Shaping Fantasies

This book assembles in one volume the introductions Tony Tanner wrote for the Everyman Library seven-volume Shakespeare, first published between 1992 and 1996. In an era where hyper-professionalisation and specialisation (even more so in America than in the UK) discourage scholars from moving beyond their official fields, the spectacle of a brilliant critic of nineteenth-century British and American literature following in the footsteps of Johnson and Coleridge and Hazlitt and reflecting upon the Shakespearian corpus is a refreshing surprise. The nearest equivalent to Tanner's project would be Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), which also addresses all the plays - but Tanner's meditations are more capacious, much less polemical, and in the end rather more humane than Bloom's.

One is struck, first of all, by the testimony of the table of contents to the author's own preferences. This volume divides the plays by genre, and none of them is skimped, but the general introductions preceding the individual discussions of comedies and romances are much more detailed than those preceding the major tragedies, the histories, and the Greek and Roman plays. Essays on As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are significantly longer than those on Hamlet and Othello (Tanner's wonderful account of Cymbeline runs to thirty-five pages). (Romeo and Juliet, which in Tanner's words, 'fails of being a comedy by something under a minute' (p. 92) is classified with the comedies.) Tanner's particular genius is for comedy and romance: he delights in the hints of everyday magic in the comedies, in the matrix of wonder, dream, and art that both transcends and reaffirms 'natural magic' in the romances. His prefaces could be thought of as offering an overview of Shakespeare's own Metamorphoses (and are exquisitely attentive to the playwright's recursive transformation of his dramatic preoccupations across the course of his career), but they celebrate a metamorphic universe where 'all the changes take place inside' (p. 14), where language itself is transfigured, and where there is abiding and productive tension between Shakespearian comedy's celebration of flexibility and adaptability and its competing desire for 'continuity, fidelity, trust', and stable identities (p. 63).

The prefaces' governing tone is wonder (it's not surprising Tanner has so much to say about the romances): their analyses are complemented by a record of their author's astonishment, delight, or even bafflement. He invites the reader to note the strangeness, as well as the richness, of what Shakespeare offers us: his essay on Cymbeline, after mapping its web of sources, its Byzantine plot, and its manipulation of 'the most disparate, incongruous, intractable material imaginable, all concerning important matters', concludes: 'Our pleasure should be tragical-historical-comical-pastoral-romantical; and also, theatrical-magical. Cymbeline, it seems to me, is the most extraordinary play that Shakespeare ever wrote. How does he do it?' (p. 755). Alternatively, after carefully teasing out the literary and historical peculiarities and perversities of Henry VIII, he simply throws up his hands: 'why Shakespeare wrote it - to the extent that he did write it - is simply beyond the reach of informed conjecture' (p. 485).

The prefaces, then, are personal, responsive, and as Stephen Heath notes in his brief introduction to the volume, appreciative. This is not an author with an axe to grind (with just one or two exceptions: writing of The Merchant of Venice and defending his Shakespeare from charges of anti-Semitism, Tanner is unusually vehement about 'damagingly irrelevant attitudes to the play' (p. 141); elsewhere, his own dislike of Henry V produces an oddly reductive account of that work's perceived shortcomings). His imagined audience is not really the kind of undergraduate who needs bullet points and catalogues of Main Themes but a very literate general reader - although at times that reader becomes more of a fellow scholar, and is told, without further explanation, that the Hero/Claudio plot in Much Ado About Nothing already existed in 'Ariosto...