Book contents
- Frontmatter
- The Problem Plays, 1920–1970: A Retrospect
- ‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
- The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook’s ‘Measure for Measure’
- Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘Measure for Measure’ and Mark iv
- The Design of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’
- Directing Problem Plays: John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans
- The Queen Mab Speech in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
- ‘Time’s Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in ‘The Comedy of Errors’
- Faith and Fashion in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
- ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a Hallowe’en Play
- ‘The Tempest’ at the Turn of the Century: Cross-Currents in Production
- Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’
- The Life of George Wilkins
- A Neurotic Portia
- Of an Age and for All Time: Shakespeare at Stratford
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- The Problem Plays, 1920–1970: A Retrospect
- ‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
- The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook’s ‘Measure for Measure’
- Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘Measure for Measure’ and Mark iv
- The Design of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’
- Directing Problem Plays: John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans
- The Queen Mab Speech in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
- ‘Time’s Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in ‘The Comedy of Errors’
- Faith and Fashion in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
- ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a Hallowe’en Play
- ‘The Tempest’ at the Turn of the Century: Cross-Currents in Production
- Variations Within A Source: From Isaiah XXIX To ‘The Tempest’
- The Life of George Wilkins
- A Neurotic Portia
- Of an Age and for All Time: Shakespeare at Stratford
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Many of the critical approaches to Shakespeare used during the past forty years or so have appeared to offer methods of perceiving the plays’ central issues, but have been in fact means of isolating some single aspect of their complexity. In his 1969 Academy lecture, Alfred Harbage looks with wit and good sense at one class of these: the efforts aimed at giving Shakespeare a modern complexion of one sort or another. He realises that most modernisers produce their often spectacular results by ignoring the fact that ‘action in a Shakespearian play has . . . more meanings without the words than with them’. And by following up the implications of his idea that ‘words are a limiting factor: they restrict our interpretations of an action in the direction of . . . the author’s intention’, he is able to clip the wings of Kott’s reputation, to estimate the degree to which one may speak valuably of a Christian Shakespeare, to indicate fairly the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet criticism, and to contemplate judiciously the possibility of an Absurdist Bard. Clearly Harbage’s own sympathy is with the silent critics all over the world who read the plays regularly and apply the only valid test for determining whether a work of art is being justly seen, in its own age or later, which is ‘to observe how much of its data is being taken into account’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 171 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972