Shakespearian Criticism Research Articles

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History by Chris Fitter

 Reviews high time to devote similarly sustained attention to it in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries as well. U  W I K Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History. Ed. by C F. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Contrasting the emergent claims of a ‘new social history’ of early modern England with the viewpoint espoused by the leaders and disciples of the older New Historicist approach, Chris Fitter posits that readers of Shakespeare have been largely made ‘oblivious’ to a ‘climate of plebeian political critique and resistance’ (p. ). e agency of England’s commoners has, it is claimed, been barely recognized and little understood in Shakespeare Studies. Drawing upon the work of social and cultural historians such as Keith Wrightson and David Rollison in this ‘new school’ (some of which is almost as old as work in New Historicism, one might add), and noting some exceptions to this rejection of the commoner voice in the Shakespearian criticism of Annabel Patterson, Richard Wilson, Jeffrey S. Doty, and Fitter himself, the Introduction sets out a series of claims for how the ‘affirmations of the new social history’ could help to re-engage scholars with the underserved plebeian class (p. ). e remainder of the volume expands upon Fitter’s own fine work in Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecra in the Early Career (New York: Routledge, ), with several of the contributors offering homages of sorts in commencing their analyses (Andy Wood, Stephen Longstaffe, Jeffrey S. Doty). With eleven chapters and an Aerword—Fitter’s long and erudite Introduction is listed as the first chapter in its own right (and he also contributes a separate chapter)—the volume draws together a relatively small group of distinguished scholars. It certainly feels like a tight-knit project: the scholars more oen than not engage with each other’s previously published work. is is not a point of criticism, but rather a reflection of the fact that relatively few scholars have championed the immanent power of ‘citizens’ and ‘plebeians’, the ‘commons’ and the ‘commonwealth’ (res plebeia), and the notion of ‘popular’ (in the sense of vox populi). Annabel Patterson’s Aerword, which reflects upon the response to, and subsequent scholarship since, the publication of her influential Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, ), provides a thoughtful capstone for the project. Each of the essays in the volume serves its purposes perfectly. Peter Lake offers an expert account of the ‘relative and relational’ political agency of the commoners (‘rather than essentializing’) in readings from Richard II and Henry V. David Norbrook writes a splendidly learned and wide-ranging chapter on the plebeian politics of Coriolanus, memorably describing the play as offering a ‘caustically ironic and destabilizing vision’ (p. ). It is a testament to the overall quality of the volume that any of the chapters could be singled out for praise. at noted, MLR, .,   there are some minor points of criticism. In a volume of this kind there is, perhaps reasonably enough, little interest in matters textual or authorial. While Andy Wood and Stephen Longstaffe smartly attend to the problems introduced by the fact that there exist multiple versions of the second Henry VI play, Peter Lake and David Rollison refer only to the First Folio texts. More surprisingly, none of the contributors makes mention of any of the significant body of scholarship on the authorship question regarding the Henry VI plays. Surely it matters for any analysis of ‘Shakespeare’s Cade’ that Shakespeare may not be the primary author of this material? In  Annabel Patterson had rightly noted that the play (in both versions) offers two different rebellions, one led by Suffolk, one led by Cade (who looms large throughout the volume); might it not be of some significance that the author of one section may not be the same as the other? In a more minor quibble, the index runs to a mere two pages; this seems a disservice to such a treasure-trove of content. Overall, this is a rich and rewarding collection that merits and will surely receive serious critical...

A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht. Jonathan F. S. Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+294.

<i>A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht</i>. Jonathan F. S. Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+294.

THOMAS BETTERIDGE, Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics. Pp. vii + 214. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005. Hardbound 35.00 (ISBN 1 902806 39 5); paperbound 18.99 (1 902806 40 9).

THOMAS BETTERIDGE's Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics begins by stating its ambitious aim of seeking a new paradigm for contemporary Shakespearian criticism, one which can take theoretical account of Betteridge's conviction that ‘Shakespeare's drama is centrally concerned with questions of truth, language and ethics’ (1). Betteridge's first move is to launch a sharp attack on New Historicism, which he accuses of being both under-theorized and (as many others have also alleged) cavalier about history. Betteridge declares his attention of being himself careful to pay detailed attention to historical particularities, and he does start off by providing a sophisticated analysis of both the inception of the idea of feudalism and its historiographical representation, which he links neatly to King Lear to argue that rather than being a play about the death of feudalism, it is in fact about its birth. He is not always so careful, though. In his discussion of As You Like It, for instance, he makes astonishingly little of the reference to the howling of Irish wolves against the moon (80), barely glancing at the obvious context of the Irish rebellion against Elizabeth's authority and reading this rather in completely dehistoricized fashion as ‘representative of the collapse of Rosalind's fantasy of love’ (81). I am also entirely unable to make sense of his statement that one could equate the difference between Julius Caesar and Coriolanus directly to their specific historical context. Coriolanus is an Elizabethan celebration of the fact that when the monarch is a woman her gender means that the relationship between ruler and body politic will also be metonymic – it can never be closed. Julius Caesar is a Jacobean warning of the dangers of a ruler whose place within the political order means that they can aspire to metaphoric totalisation – to make the metaphor of the body politic real. (128–9)

Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism. A Bibliography. Ed. T.H. Howard-Hill. Second Edition.

Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism. A Bibliography. Ed. T.H. Howard-Hill. Second Edition.

Wordsworth, Free Verse and Exteriority

Wordsworth is often considered a prophet of modernist poetics. That honour usually goes to Coleridge, with his experiments in irregular syllable counts in Christabel in name of matching metre to passion, and his insistence on this principle more generally in notion of form. As Donald Wesling and others have pointed out, principles of form demand that metre be derived within poetic content, or poet's interior intention, which sponsors most of modernist arguments for free verse (The New Poetries 64). Since Dryden, declared Coleridge, the of our poets leads to sense; in our older and more genuine poets, sense, including passion, leads to meter (Shakespearian Criticism I 197). In eighteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, he accordingly remarks that discrepancy between pathetic events of poems like Simon Lee and Mice Fell and implied by their metre means that they fail to be poems. Wordsworth, after all, had unpardonably argued that metre might suggest a feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with passion in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose Works I 147). With Coleridge, criteria for poetic form is its interiority, so that formal pattern becomes equated with exterior, artificial and disunified: form is about ethics of subjectivity as well as poetics. Hence when Ezra Pound began to proselytise for free verse a century later, his terms are exactly Coleridge's:Poetry is a composition or organisation of sounds set to music. By 'music' here we can scarcely mean more than and timbre. The form is false unless it belongs to particular emotion or energy which it purports to represent (New Age 349-50). Pound began his Imagist revolution in 1912, with a rousing call to poetic accuracy and a disparaging of all nineteenth-century deviation from it as rhetoric, a criterion that like organic combines poetics with an ethical principle: rhetoric is borrowed form and thus insincere expression. But in pages of The Egoist, semi-official house organ of Modernist poets, this dislike of rhetoric became correlative of an aggressive reworking of interiorization into individualism. As Richard Aldington, magazine's sub-editor, declared: The old accented verse forced poet to abandon some of his individuality, most of his accuracy and all his style in order to wedge his emotions into some preconceived and childish formality; free verse permits poet all this individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people's, all his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write naturally and therefore with precision, all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in old forms. (Free Verse in England The Egoist 351) Despite inordinate length of Aldington's sentence being determined entirely by rhetorical device of ternary parallelism, his point is clear: to be accurate is to be hindered by external considerations, which means to be an individual. Or, as Pound had put it: I believe in an a rhythm, that is, in poetry, which corresponds exactly to emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man's must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in end, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable ... I think there is a fluid as well as a solid content, that some poems may have a form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore properly rendered in symmetrical forms. (Literal, Essays 9) An absolute rhythm is a that could be measured against anything else but emotional content, and which could be copied or reproduced. …

Shakespearian bibliography and textual criticism: a bibliography

Shakespearian bibliography and textual criticism: a bibliography

'Worse Than Malone or Sacrilege': The Exhumation of Shakespeare's Remains

The textual, like the literary, criticism of Shakespeare is concerned with the inter-relation of spirit and form: searching for traces of the originating hand, the distinctly Shakespearean feature that is encased in the accretions of the physical book. The presence of such idealisations is less a contradiction of the claim to objectivity than it is a necessary precondition of the method of enquiry of nineteenth and early twentieth-century textual theory. Literary criticism likewise, sought for a similar spiritual element, a pure principle of meaning locked into the words on the page. As Stephen Greenblatt remarks at the beginning of Shakespearean Negotiations : 'I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organised, professionalised, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum... Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces made themselves heard in the voices of the living'.1 Throughout this whole discourse, of which Greenblatt's disclosure is such an eloquent product, the spiritual and the corporeal mingle; coalescing with an archaeological concern to locate the authentic remains of the author and flesh them out in the lineaments of the artefact. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century throughout, that is, the history of Shakespearian criticism and Shakespearian tourism a similar interest has been expressed in Shakespeare's physical remains in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. When Washington Irving visited Stratford he was scornful of the relic-mongering that he found: the shattered matchlock with which Shakespeare allegedly shot the deer and the sword with which he was supposed to have played Hamlet. However, in Holy Trinity © CS 1997

The modernist Shakespeare: critical texts in a material world

This is a major study of the history of Shakespeare criticism in the modern era. Every epoch recreates its classic icons - and for literary culture none is more central nor more protean than Shakespeare. Even though finding the authentic Shakespeare has been a goal of scholarship since the eighteenth century, he has always been constructed as a contemporary author. Hugh Grady charts the construction of Shakespeare as a twentieth-century Modernist text by redirecting 'new historicist' methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare crticism itself. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian age, this much praised study describes the widespread attempts to save the values of the culturalist tradition, in reformulated 'Modernist' guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modernized universites. The tension between professionalism and culturalism gave rise to the Modernist Shakespeare of G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, and American and British New Critics, and still conditions the postmodernist Shakespearean criticism of contemporary feminists, deconstrcutros, and 'new historicists'. From reviews of the hardback: 'I enjoyed every word of The Modernist Shakespeare ...The arguments it provokes are important ones, and it compels a rethinking of many critical assumptions in broader fields than just Shakespearian criticism.' Notes and Queries 'a fluently meticulous history that comprehensively succeeds in justifying the three working assumptions Grady identifies ...carefully nuanced, and theoretically incisive' Review of English Studies

T. S. Eliot and John Dryden: A Study in Relationship

T . S. E L I O T A N D J O H N D R Y D E N : A S T U D Y I N R E L A T I O N S H I P DAVID MACAREE University of British Columbia O n e feature of Thomas Steams Eliot’s activity as literary critic, poet, and dramatist on which commentators are generally agreed — however widely they may differ in detail — is the extent of his reliance on what he saw as the living tradition embodied in a number of figures drawn from the artistic heritage of Western Europe whose contributions enriched that continuing intellectual current which flowed on to succeeding generations. Study of their works, in his view, invoked, as he himself said, “not only. . . the past­ ness of the past, b u t. . . its presence.” 1 This tradition he saw as primarily classical Greek and Roman in origin, with infusion of an oriental — mostly Judaic — ■ religious strain that powerfully modified later sensibility through the Renaissance period and into modem times. Contributors to the tradition from Italy, France, and England all came under his critical scrutiny: Dante, Shakespeare and the Jacobean dramatists, John Donne, Baudelaire, and the French symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue may be mentioned because his interest in them has received considerable attention from commentators and critics alike; one such figure, however, has suffered relative neglect: John Dryden. It is almost as though mere mention of this name causes a certain uneasiness, verging sometimes on hostility, among those who have written on Eliot’s literary relationships. In fact, they seem to consider as some sort of aberration their subject’s interest in, and enthusiasm for Charles II’s Poet Laureate. For Dryden engaged his successor’s attention during more than four decades, from the latter’s early references to him in an essay of 1920, “The Perfect Critic,” and a review of Mark Van Doren’s study, The Poetry of John Dryden, in the Times Literary Supplement of 9 June 1921. After this beginning other articles and talks of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s followed, supplemented by extended reference in critical articles continuing into the 1950s and 1960s, with one of his last lectures, in 1961, returning to consideration of Dryden as critic. In all these pieces Eliot dealt with Dryden’s literary attainments as poet, or dramatist, or critic, and in many he laid stress also on the influence that his sevenE n g lish Stu d ies in C anada, xiii, i, March 1987 teenth-century predecessor had on the ages following his, if not on the whole subsequent development of English as a vehicle of expression. The sheer amount of such critical comment is impressive. Not only did Eliot devote a number of essays, addresses, and reviews to Dryden’s work in various genres, he also, on more than one occasion, used his subject’s name as the label for an era in his more general surveys of English literature: for instance in his chapter on Shakespearian criticism that appeared in Harley Granville-Barker’s compilation, A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, as well as in his own collection of 1932-33 Harvard Lectures, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. These, however, were by no means the first manifestations of interest in his subject, both having been antedated by his article in the Times Literary Supplement, his preface to the reproduction of the 1668 edition of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1928), and his BBC talks of 1930 and 1931 published in The Listener. As already mentioned, his earliest extended comment appeared as a TLS review article, an article in which Eliot’s enthusiasm is obvious from its opening remark: “ If the prospect of delight be wanting (which alone justi­ fies the perusal of poetry) we may let the reputation of Dryden sleep in the manuals of literature” (SE 305). Next, this essay became the opening piece in a slim volume published in 1924 under the significant title, Homage to John Dryden, where it was buttressed by a study of Andrew Marvell and another on the metaphysical poets, the essay that, ironically enough, con­ tained the criticism...

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Maurice Morgann: Shakespearian Criticism. Edited by DANIEL A FINEMAN Pp xiv+444Oxford Clarendon Press, 1972 £6 net J P HARDY J P HARDY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXIV, Issue 93, 1973, Pages 496–499, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXIV.93.496 Published: 01 January 1973

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Maurice Morgann: Shakespearian Criticism. Edited by DANIEL. A. FINEMAN. Pp. xiv+444. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972 £6 net. J. P. HARDY J. P. HARDY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXIV, Issue 96, November 1973, Pages 496–499, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXIV.96.496 Published: 01 November 1973

The Living Image; Shakespeare's Dramatic Art; Shakespearian Criticism; A. C. Bradley and his Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism; Shakespeare and the Critics; Shakespeare's God: The Role of Religion in the Tragedies; Shakespeare: The Early Writings; Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Volume 108; Horatio's Version; Edmund Spenser: Prince of Poets; Spenser's Courteous Pastoral; The Art of John Webster; The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's

The Living Image; Shakespeare's Dramatic Art; Shakespearian Criticism; A. C. Bradley and his Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism; Shakespeare and the Critics; Shakespeare's God: The Role of Religion in the Tragedies; Shakespeare: The Early Writings; Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Volume 108; Horatio's Version; Edmund Spenser: Prince of Poets; Spenser's Courteous Pastoral; The Art of John Webster; The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's

A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III

First published in 1968. Providing a detailed and rigorous analysis of Richard III, this Commentary reveals every nuance of meaning whilst maintaining a firm grasp on the structure of the play. The result is an outstanding lesson in the methodology of Shakespearian criticism as well as an essential study for students of the early plays of Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar: An Experiment in Point of View

ECENT studies of Julius Caesar reveal a significant trend in Shakespearian criticism; for better or for worse, critics have become increasingly tentative in their interpretations. Where in past they plunged confidently into a play to pluck out heart of its mystery, they are now inclined to submit reverently to complexity of Shakespeare's vision and accept as an integral part of meaning a dilemma which must not be violated. Perhaps some of color of Shakespearian criticism has been lost; it was comforting for neophyte to discover one critic arguing vehemently that Julius Caesar was intended as a bitter denunciation of tyrant Caesar, while another critic would insist with equal vigor and certitude that play was intended as an expose of Brutus and a resounding affirmation, therefore, of monarchical principle.' But if recent interpretations lack flair and gusto of earlier criticism, they have gained, in my opinion, in accuracy. The focal point of recent studies of Julius Caesar has been very ambivalence of a play which has allowed for such contradictory responses. Bonjour, noting confusion of good and evil which marks every character in play, has concluded, for example, that play is intended to reveal the value of suspended judgment.2 Traversi has also recognized fundamental equivocality of play; he finds that Caesar is cast as an ambivalent figure, but this

Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism.

Journal Article Frank Kermode, ed.: Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism Get access Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism. Edited by Frank Kermode. New York: Avon Library, 1965. Pp. 571. $1.45. Robert H. Goldsmith Robert H. Goldsmith Emory and Henry College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 1, Winter 1968, Pages 94–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867854 Published: 01 January 1968

The "Poet of Nature" and Self-Knowledge: One Aspect of Johnson's Moral Reading of Shakespeare

Alluding in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare to the effect of the plays on an audience, Johnson uncovers a striking picture of himself as one of its members. "As he commands us," he writes, "we laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity without indifference." No simple explanation of this involvement is, of course, possible. Johnson once wrote that he went to the theatre only to escape from himself; and surely every reader of fiction seeks to immerse himself in a more colourful, exciting, unusual or significant world than is normally present to his senses. Yet Johnson was also, by his own account, "perpetually" a moralist, who had therefore to be able to justify his appreciation of literature in moral terms. "The end of poetry," he wrote, "is to instruct by pleasing." In his perceptive book on Johnson, Professor W. J. Bate has rightly pointed out that Johnson's appreciation of literature was "meshed with the larger context of his writing on human life and experience itself," that "the growth in awareness, the process of enlightenment" was inextricably bound up with the process of "pleasing." Yet we may still ask, remembering Johnson's definite reservations about Shakespeare's seeming lack of "moral purpose," in what was this process of enlightenment thought specifically to consist? The answer to this question has also important implications for the accepted history of eighteenth-century Shakespearian criticism, though this will be less our concern here than Johnson's own position. Professor R. W. Babcock, for example, in his study of Shakespeare idolatry, quotes Johnson's stricture on Shakespeare's moral purpose and contrasts his attitude with that of the later eighteenth century, when critics "became increasingly interested in the spectacle of Shakespeare as a moral philosopher." Such a reading of the plays was, however, current by Johnson's time, who merely adds the weight of his own response to a developing tradition. Yet because of his intense preoccupation with moral questions, Johnson's remarks have a special validity. He scrutinized characters, scenes, and even whole plays in a way unattempted by less discerning critics; and he showed what relevance such a reading of Shakespeare had both for others and for himself personally.

The Aesthetic Criticism of Hamlet from 1692 to 1699

HE aesthetic criticism of Hamlet began in last decade of seventeenth century. Before this time, only one short statement by Dryden is worthy name of criticism. Dryden objected to some of language in . . out, thou strumpet, Fortune and in the mobled queen. This is a ca>Kj o small observation, but it is apparently first instance of aesthetic criticism applied to Hamlet. In last decade of century two events happened which produced a change in Hamlet discussion and made a beginning in field of aesthetic criticism. One of these events grew out of other. They set a pattern that continued down to Coleridge. The first of these was publication of critical studies by Thomas Rymer and Jeremy Collier. The second event was publication of a number of replies to these works. This was pattern: presentation of a critical opinion, which in turn was answered by one or more critics. Thomas Rymer's Short View of Tragedy appeared in i692. From this time until I765 question of unities was a problem in Shakespearian criticism. Rymer inspired attacks on this and on other topics as well. Two years after appearance of Short View, Charles Gildon made a reply in his Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short View of Tragedy. He calls attention to morals of Shakespeare's plays (Hamlet is one he mentions), and says that they are mightier than any in Sophocles except Electra.' Gildon takes proEnglish view which had been gaining ground since appearance of Dryden, and rates Shakespeare above Greek and Latin poets. He absolves him from Aristotelian rules. He is much impressed with Shakespeare's power over words and his ability to create images. This is not, however, in strictest sense, a criticism of Hamlet, because Gildon is dealing chiefly with Shakespeare in general, and uses Hamlet as an instance of whatever point he is making. This does, however, introduce some problems which are soon to follow in discussions of Hamlet. The moral question is up for consideration from this time until only one year before Coleridge began his first lectures. Gildon noticed lack of bombast in Shakespeare. Dryden a quarter of a century before this had noticed presence of it. Shakespeare's use of language is a common topic for argument throughout period. The opinions of Gildon are not mere observations. They help to begin old style of general criticism which reached its height in Johnson. He makes a statement and then offers, if not proof, at least an attempt at explanation.

Dramaturgy in Shakespeare and Brecht

That Elizabethan plays, and particularly Shakespeare's history plays, had a great influence on "epic" drama is by now a commonplace of Brecht criticism; but no one seems to have worked out exactly how close the two dramaturgies are. This essay, therefore, aims to do three things. First, to interpret the dramaturgical theories and practice of Brecht, noting that his ideas changed towards the end of his career and that there was sometimes a gap between his theory and practice. Second, to suggest parallel theories or practices in the Elizabethan drama. And, finally, to reverse the normal process of historical criticism, and, instead of assessing the influence of Shakespeare on Brecht, to investigate whether the clear statements of intention by Brecht, when he uses certain devices, may not occasionally throw new light on Shakespeare's use of similar devices—light normally obscured for us by our predominately classical-realist training. There is a tendency in Shakespearian criticism, I think, to treat Elizabethan departures from realism solely as conventions, that is, as an agreed-on, accepted simplification of reality, a dramatic shorthand. But may they not sometimes be deliberate ruptures of the dramatic illusion as in Brecht—intended to prevent our application of everyday attitudes, our too easy sympathies, our tendency to abstract and unify into familiar patterns? At least, there can be no harm in trying such an approach. We shall thus be following T. S. Eliot's advice: using the new genius to re-interpret the old tradition. Moreover, it seems to me that several of the most recent critics and producers of Shakespeare are already moving in this direction—though, as far as I know, their tendency has not so far been associated with the influence of Brecht.

The Study of Shakespearian Tragedy Since Bradley

NTIL recently, Bradley's analysis of the nature of Shakespearian tragedy has been substantially accepted as fundaiJ imental to our understanding of the tragic pattern in the plays. Something of the excited approval with which was * p first accepted has been described by one of his severest latterday critics; in her article, Bradley Revisited: Forty Years After,' Professor Lily Bess Campbell has recalled the enthusiasm with which critics and teachers alike greeted the appearance of Bradley's study. And it was no wonder that he should have been given so hearty a response, for if we glance at the state of Shakespearian study in the twenty years or so preceding the publication of his book we can see how great an advance he made in the analysis of Shakespeare's tragedies and to what a high level he lifted Shakespearian criticism. However, just as Bradley's learning and critical depth put an end to nineteenth-century didactic, impressionistic, and romantic interpretations of Shakespeare's tragedies, so now a number of developments in modern criticism and scholarship have tended in turn to undermine his labors. These are, first, the emphasis on text instead of idea, characteristic of the new criticism; second, the effect of studies of imagery; third, the reading of Shakespeare's characters in the light of Elizabethan psychology; fourth, the emphasis on native medieval elements in Elizabethan drama; fifth, the semantic revolt against generic terms; and sixth, the assertion of the impossibility of the creation of tragedy at all. The cumulative direct force of the first five of these approaches, plus the indirect influence of the sixth, has brought about a general disparagement of Bradley's point of view and a corresponding lack of interest in the idea of tragedy and its applications. The most formidable of these approaches is the application of -the methods of the new criticism to Shakespeare's plays. By asserting the unique integrity of a work of art, . . a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme,2 as Professor Cleanth Brooks puts it, the new criticism effectively cuts off from the consideration of a piece of literature all matters which are not immediately intrinsic to it. More important, however, is the denial of the element of judgment in the new criticism. It is sig-