The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

It is a presumption to believe that dramatic experience can be fully described in terms of pattern and symbol To speak of Shakespeare's plays in symbolic terms reveals a unity, but it does not necessarily follow that the plays are wholly harmonious, or that this unity is the only one. Such criticism may seem to clarify our appreciation, but it does not necessarily follow that the plays are without other aspects important to author and audience.

So writes John Russell Brown in an important article which is indicative of the re-appraisal which Shakespearian criticism is undergoing. The symbolist-imagist orthodoxy is being questioned as too narrow, even as its exponents questioned its Bradleian predecessor. The plea is for a more inclusive view of the plays with greater emphasis on what Brown calls, in another article, 'the expression of character in subconscious existence and in the deeper recesses of consciousness'. But these aspects of the plays are also to be seen in terms of the theatre-'of repetitions, silences, sudden intensities and insistences that are apparently without motive', devices that we may now perceive with greater clarity owing to our exposure to the 'new' drama of Pinter, Beckett and Ionesco.