Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
Magical and Mundane Shakespeare
By C.L. Barber
Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach
by Frances Yates
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 140 pp., $10.25
William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
by S. Schoenbaum
Oxford University Press in association with the Scolar Press, 273 pp., limited boxed edition, $150.00
Years of courtly and esoteric studies have made Frances Yates, vicariously, a learned Renaissance courtier, skilled in the allegory of royal pageants, a great reader of the political implications of tapestries, a sympathetic invisible witness at the dinner party in London at which Giordano Bruno expounded his theory of the infinite plurality of worlds to Elizabethan noblemen, probably including Fulke Greville, perhaps Sir Philip Sidney. In Shakespeare's Last Plays her New Approach is to attend the plays as though a member of a court party intent on the revival, through James I's children, of the great days of Elizabeth as the champion of Protestantism on the Continent, the days of Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, the mathematician-magician John Dee. Miss Yates is caught up in high hopes for high people. Young idealistic Prince Henry has been enhanced by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones as the reviver of chivalry in 'Prince Henry's Barriers' and 'Masque of Oberon.' Suddenly, in 1612, Henry is taken ill and dies, while plans are in progress for his sister Elizabeth's marriage to Frederick, the Elector Palatine.
Review, 3455 words
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