Othello's Sacrifice: Essays on Shakespeare and Romantic Tradition by John O'Meara (review)

196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Jolm O'Meara. Othello's Sacrifice: Essays on Shakespeare and Romantic Tradition Guemica. 128. $12.00 The first essay in this volume, 'Othello's Sacrifice as a Dialectic of Faith,' uses an Abraham and Isaac analogy to argue that there is an inward spiritual development in Shakespeare's Moor through which he must go before he can say with such calm assurance, 'And I will kill thee / And love thee after.' The second, 'Shakespearean Tragic Representation and the Formal-Aesthetic Solution,' carries the development of an inner and universal wisdom, supported by 'verbal allusions to a process, movement, or continuum ofemotion,' into the other tragedies, and suggests that it parallels an 'inner evocation' in Shakespeare himself. The analyses are particularlyinsightful as far as the plays are concerned. The application of the 'proce&s' to the playwright, however, relies on the notion that Othello and each of the other tragedies as we have them emerged fully formed and fully scripted from Shakespeare's creative imagination like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus; a belief not held by most modem Shakespeareans, who do not see the 'text' as static but as formed from an interplay between playwright and actors, and audience, and early modern socio-politico-cultural conditions. When O'Meara speaks of King Lear, for example, I ask, 'Which Lear, quarto or folio?' and then add JOr the playas it might have been performed at any time between those two printed versions?' . Part 3, 'The Coming of Rudolf Steiner and Romantic Evolution,' which is more than half of the book, broadens O'Meara's theory further and argues thatShakespeare's progresstowards auniversalspiritualconsciousness can be explained through the romantic theories of Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Society of Anthroposophy. The approach relies, perforce, on an intuitive formula or credo which is applied to Shakespeare internally and to his plays externally. This sort of synchronic analysis (the kind that E.E. Stoll was debunking fifty years ago and attacked for doing so by some of the critics of the 1950S and early 19605 that O'Meara mentions), whether of Shakespearean inner growth to higher wisdom or that of the characters in the plays, aside from being occultist and proselytising, seems oldfashioned 'in the light of modem critical pluralism, which may be 'unromantic ,' as O'Meara claims, but nonetheless even in its diversity would eschew attempting to understand Shakespeare's wellspring of creative genius through psycho-spiritualism. I suspect that O'Meara thinks of himself as an anthroposophist first and then as a Shakespearean, and for this reason Ialso suspect thatmost readers of his book will ultimately ask, 'Does this argument convince me that what Shakespeare studiesinour universities needs is a "vindication of Romantic tradition" through a course entitled "Shakespeare and Anthroposophy"?' My guess is that most answers would be negative. (CATHERINE M. SHAW) ...