Volume 6, Number 8 · May 12, 1966
The Enduring Lear
By Frank Kermode
King Lear in Our Time
by Maynard Mack
California, 126 pp., $3.75
Conceptions of Shakespeare
by Alfred Harbage
Harvard, 164 pp., $4.95
The reasons for a work of art surviving are probably much more complicated than we tend to suppose, and in any case are rarely sought. What we get instead of inquiry into them is talk about the nature of the classic. Eliot, for example, distinguished between absolute and relative classics; the distinction depended upon the grand imperial myth he worked up in the later years of his life, for absolute classics belonged to 'a larger pattern set in Rome.' This makes Virgil chief of the class because of his truly metropolitan situation and because he was the poet and prophet of that imperium which we still inhabit or do not inhabit according to whether we are or are not 'provincial.' By such standards Shakespeare is in some degree provincial, and there are moments when it becomes clear that Eliot was on the point of saying so. Nevertheless, if we change the terms a bit Eliot's classic provides part of the answer to the question about survival, since it must be true that certain works have, for one reason or another, been formative of the culture we inhabit, even to the point where in order to reject them we should have to reject much else with them; so that on the whole it is easier to accept and adapt them, sometimes drastically, as the Stoic allegorists accepted and adapted Homer, or modern theologians the Bible, or modern directors Shakespeare.
Review, 2224 words
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