Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language (review)

Tolkien's rather mixed views on Shakespeare's plays are well-known, at least among Tolkien scholars, and Janet Brennan Croft conveniently summarizes them in her introduction: on the one hand, his youthful dislike of the remnants of Shakespeare's Warwickshire life, his contempt for Shakespeare's "Pigwiggenry" and Macbeth's Weird Sisters, his curriculum reforms that reduced emphasis on such "Moderns" as Shakespeare and Milton; on the other, perhaps, his lecturing on Shakespeare along with other younger members of the English Faculty at Oxford (he lectured on Hamlet), his enjoyment of a performance of Hamlet (in 1944), his references to Lear in his Beowulf lecture, his thoughtful claim in "On Fairy-stories" that Shakespeare would have been better off if he could have written Macbeth as a story rather than a play. Even if Tolkien made rather a point of not caring for Shakespeare, as the editor points out, he knew Shakepseare's works well—and as the editor also points out, he was fully cognizant of the problems of writing fantastic or Faërie drama: "In this essay Tolkien illustrates his point about the inability of Drama to represent Faërie by describing how depicting the witches through stage trickery detracts from the power of their portrayal in the reader's imagination" (2-3).

The essays following the Introduction are arranged thematically "according to the broad themes and motifs which concerned both authors: Faërie, Power, Magic, and The Other (there is of course a great deal of overlap between these categories; they are all interrelated)" (3). The ideas implicit in this would seem to be that in some way Shakespeare influenced Tolkien (which is an explicit claim in a couple of the essays) and, more often, that seeing how these two authors addressed these themes will help us understand both of them—or at least Tolkien—better. I am not entirely convinced, but let us see. In fact, the essays pretty much resolve themselves into those looking at A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Henry V, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear (not much on Hamlet). From the fact that I made the comparison with Henry V myself several years ago (though much more allusively and in less detail), it may correctly be inferred that this is the place where I am most sympathetic to looking at Shakespeare to understand Tolkien, but I hope I am fair-minded about the others. There are, however, two caveats to be entered here.

First, when the distinguished Shakespearean Nevill Coghill contributed to the festschrift English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), his contribution was the brilliantly à propos "God's Wenches and the Light That Spoke (Some Notes on Langland's Kind of Poetry)"—with its implicit personification of Tolkien as Langland. We need to keep this in mind when we look at Tolkien's appreciation of the common man (and we might remember the figure of John Bunyan as well). Second, though we can (and I have) traced a literary connection between Shakespeare and Tolkien, it runs not from Shakespeare as we know him now (or even Shakespeare as Tolkien knew him "then"—whenever "then" was), but from Shakespeare through the Eighteenth Century, into Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, thence to Tolkien—very much not the Shakespeare we know now. Just as we must keep in mind what Anne Hathaway's Cottage looked like in 1908 when viewing Tolkien's remarks on Shakespeare in 1908, so we must remember, when searching for Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien, that, if it does exist, it isn't the influence of Shakespeare as we know him now. But that of course does not preclude our looking at the way Shakespeare treats a theme to illuminate the way Tolkien treats that theme—quite another thing from looking at Shakespeare...