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James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
When Oscar Cargill suggested thatweshould re-examine Henry James's The Princess Casamassima in terms of the parallels its protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, has with both Anglo-American and continental attitudes toward Hamlet, he partly opened the door on another critical problem—the relation of James to all of Shakespeare. I propose to open that door a good deal wider without presuming to have opened it all the way or to have explored every aspect of the relationship. The novelist, it turns out, has much to say explicitly about the poet. His autobiographical memoirs, his published letters, his critical prefaces, his notebooks, and his literary and dramatic criticism, when taken collectively, reveal a surprisingly large body of both casual and critical comment on Shakespeare. More importantly, James wrote a longish but apparently little-known introduction to one of the poet's plays, which in effect is an interpretation and evaluation of the whole Shakespeare. And, of course, he wrote “The Birthplace,” that amusing but provocative tale of the caretakers of Shakespeare's home in Stratford. If a survey of this material does not throw much new light on the poet, it does, I think, importantly illuminate a significant aspect of Henry James—his critical attitude toward literary genius; in addition, it sharpens our understanding of “The Birthplace.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 “The Princess Casamassima: A Critical Reappraisal,” PMLA, lxxxi (March 1956), 113–117.
2 Reprinted in Henry James, Autobiography, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1956), p. 56.
3 See Robert C. Le Clair, Young Henry James: 1843–1870 (New York, 1955), pp. 89, 93, 113, n. 9; also Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years: 1843–1870 (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 126.
4 See English Hours (Boston, 1905), pp. 213–214; for other allusions, also see pp. 14, 88–89, 201, 211, 216.
5 Essays in London and Elsewhere (London, 1893), pp. 86–127 et passim.
6 “The Lesson of Balzac” in The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), p. 115, also pp. 105, 256; and F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family ... (New York, 1948), pp. 565–566.
7 To Portia “as the very type and model of the young person intelligent and presumptuous”; to Hamlet and Lear as characters who are “finely aware ... ”; and to “the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet” (The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur, New York, 1934, pp. 49, 62, 90; see also pp. 50, 68, 129).
I am indebted to Professor Oscar Cargill for the allusions to Shakespeare in the travel essays, the essay on Mrs. Kemble, and the prefaces.
8 Collected and ed. Allan Wade in Henry James, The Scenic Art, Notes on Acting and the Drama: 1872–1901 (New Brunswick, 1948); all of my page references in the following section of the text are to this work.
9 The lack of (1) rapid movement, (2) bare, unobtrusive staging, and (3) “the art of finished and beautiful utterance” is the threefold criticism James most often made of the productions he reviewed. See, e.g., Wade, pp. xix, xxi, 106–107, 140–141, 164, 165, 287–288, et passim.
10 For examples, see pp. 26, 34, 106–107, 122, 164, 165, 166, 177, 189, 241–242, 282.
11 “Celebrities Off Parade: Henry James,” The Christian Science Monitor, 24 Aug. 1934, editorial page.
12 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, with Annotations and a General Introd. by Sidney Lee (Boston: Jefferson Press, 1907), viii, ix–xxxii.
13 A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (New York, 1930), p. 109; the anthology, The A ppreciation of Shakespeare, ed. Bernard M. Wagner (Washington, 1949), pp. 475–481. Wagner's one-sentence comment on the essay includes the statement that it “has been entirely forgotten ...” (p. x).
14 All of my page references in the following section of the text are from the edition cited in n. 12.
15 See, e.g., Wilson Follett, “The Simplicity of Henry James,” Amer. Rev. i (May–June 1923), 315–325; “Henry James's Portrait of Henry James,” New York Times Bk. Rev., 23 Aug. 1936, pp. 2, 16; and Edmund Wilson, “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” reprinted in The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W. Dupee (London, 1945) pp. 182–184.
16 Henry James (New York, 1951), p. 180; (New York, 1945), pp. 486–547; (New York, 1950), pp. 223–280.
17 Although named in the story only as “the early home of the supreme poet,” James's notebook reference makes it clear that Shakespeare's house at Stratford is the place he has in mind. See The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1947), p. 306.
18 Page references in this section of the text are to Anderson's anthology.
19 Only the post-“Birthplace” James could have written the following otherwise cryptic letter to Violet Hunt (dated 26 Aug. 1903), apparently in reply to her query about his attitude toward the Baconian controversy: “I am 'a sort of haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest fraud ever practiced on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is all—I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any farther. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did” (The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, New York, 1920, i, 424).
20 The Art of the Novel, p. 176.