Patterns in Shakespeare

REVIEWS PATTERNS IN SHAKESPEARE R. S. KNOX That the artist may be unaware of the full implications of his art, and that it falls to the interpreting critic to make these explicit, is a fashionable doctrine today. It is the doctrine on which are bas~d the findings of two recen t books on Shakespeare. The first of these is a series of lectures given by Professor H. B. Charlton in the John Rylands Library, and now collected under the title of Shakespearian Comedy.l Mr Charlton's purpose is to trace throughout the plays the growth of Shakespeare's "idea" of comedy. To talk of an idea of comedy, and to talk about it as one must for such exposition as is now being attempted, may seem co imply a clear consciousness of such things in the mind of the dramatist. But that, it must be insisted, is very wide of the mark. A dramatist's creative power is essentially different from, and largely independent of, his pure reason. The life he imaginatively apprehends may remain, and indeed most frequently does remain, entirely unanalysed and unsystematised by his reason. But when the life he creates by his art displays th~ completeness of an, organic unity; the principles implied in it or presupposed by it may be inquired into, and formulated, though but imperfectly. The formulation of them will be in terms which, more often than not) would appear to the dramatist himself as more or less unintelligible irrelevancies. Shakespeare , it is certain, had no theory of comedy. But his genius created a "comic" world. To trace the evolution of his idea of comedy is to follow the stages by which his presentation of the "comic" grew into the creation of a universe which was complete in itself and was held together by its capacity to convince the imagination of man that the fundamental laws of it correspond to man's sense of what he himself is and what, in its essence, is the world in which he lives. 'The vagueness of the last-quoted sentence is unusual in the writing, and the underlying contention is elsewhere made clear. A comedy is a play which ends happily. The happiness must not be an arbitrary imposition" but must issue from the temperament and attitude of the protagonist. He must be such a person as would conquer circumstances; and the circumstances must be characteristic of those we know in life. Throughout his comedies Shakespeare is unconsciously seeking the ideal hero who "must succeed because of those trai ts of human nature which render lShakespearian Comedy, by H. B. Charlton, Macmillan, 1938, $4.00. 107 REVIEWS PATTERNS IN SHAKESPEARE R. S. KNOX That the artist may be unaware of the full implications of his art, and that it falls to the interpreting critic to make these explicit, is a fashionable doctrine today. It is the doctrine on which are bas~d the findings of two recen t books on Shakespeare. The first of these is a series of lectures given by Professor H. B. Charlton in the John Rylands Library, and now collected under the title of Shakespearian Comedy.l Mr Charlton's purpose is to trace throughout the plays the growth of Shakespeare's "idea" of comedy. To talk of an idea of comedy, and to talk about it as one must for such exposition as is now being attempted, may seem co imply a clear consciousness of such things in the mind of the dramatist. But that, it must be insisted, is very wide of the mark. A dramatist's creative power is essentially different from, and largely independent of, his pure reason. The life he imaginatively apprehends may remain, and indeed most frequently does remain, entirely unanalysed and unsystematised by his reason. But when the life he creates by his art displays th~ completeness of an, organic unity; the principles implied in it or presupposed by it may be inquired into, and formulated, though but imperfectly. The formulation of them will be in terms which, more often than not) would appear to the dramatist himself as more or less unintelligible irrelevancies. Shakespeare , it is certain, had no theory of comedy...