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  • Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century
  • John D. Staines (bio)
Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing, 2008. Pp. xii + 189. $99.95 cloth.

Among the many disciplinary boundaries that shape the study of Shakespeare, the classifications set by chronological periodization are among the firmest. With separate conferences, journals, and faculty hiring slots, scholars whose subjects are separated by a mere century, or even just a few decades, often find it hard to communicate with one another. Perhaps the most pernicious effect of such artificial divides is the tendency of critics of one period to make broad, exaggerated generalizations about the other that, while convenient to make an argument, often sound to a specialist from the competing period to be at best unsubtle and at worst ignorant. Thus, scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently portray the eighteenth century, or the Enlightenment, as the place where everything goes wrong, modern reason and its economics, politics, and philosophy distorting Shakespeare in ways that would make his plays unrecognizable to his original audiences, taming Shakespeare to make him a modern just like us. Just one alleged crime, among many, is the creation of character criticism and the resulting projection of anachronistic [End Page 295] psychological concepts upon Shakespeare's dramatis personae as if they were real, modern human beings.

Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin have compiled a collection by scholars from both the Renaissance and the eighteenth century to bridge this gulf of misunderstanding and oversimplification. Originally written for a 2006 symposium on "Enlightenment Exchanges," the essays portray Shakespeare and his eighteenth-century readers in dialogue. Here, Shakespeare is not an inert victim of Enlightenment values but a figure who shapes his critics and their world view in return. Moreover, the essays grow out of a recent shift in perspective that sees the eighteenth century less as the age of reason than as one of sympathy and the passions. Seeking to defend character criticism from its parody as a confusion of literary figures with real people, many of these critics explore how the best character critics use Shakespeare's creation of realistic personae to explore moral, ethical, psychological, and political questions.

The first three essays set out the main theoretical concerns that the collection as a whole explores. Michael Bristol answers the old complaint that the eighteenth century misled Shakespeare criticism into the anachronistic study of character by showing that developments in ethics and moral philosophy produced the century's special interest in Shakespeare's characters. Bristol makes a strong case against seeing these critics as making an ontological error, confusing fictional characters and real people. Critics turned to Shakespeare because they saw his characters as exercises in practical, pragmatic, or prudential ethics. Samuel Johnson might object to the morality of Shakespeare's world view as expressed by his poetry and his characters' choices, but like other critics, he used Shakespeare's characters to discuss ethical problems because "they are represented as fully embedded in the concrete particularity of everyday life" (25). As Jean Marsden explains, another prime concern of eighteenth-century philosophy, the theory of sympathy developed by Adam Smith, David Hume, and others, shaped both the critical response to Shakespeare and the performance of his plays. Smith's conception of sympathy and its place in moral philosophy had great effects upon the understanding of Shakespeare and literature in general, since it rested "on a theory of spectatorship" where, "because of the experience of sympathy, spectatorship can lead to virtue" (31). Drama and especially tragedy rose in the hierarchy of the literary arts, and plays were tailored to cultivate sympathy in the sense of an audience's fellow-feeling for an identifiable character. This shift, which makes the eighteenth-century experience of a play very different from what came before, continues to shape performance to this day. Marsden uses it to explain, for instance, why eighteenth-century (and modern) audiences find King Lear's emotional power in Lear's experience as a wronged father rather than as a fallen king. Nicholas Hudson then looks at one aspect of that identification between audience and character to explore Shakespeare...

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