Shakespeare Closely Read; A Collection of Essays: Written and Performance Texts ed. by Frank Occhiogrosso (review)

The need for a volume that closely reads Shakespeare derives primarily from an impetus to revisit formalist criticism in a postmodern world—one that sees a proliferation of new Shakespearean performances on stages and screens in nearly every part of the globe. The sheer quantity of new performances staged each year demands a method of documentation and analysis that exceeds the scope of the conventional play review. To approach Shakespearean performance criticism, scholars must conjoin their analysis with literary criticism. This is the position taken by the Introduction to this volume, in which Frank Occhiogrosso names “close reading,” the principal methodology utilized by the New Critics from the 1930s to the 1960s (1), as the approach the volume’s contributors will use in their discussion of Shakespeare’s plays. Occhiogrosso explains that New Criticism and close reading make us aware of the centrality of language to a text; thus, close reading often sets the stage for a critical Feminist, Marxist, or Deconstructionist interpretation (2). Yet, referring to close reading, Occhiogrosso contends that “some things once considered central have been left behind” (2). He indicates that a number of recent publications, however, have argued for the need “to retain close reading” (3). Occhiogrosso’s Introduction implies that most current scholarship on Shakespeare does not feature close reading, an implication that some readers may find debatable.

The book’s eleven essays were originally written for a seminar called “Close Readings of Shakespeare” that Occhiogrosso organized and conducted at the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008. Shakespeare Closely Read is divided into two sections, the first of which “closely reads” written texts. Occhiogrosso’s contribution, “‘Music Plays and They Dance’: A Close Reading of Romeo and Juliet, 1.5” stands out as particularly significant: it carefully examines the famous ball scene at Capulet’s to analyze how Shakespeare uses dramatic structure and staging to create paradoxical irony, a form of dramatic oxymoron (19–20). The stage direction at line 26—“Music plays and they dance”—which appears in both quarto and folio texts, is important for his argument, because nowhere later in the scene is it countered by any direction indicating that they stop dancing and retire (20). It is thus reasonable to assume that the dance continues through the remainder of the scene. The presence of the dancers on stage—presumably upstage—forces all the characters that have speaking parts into the downstage area (20). Noting the absence of stage directions indicating Capulet’s exit and/or Romeo’s entrance (21), Occhiogrosso observes how the juxtaposition of Capulet’s “speech of age” (“How long is’t now since last yourself and I / Were in the mask?” [33–34]) with Romeo’s “speech of youth” (“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! / For ne’er saw true beauty till this night” [53–54]), read in conjunction with the absence of evidence that the two can hear one another, shows us “dramatically the irony of people so close and yet so far apart, a dramatic oxymoron” (21). Shakespeare, by “jamming together into a tight space so many incongruities, dramatically creates in us the feeling, the perception, that although these characters are close enough to touch each other, in several senses of the word, they are still worlds apart” (24).

John Russell Brown’s essay, “Shakespeare’s Secret Language,” closely reads dialogue and stage direction in King Lear. Discussing the commentary from his volume on King Lear in the Palgrave Shakespeare Handbooks series, Brown argues that “textual references to physical actions carry with them further ‘secret’ instructions” to make the audience “see feelingly” (4.6.140). For example, if the stage direction for Regan to “‘pluck [Gloucester] by the beard’” is to make sense Regan will “repeatedly ‘pluck [Gloucester] by the beard’ in act 3, scene 7 at lines 35–36 and 38–41” (39). According to Brown, close contact...