The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public Theatre by Alvin B. Kernan (review)

Book Reviews Keller sees it, Dickinson was sometimes lonely, but "hardly unassociated, hardly dissociated. Though anomalous, she 'knew.'" In fact, Keller identifies Dickinson as one of America's earliest radicals, a writer who found "poetry fun and funny" and a woman who "wanted to be a poet and yet found no obligation to be learned." Keller uses her poetry to reveal a new portrait of Dickinson as a post-Puritan woman bending social conventions to meet her own needs. As such, Dickinson did not conceive America as a burden, as a problem with which she had to comprehend. She made America "indigencTus to her," and as a result, we are able to understand it "because of her." Keller's style, as always sparkling and provocative, enhances his arguments and provides Dickinson students with an opportunity to understand more fully her role in American poetry. Keller's book is surely a seminal study. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Alvin B. Kernan. The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 164 p. $10.95. Alvin Keman's The Playwright as Magician surveys several key works by Shakespeare to discover not only what these works tell us about the situation of the playwright in Elizabethan times, but more importantly what they tell us about Shakespeare's "Image of the Poet." Kernan is careful not to give us a trendy essay on metadrama — as if the center of Shakespeare's art is a reflection on art — but he shows quite convincingly that such works as Loue's Labour's Lost, Lear, and Hamlet contain a "readable" meditation on the conflict "between the ideal of who and what the poet was and the actual conditions in which the new poets lived and wrote" (17). While the patronage system seemed to be a useful way of resolving this conflict, allowing writers to sustain their conception of art as serious and important as well as support themselves without selling their work in the loathed literary marketplace, the dynamics of patronage introduced problems that Shakespeare evidently found unsatisfactory. Kernan reads the Sonnets as a sequence tracing Shakespeare's dissatisfaction with the rather mindless conventions of praise and poetic self-abasement required by a patron, and when the image of the gentleman gives way to the Dark Lady, Kernan suggests that Shakespeare herein forsakes a lyric for a dramatic view of life, full of irony and complexity. This move from the great hall to the public theatre also introduces new pressures, and Kernan is at his best in detailing Shakespeare's apparent awareness of how theatrical production is a far from ideal way of expressing an individual's vision: the plays themselves document Shakespeare's sense that audiences are often inattentive or not responsive, actors (as Hamlet fears) unreliable, and traditional theatrical conventions unwieldy. For Kernan, Shakespeare's final image of the magician, Prospero, summarizes the perils and promises of the artist: able to create artifacts that are pleasing and compelling, but also fleeting and illusory. 280VOL. 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980) Book Reviews Though he apologizes on occasion to scholars for repeating some material that will not be new to them, Kernan need not apologize to the majority of his readers who will, I think, appreciate his synthesis of a vast amount of specialist information into a slim but persuasive account of Shakespeare's strikingly modern understanding of the artist's problems and limited successes. SIDNEY GOTTLIEB, Sacred Heart University Stephanie Kraft. No Castles on Main Street: American Authors and Their Homes. Chicago: Rand McNaIIy & Co., 1979. 239 p. In Poets' Homes (1879), Richard Stoddard celebrated the ability of writers like Bayard Taylor both to bring culture to America and to achieve the "good life" through their writing. While shallow and naive. Poets' Homes had a thesis. Unfortunately, no thesis informs Kraft's book. While the Foreword bows toward "regionalism" and the importance of a "sense of place" in American literature, the book explores neither of these issues in a detailed or sustained way. Relying on the standard sources, Kraft's sketch of an author and her judgment of his or her works are conventional...