The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

OLD TIMERS

On anybody's list of great Shakespearians of the mid-twentieth century there would surely figure three names above all: C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye, and G. Wilson Knight.

C. L. Barber did not live to complete The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), and it fell to Richard P. Wheeler to prepare with painstaking care the manuscript documents for publication. It is tragic that Barber did not see the result, for it is his own 'whole journey' traced through the entire Shakespearian canon. He was loved and respected as a teacher and critic, and one can see the underlying reason for this in the nostalgic attractiveness of his assumptions concerning 'Shakespeare's ideal of a gracious, organic society' (p. 124) and its violation in plays like Richard III and Titus Andronicus. Barber retrieves an image of Shakespeare as generous, 'richly sociable', and empathetic, and whether or not these qualities lay in the dramatist, they belonged to the critic. He accounts for Shakespeare in predominantly psychological terms. Shakespeare's experiences of witnessing the worldly failure of a lovable father, and being cherished by a strong mother, who was inadvertently betrayed by the weakness of her husband, are seen to feed into patterns in the plays which are regarded as an evolving canon. The pattern is implicit in The Comedy of Errors as the intact family is refound, but in 'the whole journey' different aspects become prominent at different times.