Shakespeare's Influence Research Articles

Brecht on Shakespeare: A Revaluation

Brecht on Shakespeare: A Revaluation Doc Rossi That Shakespearean dramaturgy exerted an influence on Brecht is a commonplace of Brecht studies, the only disagreement being in terms of how much and in what way. Beyond the usual aspects or elements that the study of "influences" can suggest, in the case of Shakespeare and Brecht examination of this aspect has uniquely appropriate applications: it demonstrates how Brecht put historicization into practice by clarifying the sources of some Verfremdungseffekte (V-effekte); new aspects of Shakespearean dramaturgy are revealed from the perspective that Brecht creates through his use of Shakespearean techniques; it also becomes possible to liberate Brecht's theories and practice from his own ideologically charged explications, allowing an understanding of Brechtian dramaturgy free from the restrictions placed upon it by orthodoxy, the deadening, finalizing answer Brecht continually fought against. Freeing Brecht's work from its ideological underpinnings and the rhetoric used to express it allows the historicization of his work; for example, his use of 'dialectic' as both a term and a practice can be re-examined in a new light, away from orthodoxy and the preconceived notions orthodoxy automatically applies. Shakespeare's drama demonstrated to Brecht how historicization could be put into practice, how interest in character and situation and their relation to subject matter could be developed for purposes beyond the theater—and perhaps most importantly how imagination could be engaged rather than stifled. The influence of Shakespearean dramaturgy on Brecht thus brings to the fore the critical attitude Brecht fought to instill in his audience and actors—a creative attitude of observation which would compel interest, curiosity, and deliberate use of one's imagination. This essay argues that the critical reception of Brecht's interaction with Shakespearean drama, concentrating as it has on the apparent ambivalence Brecht held towards that body of work, suppresses examination of Brecht's development of his ideas 158 Doc Rossi159 through Shakespearean models. As the pre-eminent playwright of the orthodox theater, Shakespeare often appears to be the focus of Brecht's sharpest criticism; but the influence of Shakespeare becomes apparent where Brecht's attacks on what he calls "Aristotelian dramaturgy" converge with his criticism of "the orthodox theater apparatus," even in Brecht's sharpest "attacks." The extent of Shakespeare's influence is hidden by Brecht's pose of casual contempt, which gives a negative cast to many of his Shakespeare commentaries. When carried over into critical discussions of Brecht's use of Shakespeare, this negative slant cannot exploit Brecht's comments on the critical examination of material forces he finds in Shakespeare's drama; neither does it take into account the context of Brecht's Shakespeare criticism as an element in his campaign to transform theater and drama. Moreover, the concentration on negative ambivalence in most commentaries prohibits recognition of Brecht's use of Shakespearean dramaturgy to put the audience and actors in a position from which they are able to take up a critical attitude towards all aspects of the drama, production practices, and directorial perspectives past and present as well as text, form, content, and subject matter. Brecht held that content and form must exist as separate elements in the drama rather than feeding or supporting each other, and whereas in the orthodox theater content was smothered by form, in Shakespearean drama the form sets forth the content as something remarkable. He understood the content of Shakespeare 's drama to be the opinions and lives of the characters, that is, the characters themselves and the events in which they are involved ; the drama's episodic, nonlinear form places the characters and events in opposition to each other and thus enables the audience to observe and study the situation. For Brecht, Shakespearean drama parodies the "culinary" orthodox drama of his time, the drama which fuses content and form into some eternal truth; by separating elements of a theatrical production, "culinary " theater is put on view, thus bringing the "culinary principle " under discussion. By presenting argument rather than suggestion , Shakespearean drama enables the audience to make a decision or "cast a vote" one way or another. The audience is not involved in the action or provided with sensations and suggestions which in...

Pirandello and Film by Nina Davinci Nichols and Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni

286Comparative Drama speare's two tetralogies. Frequently, Berlin claims, such associations may have worked at the level of O'Neill's unconscious rather than as intentional borrowings. But rather than weaken the critic's case, this speculative approach allows Berlin to broaden his inquiry beyond mere source-hunting. According to the author, it is in O'Neill's last and greatest plays that Shakespeare's influence becomes most dominant, with Hamlet providing the most interesting and pervasive echoes. Berlin presents the case that James Tyrone, Jr. (who appears in both Long Day's Journey and A Moon for the Misbegotten) reanimates the distinctive suffering of Shakespeare's tortured prince, as do the central male protagonists of The Iceman Cometh. For critics unsympathetic to Freud's topography, this analytical tour will meet resistance. However, all scholars will welcome the discussion of Shakespearean references in Long Day's Journey into Night, which provides a model of intertextual commentary. To see how Jamie processes his parent's marriage through the narrative of Othello adds a dimension to his intellect and indicates O'Neill's own subtle reading; while to see how closely Jamie's immature emotions mimic Hamlet's convinces us of Shakespeare's reach to deeper levels of O'Neill's awareness. Ultimately, this engrossing book delivers more than its title promises . Berlin concludes that "O'Neill contains Shakespeare," that Shakespeare is part of his "lifeblood" (p. 254). Father-figure, anxietyprovoker , godlike artist, source: Shakespeare, as Berlin would have it, haunts the playwright's stage. Like the Ghost in Hamlet, he beckons O'Neill to the parapets, whispering, "Remember me." MICHAEL HINDEN University of Wisconsin-Madison Nina Davinci Nichols and Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni. Pirandello and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. xxviii + 248. $49.50. For much of his life, Luigi Pirandello was concerned with the creative process, both those events, images, and figures which inspire artists and those moments in which created life and characters take on lives of their own, independent of the contexts that brought them into being and of the authors who created them. In Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917; Cosi è [se vi pare]), for example, Pirandello relates the work's having sprung from a dream in which he was lodged in either the depths of a well or a deep courtyard with no exit. The image figures into the drama's account of the courtyard where Mrs. Frola tries to communicate with Mrs. Ponza. Earlier the image had generated the story "La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero" (1915) from which the drama Reviews287 evolved. Similarly Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921; Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) appears to have arisen out of a scene involving either a young woman under a lamp post or a young woman and older man being discovered in a brothel by a horrified older woman. In exploring the significances of these inspiring images and scenes, as Pirandello explains in L'umorismo (1908; On Humor), the figures take on at times a fullness that lets one imagine them in situations which their creator never considered and assume on their own meanings that he never dreamt of lending them. As examples, Pirandello mentions Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Abbondio, and Sancho Panza, but he might have named Falstaff, whose exploits in Shakespeare's Henry IV purportedly led to Queen Elizabeth's asking to see him in love and Shakespeare 's writing The Merry Wives of Windsor. Or one might cite the stock figures of commedia dell' arte who involve themselves in diverse plots dressed ever in the same costumes or, more recently, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and his recurrent hallmark derby hat, tight frock coat, baggy trousers, out-sized shoes, moustache, and cane. This concern with creative process in retrospect seems generational and may simply have been a response to the religious controversies and technological inventiveness of the day, which, on one hand, promised a better life and, on the other, threatened to dehumanize and despiritualize mankind. One sees the concern in Matthew Arnold's views on mankind's increasing reliance on art in the collapse of religious certainty ; in Friedrich Nietzsche...

The Perfect Age of Man’s Life by Mary Dove

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER expanded. Such a work might serve, but a fully satisfactory dictionary of Chaucer's names will require not only a more thorough and accurate presentation of what scholars have already discovered but much original research. No scholarorpress should let theexistence of this book discourage efforts to produce a better one. It gives me no pleasure to have to document in such detail the many failings of what should be one of the most valuable books on Chaucer to appear in our time. Professor de Weever has taken on a most difficult task, and she hasobviously worked hard to produce thisbook. It is heartbreaking thatthefinished product is so seriously flawedthat no user dare assumethat any entry in it is reliable. EMERSON BROWN, JR. Vanderbilt University MARY DOVE. The PerfectAge ofMansLife. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xiii, 175. $34.50. To represent the ways in which man grows up, changes, and grows old, medieval writers used a variety of numerical age divisions-the aetates hominum, or ages of man-sometimes numbered as four, sometimes as six, three, five, and seven; the numbers changed as the systems of thought changed. These phases often depended on correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm in relation to the natural growth cycle they shared. Thus, in the earliest theory, with Pythagorean and Hippocratic roots, the four ages, beginning withpueritia, paralleled the four seasons, starting with spring. The four ages (and seasons) also related to the four humors, sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, making up in their balance of blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm within the indi­ vidual a normal human being; the humors were also related to the cosmic regions dominated by the elements of fire, air, water, earth. Christian medieval views identified six ages-infantia,pueritia, adolescentia,juven­ tus, gravitas, senectus-to mirror the Augustinian schema of the days of creation and the ages of the world. The six-age system wasoften associated with biblical glosses, for example, those on the Gospel account of the six vessels at Cana. Another medieval view recognized a three-age systemyouth , middle age, old age-bolstered by the figures of the three Magi, 208 REVIEWS and a five-age system bolstered by the five hours named in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. In contrast, the late-medieval Arabic septen­ ary view envisioned the stages of life, both thoseofman's aging and those of the embryo's growth, as corresponding to the seven planets in a system that eventually, largely as a result of Shakespeare's influence, came to supersede the other views of the ages of man. In 1986 three books on the medieval concept of the ages of man appeared- in addition to Mary Dove's book, Elizabeth Sears's The Ages of Man: Medieva/InterpretationsoftheLife Cycle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press); and]. A. Burrow's The AgesofMan: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Each, despite overlap­ ping material, offers a slightly different approach and perspective: Sears focuses on the numbers tradition in antiquity and the Middle Ages and their popular, homiletic, and iconographic dissemination in a variety of relatedimages.Burrow, in a studylimitedtoBritishintellectual life and the history of the philosophy of nature, after an outline of the numerical concepts in the first half offers a view of the idea of naturalness mostly in medieval English writings from Bede to the end of the fifteenth century. Even more specific in her focus on philosophy and literature, Dove divides her material into three, to zero in on the middle age of man's life, that period betweenyouth and age (part 1), and, within that middle, what was known as the perfect age, theperfecta aetas, or prime (part 2), as expressed in various Ricardian poems (part 3). Dove argues that the concept of the ages of man posited a response to the threat of death and mutability either through the classical idea of media aetas as an age buffering youth from old age or as the Christian and medieval idea of "perfect age." That is, middle age was understood as a time of maturity and strength, a "perfect age" known asjuventus...

Burlesques of Shakespeare: the Democratic American's “Light Artillery”

In 1837 William Leggett, one of the foremost American politicans and journalists of the 1830s and 1840s, wrote of Homer and Shakespeare: Walt Whitman, who certainly revered Shakespeare and frequently acknowledged Shakespeare's influence, also regarded his work as “poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.” Whitman's and Leggett's pronouncements are typical of the simultaneous admiration and disapproval with which many other democrats in an emerging American culture approached Shakespeare in the nineteenth century.

Shakespeare's Influence on Moby Dick or Where There's a Will, There's a Whale

Shakespeare's Influence on <i>Moby Dick or</i> Where There's a Will, There's a Whale

Shakespeare's Influence: A Distinguished Collection

Shakespeare's Influence: A Distinguished Collection

Shakespeare's Influence on Benavente's Plays

Shakespeare's Influence on Benavente's Plays

Simms's Border Romances and Shakespeare

V R\8/X\312dealing with the last years of the American Revolution in South Carolina, and a group of border romances, was steeped J& in Shakespeare and greatly indebted to him.' His works contain many Shakespearian quotations and allusions. The violence, melodrama, strong imagination, and powerful emotion that permeate his works suggest the same qualities that are often found in Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists. Although recent discussions of Shakespeare's influence on Simms have been concerned mainly with the novels about the American Revolution,2 Simms's indebtedness to Shakespeare in a group of six novels known as border romances of the South-Guy Rivers, Richard Hurdis, Border Beagles, Charlemont, Beauchampe, and Confession-is greater than in the Revolutionary fiction. An examination of these border novels will reveal clearly the general and the specific types of influence that Shakespeare exerted on Simms as well as some of Simms's most interesting criticism of Shakespeare and his works. In Guy Rivers is seen the influence of Macbeth and Hamlet. Guy Rivers, the villain-hero, is ambitious, fierce-tempered, brutal, murderous, and highly imaginative. Obviously like Macbeth in several ways, he is, on the other hand, never the admirable person that Macbeth was prior to his murder of Duncan. He attempts to blame fate, his mother, Walter Munro (an older outlaw), and other persons for his career of crime. Speaking to Munro, Rivers says:

Shakespeare's influence in Beaumont and Fletcher

Shakespeare's influence in Beaumont and Fletcher

Measure for Measure and Pushkin's Angelo

Pushkin summarized Measure for Measure in Angelo (1833), a partly dramatic, partly narrative poem of 535 lines. He considered Angelo his best work, but critics have slighted it. Russian commentators on Pushkin have perhaps been discouraged from paying more attention to Angelo because it is not an original, independent work. Even Vissarion Bielinsky, otherwise a very attentive critic of Pushkin, dismissed Angelo cursorily. There are numerous studies of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin. These have concentrated on Boris Godunov and a few of the shorter plays, and neglected Angelo. This lack of attention is strange, because Angelo, in addition to being a fine example of the art of condensation, is a piece of Shakespearean criticism by one of the world's greatest poets, who had a very good knowledge of Shakespeare. The poem reveals what Pushkin liked in a play by Shakespeare and what he preferred to change. Its value may be all the greater because its criticism is not expressed in general, abstract terms. Besides the indirect comment in Angelo we have a fragment of Pushkin's formal opinion on Measure for Measure. In 1834 he wrote on the character of Angelo in a further development of his earlier views on Shakespeare's characterization in general:

The Classification of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Classification of the Folger Shakespeare LibraryEdwin Eliott WilloughbyEdwin Eliott Willoughby Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 7, Number 3Jul., 1937 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/614072 Views: 1Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.