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Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work and the Late Plays (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 14, Number 2, January 1997
- pp. 190-192
- 10.1353/pgn.1997.0083
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
190 Reviews Hunt, Maurice, Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work and the Late Plays (Studies in Shakespeare 3), N e w York, Peter Lang, 1995; paper; pp. x, 311; R.R.P. US$74.00 Maurice Hunt's aim is to investigate Shakespeare's 'ambivalent' portrayal of kinds of work in the late plays and he introduces his thematic study with an instructive survey of various attitudes to work coexisting in Jacobean England. He argues that social forms shaped by medieval attitudes to work remained alongside both a distinctively Protestant evaluation of the dignity of labour and an expectation of apocalypse which anathematised redemptive work. The honouring of labour was largely contradicted in practice by the idle Jacobean court and thwarted in expression generally by working conditions and a lack of employment opportunities in the early seventeenth century. Describing childbirth as 'English Renaissance women's special work', Hunt includes images of birth labour which were appropriated by male writers as a metaphor for works of the imagination. H e also observes that evidence of the working mind is often manifested in the bodily stasis of characters in Shakespeare's plays. Although concluding that Shakespeare 'responded' to the manifold images of labour in his society, Hunt also argues that his plays 'reflect' this cultural ambivalence. Suggestive as these comments are, Hunt's introduction offers no discussion of a method of negotiating culture, text, history or author. Hunt begins the body of his study with a survey of Shakespeare's early Jacobean plays, charting a progression of ideas from the Elizabethan plays, concerned 'only' with the aristocracy's freedom from work, to the Romances and Henry VIII where the idea of labour as redemptive emerges as a central theme. First, Hamlet is summarised as a morality play demonstrating the evils of sloth which emanate from Claudius and spread to Hamlet who ultimately decides that work has no meaning. After skimming over Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, in which the concept of labour is diversified, Hunt argues that the role of work in city and nation is a general theme that connects Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, with the final text acting as a 'bridge' into the later plays portraying war as redemptive labour for a society. Hunt's reading of Coriolanus is suggestive and, at times, compelling, but on the whole the brief summation of six plays and the aligning of them into a unified scheme is both dissatisfying and theoretically problematic. Mapping Shakespeare's treatment of the theme of redemptive labour Reviews 191 Hunt deals with the late plays in chronological order, arguing that the idea peaks in Henry VIII and finally recedes to a mystery in The Two Noble Kinsmen. H e begins his study with Pericles where the physic performed by Cerimon and the 'stir' portrayed in the storm are parallelled as images of redemptive work. Shakespeare's aim in Pericles, Hunt concludes, is to make the audience work at comprehending the play. The experience allows them to empathise with both the labours of the characters and the playwright, thus increasing delight, although Hunt does not explain why this might be. This is also Hunt's ultimate argument about The Tempest where the Bard is pictured as advocating the redemptive labour of self-discovery to his audience. Despite the frequent mention of play-goers and their mutual labouring with the playwright there is no adequate description of who they were nor the variety of interests they may have represented. The labour of gathering meaning is also a dynamic perceived in Cymbeline where Hunt concludes his rather strained reading with the puzzling hypothesis that the offering of another tedious play was a 'career' move on the part of Shakespeare who 'may have thought that he ought to work as programmatically as the characters in the plays' (p. 129). Indeed, the characters in Hunt's reading of the late plays are never interpreted as less than fully human. Shakespeare manifest as nurturer of the essential truth discovered like nuggets in Greene's Pandosto is Hunt's final word on The Winter's Tale. According to his overall argument, the idea of work as redemptive peaks at the history...