Shakespeare’s Open Secret

Summary

One of the embarrassments of writing about Shakespeare is to discover when one appears in print that, as Hector remarked about Troilus and Paris, one has glozed but superficially on the question at issue. I grew up in the age of Bradley; and, like most Shakespearians of my generation, I was later influenced by the criticisms made of his method by Edgar Elmer Stoll, Lily Bess Campbell, Levin Schücking, and L. C. Knights. I came to assume that Bradley read subtleties into the plays which would have astonished an Elizabethan audience or, indeed, the poet himself; that he was too little aware of theatrical considerations; and that (as Knights put it) he did not know that Macbeth was more like The Waste Land than A Doll’s House. In fact, as we now know, Bradley was a keen playgoer and he always believed and asserted that Shakespeare’s plays were essentially dramatic poems. Some of the most memorable passages in his Shakespearean Tragedy are on a subject he professedly omitted – the poetry of the plays; while, on the other hand, the most memorable passages of his critics are not those where the plays are considered specifically as dramatic poems, but rather those which concentrate on the moral issues raised in them.