Shakespeare's Storytellers: Dramatic Narration (review)

Shakespeare's Storytellers: Dramatic Narration. By Barbara Hardy. London and Chester Springs: Peter Owen, 1997. Pp. 224. $34.95 cloth.

In Shakespeare's Storytellers, Barbara Hardy considers the art of dramatic narration, a subject on which she has written and lectured for almost half a century. Though revised for this book, her ideas will be familiar to many from previous publications. Nonetheless, the present work is a pleasure to read, free of jargon, intelligently crafted, eminently sound, sane, and subtle. Hardy eschews fashionable theoretical technicalities in favor of a sure grasp of literary aesthetics, techniques, and structure.

The first section of Shakespeare's Storytellers examines narrative constructions, with chapters on self-conscious narrative, narrative beginnings, closing narrative injunctions, and narratives in the sources. Among the intentional narrators discussed in the first chapter, Egeon and Egeus spring from classical roots, while the figure of Gower offers "Shakespeare's most sustained and elaborate act of literary mimicry" (37-38). In the treatment of choruses, of messengers and ambassadors relating their stories before public audiences, as well as comic or satiric discourses, readers may feel too much is covered too briefly, though for Othello, "a play about the ethics of narrative" (58), the observations deepen to a certain extent. The second chapter offers a good assessment of the Poet-Painter dialogue in Timon. When Hardy takes up the phenomenon of the narrative injunction in the third chapter, she observes that, save for a couple of instances in Lyly, Shakespeare seems to have invented "the form of a demand or request or invitation, at the end, for someone to recall and relate the story of the play" (72). Racing through examples from fourteen plays in a scant nine pages, the assessment lingers for a surprising two-and-a-half pages on Cymbeline before polishing off the rest of the canon.

Possibly the strongest critiques lie in chapter 4, "Shakespeare Reading Narrative." Through revisions to the sources, one perceives "within the play a distinguishing awareness of narrative meant for a reader and narrative meant for an audience" (92). Thus, in Antony and Cleopatra,

Shakespeare's poetry, complexly in character, is expressive both of the subject (the narrator) and object (the person discussed). Enobarbus's rapturous hyperbole characterizes a sensualist with imagination and humour, shaping for other men a sensual woman also with imagination and humour, staging a scene. Caesar's bitter savouring of austerity and endurance speaks the politician's--and the general's--ambivalent wry admission of need, as he remembers and condemns Antony through praise. The emotional charge of each narrative is a blend of irony and appreciation. There is something stronger too, a kind of wonder, diffused through Enobarbus's speech, but concentrated at its end, and appearing only at the end of Caesar's speech in that image of strange flesh, contemplated in disgust and fascination. Each narration is given a strong beginning--Enobarbus facing his listeners, Caesar turning from Lepidus to Antony--and a strong climax at the end.

(97-98)

By contrast, with Titus, Shakespeare not only reworks but foregrounds the play's literary antecedents. "He makes his bookish characters read the books he read, Virgil and Ovid, enjoy them, allude to them, discuss them and use them . . . as models for action" (102). Moving on to Macbeth, Hardy looks at the Malcolm-Macduff testing, carried out as "the lie, the political, moral and psychological category of narrative which he is constructing for scrutiny, in the dialogic medium of theatre" (106). Here she discusses not simply the dynamics involved but possible appropriations beyond Holinshed--Rerum Scoticarum Historia by George Buchanan and the Parthenia-Argalus episode of Sydney's New Arcadia. The latter work's use of parentheses or collapse of speech and silence to mark strong emotion carries over into several other Shakespearean plays.

Themes occupy the three chapters of Storytellers' second section. Looking at "Arts and Acts of Memory," Hardy first singles out the memorial, with its attendant complexities of a speaker's present stance...