Johnson on Shakespeare
edited by Arthur Sherbo, with an Introduction by Bertrand H. Bronson
Yale, 2 volumes, 1,100 pp., $25.00
Shakespearian and other Studies
by F.P. Wilson, edited by Helen Gardner
Oxford, 345 pp., $10.50
Shakespeare the Craftsman
by M.C. Bradbrook
Barnes & Noble, 187 pp., $5.00
Shakespeare: The Pattern in his Carpet
by Francis Fergusson
Delacorte, 331 pp., $6.95
The Tragic Engagement: A Study of Shakespeare’s Classical Tragedies
by Judah Stampfer
Funk & Wagnalls, 336 pp., $6.95
The Tiger’s Heart: Eight Essays on Shakespeare
by Herbert Howarth
Oxford, 210 pp., $5.00
Motiveless Malignity
by Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 158 pp., $5.00
Macbeth and the Players
by Dennis Bartholomeusz
Cambridge, 300 pp., $10.50
The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Development
by Julian Markels
Ohio State, 191 pp., $6.00
Iago: Some Approaches to the Illusion of his Motivation
by Stanley Edgar Hyman
Atheneum, 174 pp., $5.95
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama
edited by Norman Rabkin
Columbia, 205 pp., $5.50
An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
by Stephen Booth
Yale, 218 pp., $6.00
Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’Expence of Spirit
by Roman Jakobson, by Lawrence G. Jones
Humanities Press, 32 pp., $3.25
Mr. Lawrence F. MacNamée researches into Shakespearian research, and has published a study of academic dissertations on Shakespeare written in Germany, Britain, and the US during the century up to 1964. During this time there were, he says, 681 successful these, 333 of them in the US and thirty-one in Britain. This last figure I cannot accept; for my reason tells me that however I may feel about it I cannot myself have supervised or examined the entire output.
However, certain trends are detectable, and perhaps trends are more interesting than mere numbers. In the earliest days there was a tendency to be strenuously philological, and emulation of the sciences produced poker-faced source studies, or inquiries into the syntax of Shakespeare’s infinitives. Later there was a lot of history of ideas, the fossilized remnants of which are still chipped out of paperbacks by enterprising students; and then there was allegory, mostly Christian, and imagery. This information I derive not from Mr. MacNamee directly, but from a rather horrifying though well-produced annual entitled Shakespearian Research Opportunities (which, as we can see, researches into research on Shakespearian research). S.R.O. reports all it can gather about the Shakespearian scene, from major editions to books about Elizabethan bastardy, and from the proper study of computers to glossolalia in Hamlet. It is where you ought to go to study the action.
The purpose of this review, which takes in only a dozen or so recent books, is obviously more modest; although the sample may seem too small to entitle me to speak of trends, I intend nevertheless to do so. For Shakespearian criticism is, I think, interesting in ways that have nothing to do with Shakespeare, and that are in the long run the business of cultural pathology. It is the understanding of all sensible men that there is far too much criticism around, and that most of it is rubbish; but the license to write it probably originated with Shakespearians. The right to say what you damn well choose about Shakespeare is felt, like the American right to bear arms, to be constitutional, though it leads to those lamentations one regularly finds in prefaces to books by authors fastidious only in these exordia.
The standards of Shakespeare criticism are still very much lower than those of, say, Milton criticism. The reasons, partly cultural, partly social and economic, will not emerge from a cursory review, but the fact remains that Shakespeare is the only important writer on whom anybody can write a book for no other cause than that he has a mind to do so; and the chances appear to be that he will find a publisher. It is also a fact that good critics tend to do worse with Shakespeare than with anybody else, not because of his inherent difficulty but because the climate of Shakespeare studies is so relaxing.
I don’t mean that this batch is particularly dim; in fact, it may suggest that at the highest level …
