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

Summary

When so much of the criticism of Shakespeare during the present century has, after the manner of Bradley and Knight, tended to move naturally into the wider issues of the plays, it is refreshing to come across a book which concerns itself with one specific technical aspect of them, which turns out to have real critical implications. Such is E. Jones’s Scenic Form in Shakespeare which focuses our attention on the scene as the basic dramatic unit in the plays. The early chapters offer a virtuoso display of perception on such topics as the nature of the theater audience, the creation of the ‘audience mind’, the basically simple design of the big set scenes, the variety of patterns in information-giving scenes, the methods of increasing and retarding tempo, and the nature of dramatic time. At every point Jones’s schematizations are illustrated by brilliant close analyses of particular scenes (outstanding examples are the discussions of Titus, III, i, and Caesar, I, ii), extended discussion of the pacing of scenes in complete plays, and the whole question of the time-scheme in Othello. He detects in the Histories and Tragedies a two-part structure with each section being characterized by its own theatrical unity of time.