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

Summary

There has been a rapid increase this year in the number of books published and in the proportion of these available for review, and the trends of current criticism stand out the more clearly.

In last year’s survey of criticism I suggested that we had reached a pausing-place in Shakespeare studies, the turn of the half-century and the end of the war alike making a revaluation of the twentieth-century’s findings and a fresh direction, or at least a modification, probable. A notable feature of that year’s critical work was the tendency of its writers to turn back to the contemplation of Shakespeare as an artist and a poet and to indicate, even when primarily concerned with some other theme, that the essential Shakespeare is to be found in the poetic content of the plays. Some critics, clearly aware of their position, stated it explicitly; one almost in the form of a manifesto. Others, though less conscious of the novelty of this return to the imaginative tradition of the nineteenth century, nevertheless tended instinctively to the exploration of aesthetic or mainly aesthetic problems.

It was clear that the next few years would be crucial in determining whether or not there would be a change in direction strong enough to discover fresh lines of criticism, lines as boldly independent, perhaps, of what had gone before as those that mark the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. I do not think we can yet say that this has happened; but we can point to indications, to certain tendencies that another decade may recognize for its 'hoved-strømninger'.