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

Summary

Allardyce Nicoll in his British Academy lecture answers the complaint, with which those who survey the year’s work must have a sneaking sympathy, that Shakespeare is being buried beneath his commentators. Although we may share Louis Wright’s depression about the state of Shakespearian scholarship, “a great deal of energy . . . being wasted on minutiae that will add up to very little”, Nicoll points out that “many things accomplished in the past urgently need to be done again” and “many productive areas await proper exploitation”. He gives a number of examples—texts which demand proper editing, documents which await detailed examination, further investigation of Shakespeare’s imagery, and, he might have added, the imagery of his contemporaries, “the imaginative consideration of Shakespeare’s creative genius in the light of” his sources, the examination of Shakespeare’s style, the publication of an adequate dictionary of Elizabethan English, the provision of an ‘authorized’ text. Nicoll concludes, not unnaturally, that such a programme can be carried out only by team-work. L. C. Knights, on the other hand, offers a warning on the limitations of historical scholarship as exemplified by Virgil K. Whitaker’s Shakespeare’s Use of Learning. He emphasizes that in applying Elizabethan ideas to our study of Shakespeare

We should not approach them as Shakespearian scholars bent on reconstructing a merely historical background, but—paradoxically—that we should study them for themselves, responding to them as themselves actual and vivifying.

C. J. Sisson, meanwhile, gives the general reader a brief guide3 to Shakespeare and his critics. He is well-balanced and catholic in his sympathies, though he seems to regard some admired modern criticism with suspicion.