The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

This year’s critical work shows some interesting developments in line with, but by no means repeating, those of the last two years. The tendency to give first place to the art and poetry of Shakespeare is confirmed and some searching and penetrating work in this field gives promise of a coming renascence in dramatic aesthetics. A new edition, by Napoleone Orsini, of Benedetto Croce’s Shakespeare is symptomatic of the growing interest in the older criticism, as is also the constant reference back to Bradley, but one of the healthiest signs is the divergence of opinion on certain branches of Shakespeare’s dramatic technique and the acute and close arguing which, in three or four volumes, accompanies the investigation of the functions and relations of these to the forms of specific plays and to the nature of dramatic art itself. Though many aspects of Shakespeare’s work have here come in for their share–thought, structure, character, style and imagery—the treatment of character and its dramatic function has invited the widest range of critical judgements, from those of Henri Fluchère and of J. F. Danby, who, in different forms, deny psychological reality to character in drama (even in Shakespeare’s drama), to those of H. B. Charlton and J. I. M. Stewart who stoutly maintain the fundamental truth of the character-drawing in the plays. Clearly the question of the relation of ‘character’ in drama to the basic nature of the art is disturbing some of our assumptions, and the problems that this uneasiness will ultimately disclose may tax to the full our powers of thought, even as those raised by the nature of dramatic imagery did some twenty years ago. Another tendency noticed last year, the detailed study of a single play in a volume of some length, also continues: last year’s favourite play was Hamlet; this year’s is Lear.