Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century: Criticism and Research

Summary

In his essay for A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ‘Shakespearian Criticism from Dryden to Coleridge’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), T. S. Eliot took much care to underpin his argument with what he described as a ‘very simple’ point: ‘Shakespeare criticism will always change as the world changes’ (p. 288). Yet while arguing for critical difference, he explored the growth of eighteenth-century criticism that was based on textual study rather than performance by singling out Maurice Morgann’s essay On the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) and applauding the piece in terms typical of 1930s character criticism. Iris Murdoch, in a 1961 Encounter article, ‘Against Dryness’, contrasted Shakespeare’s unique facility ‘to create at the highest level both images and people’ with the empirical rationality of representations of man which she deplored in contemporary literature. She illustrated her argument with a historical parallel which considered the enduring influence of Hume and Kant and suggested

our present situation is analogous to an 18th-century one. We retain a rationalistic optimism about the beneficent results of education, or rather technology. We combine this with a romantic conception of ‘the human condition’, a picture of the individual as stripped and solitary . . . The 18th century was an era of rationalistic allegories and moral tales.

(Encounter 88, 18)