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SHAKESPEAlIE PRESENT AND FUTURE 191 SHAKESPEARE PRESENT AND FUTURE' To record what sure1y must have been one of the most ambitious and successful international conferences ever devoted to the work of a single artist, the editors have presented us with a book of elegant design, high quality, and admirable catholicity. Given unity as it is by the pairing and grouping of essays under such general headings as Elizabethan Theatre, Text and Canon, and Critical Approaches, the book ( unlike some such collections) can be read from cover to cover. A reviewer with limited space at his disposal, however, cannot describe it all but must first quote a few passages representative of its happiest moments and secondly comment on its most surprising - and welcome - general characteristic . Writing on (Continuities and Discontinuities in Shakespearian Prose' with the same insight that he has previously brought to Ben Jonson, Jonas Barish notes this about the citizens' speeches in Coriolanus: We lind in all of them an unforeseen texture of close argument and debate, of opinion carefully pondered and discriminatingly sifted. We bnd an equally striking absence of the usual frenetic punning, the compulsive flippancy, the turning of every third word into a joke, that we have come to think of as a kind of Shakespearian trademark for such scenes. There is a minimum, too, now, of obvious colloquialisms, of clipped forms, slang words, homely proverbs, and references to things like toasted cheese and cobblers' implements . Little in the language in fact betrays the proletarian status of many of these speakers. The most judicious patrician would hardly have to be ashamed of the vigorous intelligence of these ragged tradesmen, who wield their epigrammatic rhetoric with a deadly aim (,What authority surfeits on would relieve us'), and command a syntax of considerable authority and energy. Despite their failure to sustain a single course of action, the commonalty, in this play. impresses us as intellectually more active and morally more energetic than its earlier counterparts, the rabbles of Hobs and Dicks, Butchers and Weavers and Cobblers; on this occasion, moreover, singleness of action, on the showing of the tragic hero himself, no longer strikes us as so unquestionably admirable. Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to make the people worthy antagonists of their mighty opposite, Caius Marcius, no more the contemptible woollen groats he takes them for than he is the ferocious tyrant some of them think him to be. ( 72-3) This paragraph should be pondered in connexion with H.D.F. Kitto's insistence (in Why Blame Aristotle?') on the greatness of the play and the crucial importance to it of the parable of the belly and the members as a Sophoclean 'background of the action' (136). My other example must also be taken from the section on verse and prose. G.R. Hibbard shows how the young Shakespeare moves toward perfect control of tone in language: As Berowne sings the praise of love near the end of Iv.iii (313-60), images drawn from daily life. from books. from sensitive observation of the natural world, and from classical mythology mingle together in 'an easy commerce of the old and the new.' But the man who wrote this speech knew, as the author of Titm Andronicus did not, that, to quote Berowne once more, 'Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief' ( v.ii.743). And so "'Clifford Leecb and J.M.R. Margeson, ed., Shakespeare 1971 : Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, VancouveT, August 1971. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972. Pp.xii, 298. $10.00 UTQ, Volume XLIII, Number 2, Winter 1974 192 WILLIAM BLISSETT in this play, the most magical and moving moment takes another form altogether. The Pageant of the Nine Worthies has been played; Armada has challenged Costard to a duel; the fun is at its height; we wonder what further exhibition of folly is to come. What we get is the stage direction 'Enter a Messenger Mounsier Marcade.' A chill falls over the scene. [The dialogue is quoted.] Abruptly the whole movement of the verse has shifted from the major to the minor key as the reality of death intrudes on this butterfly world. And it has...

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