the play is sound to the core, and profoundly Christian in spirit”; and the late R. W. Chambers acclaims it as embodying a philosophy “more definitely Christian than that of The Tempest.” Appearing the same year as Professor Chambers’ spirited essay is C. J. Reimer's Marburg dissertation, in which we find repeated with emphasis Louis Albrecht's earlier high estimate of the play: it reveals, say these German scholars, the “Hauptzüge der Shakespeareschen Weltanschauung”—namely, a Christian faith not dogmatic or ecclesiastical but Biblical and evangelical. Finally, there has been in recent months a flurry of essays exploring the play's ethical nature. D. A. Traversi calls Measure for Measure “uncompromisingly moral”; F. R. Leavis finds in it a “fineness of ethical and poetic sensibility” which makes it “one of the very greatest of the plays”; and Miss M. C. Bradbrook offers the suggestion to regard it as “something resembling the medieval Morality.” Out of this welter of criticism one truth clearly emerges: that in this instance Shakespeare's work has abundantly justified its teasing title by becoming a “measure” for critics.