The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

While there is much in recent Shakespeare studies to suggest that the damaging division between ‘historical’ and ‘critical’ approaches is still being preserved, there are also some signs that a synthesis of these attitudes is being attempted; and many authors, while firmly bent on defining the totality of a play, or determining its special relevance to our age, nevertheless make skilful use of the ever-growing knowledge of the playwright’s own time. As one might expect, L. C. Knights in his Further Explorations has a good deal to say on the critical/historical dichotomy; and in one essay tackles the subject head-on. He restates his well-known position rather less stridently than in his earlier explorings:

The meanings of a poem are not exhausted by the meanings it may have had for its original readers . . . The meanings that it had for the original audience cannot in any case be identified with the meanings of which they were fully conscious.

and expresses his distrust of historical scholarship's tendency to 'substitute accumulated “knowledge about” for living responsiveness' thereby obscuring the essential nature of art and missing its 'personal vibrancy'. Knights is so attractively and seriously concerned with what is important in literature and life that it is difficult to take issue with him while reading his hard-thought-out articulations; and this is specially true when he admits the value of what scholarly research can supply in terms of such things as the habits of mind and ear of Renaissance man or the 'life-bearing ideas of Shakespeare's age'.