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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare
  • Jay L. Halio (bio)
Shakespeare. By David Bevington. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Pp. x + 250. $19.95 paper.

Of volumes introducing students and the general reader to Shakespeare, there is no dearth. What is rare, however, is one that is not only exceptionally readable but also well informed and sensible rather than idiosyncratic. Bevington's Shakespeare meets precisely those criteria. David Bevington caps his long and eminent career as a Shakespeare scholar and teacher with this excellent new study. Throughout, he carries his learning lightly, but to the experienced eye the learning is ever present; whereas the less-experienced eye is not burdened with a surplus of footnotes, endnotes, or scholarly digressions.

The book's central idea is to look at "Shakespeare's writing career as a mirror of the human life cycle as experienced by Shakespeare" (242). He organizes his material thematically, as follows: 1. All the World's a Stage: Poetry and Theatre; 2. Creeping Like Snail: Childhood, Education, Early Friendship, Sibling Rivalries; 3. Sighing Like Furnace: Courtship and Sexual Desire; 4. Full of Strange Oaths and Bearded Like the Pard: The Coming-of-Age of the Male; 5. Jealous in Honour: Love and Friendship in Crisis; 6. Wise Saws: Political and Social Disillusionment, Humankind's Relationship to the Divine, and Philosophical Scepticism; 7. Modern Instances: Misogyny, Jealousy, Pessimism, and Midlife Crisis; 8. The Lean and Slippered Pantaloon: Ageing Fathers and their Daughters; 9. Last Scene of All: Retirement from the Theatre.

In several of these chapters, Bevington shows how badly some men treat women and how well most women treat men in the plays. In the discussion of Measure for Measure, he notes that "Juliet takes primary responsibility for [her] pregnancy, and the heavier sense of sin" (107). By contrast, in Much AdoAbout Nothing "the picture it presents of men in love is troublesome," and characters such as Claudio in that play come in for some particularly harsh criticism (102).

In his treatment of the tragedies especially, Bevington maintains along with A. C. Bradley that "Character is fate." While Bevington is not primarily concerned with character analysis along Bradleian lines, he is nonetheless astute when dealing with Shakespeare's major figures. He says, for example, that "Hamlet is a tragic hero not merely because he suffers terribly but because he cannot be satisfied until he thinks he understands why that suffering has happened and what he was supposed to do about it" (137). A question that critics have pondered frequently is "Why must Cordelia die?" In all of Shakespeare's sources she survives and wins the battle against her wicked sisters, restoring her father to the throne, but not in Shakespeare's rendering. On this [End Page 71] issue Bevington argues: "The reason that Lear is denied Cordelia at last is that he cherishes her too much. . . . He stakes his very being on having her; she makes everything all right" (149). But in the Lear universe, everything is far from all right, as Edgar could have told him, Bevington says; and it is a mistake to depend on something like having his once-banished child back to bring him "a belated bit of happiness" (149).

Bevington's interpretations of Shakespeare's plays will inevitably prompt the same kinds of scholarly disputes that other readings have generated, though I suspect many fewer. He never goes off the deep end to make outrageous claims or radically novel statements. On a few matters of fact, however, his arguments may require some modification. For instance, Bevington claims that Shakespeare's colleagues, Heminges and Condell, when collecting the plays for publication in the Folio of 1623, did not know how to categorize Troilus and Cressida (102). The evidence in the Folio, however, indicates that Heminges and Condell originally intended to have Troilus follow Romeo and Juliet among the tragedies, as the misnumbered pages at the end of Romeo and beginning of Troilus indicate. Copyright problems interfered, and the printing of Troilus was interrupted, to be resumed later on, with the play positioned anomalously between the histories and tragedies after the volume was nearly complete.1 Again, it is not at Oberon's behest that Bottom becomes "translated" by wearing...

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