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

Summary

Many of the critical approaches to Shakespeare used during the past forty years or so have appeared to offer methods of perceiving the plays’ central issues, but have been in fact means of isolating some single aspect of their complexity. In his 1969 Academy lecture, Alfred Harbage looks with wit and good sense at one class of these: the efforts aimed at giving Shakespeare a modern complexion of one sort or another. He realises that most modernisers produce their often spectacular results by ignoring the fact that ‘action in a Shakespearian play has . . . more meanings without the words than with them’. And by following up the implications of his idea that ‘words are a limiting factor: they restrict our interpretations of an action in the direction of . . . the author’s intention’, he is able to clip the wings of Kott’s reputation, to estimate the degree to which one may speak valuably of a Christian Shakespeare, to indicate fairly the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet criticism, and to contemplate judiciously the possibility of an Absurdist Bard. Clearly Harbage’s own sympathy is with the silent critics all over the world who read the plays regularly and apply the only valid test for determining whether a work of art is being justly seen, in its own age or later, which is ‘to observe how much of its data is being taken into account’.