Some Facets of ‘King Lear’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism ed. by Rosalie L. Colie, F.T. Flahiff (review)

HUMANITIES 371 Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff, editors, Some Facets of 'King Lear': Essays in Prismatic Criticism. University of Toronto Press, xi, 237, $15.00 In the words of Rosalie Colie, who died just as Some Facets of 'King Lear' was accepted for publication, the twelve essays in the collection deal with many different topics as if they were facets of a prism, putting emphasis on Shakespeare's consciousness of his craft, on his critical use of the materials, notions, and devices available to him. However, while prisms as well as prunes are useful for the formation of a surface, as Mrs General observed, whether these essays together have the underlying unity that Miss Colie has claimed for them is questionable. Not only are they not as 'mutually supportive' as her preface suggests (except in their agreement on the magnificence of their subject), but the endeavour hardly seems more 'cooperative' than the casebook or 'perplex ' Miss Colie insists her book is not. In fact, although the total of each is inevitably greater than the sum of its parts, the former providing a historical perspective whereas the Facets are all noticeably post-Maynard Mack, the value of each resides ultimately in the excellence of its individual pieces. Luckily, enough of the pieces in Facets are outstanding in this respect: several of them are superb, and all provide exciting insights into King Lear. The essays fall roughly into three categories, language, structure, and content. The first facet is perhaps the most brilliantly illuminated, particularly through the coruscations of Sheldon P. Zitner, who shows the language often to be based on a 'counter-system: a basic design of deception according to which characters do not speak what they feel but what they feel they ought to say. Next, Rosalie Colie stalks familiar quarry in her pursuit of paradox in the biblical echoes in the play, while Martha Andresen comments on sentenfiae, and Maurice Charney uncovers with a flourish the play's theme of nakedness (without, however, relating it closely enough to that of nothingness). Among the essays on structural matters, Bridget Geller Lyons examines the simplifications of the subplot, John Reibetanz places Shakespeare 's use of theatrical patterns in the tradition, and Thomas F. Van Laan tries to convince us of the centrality of 'playacting' and 'roles' (rather than of, say, hypocrisy and self-hood) in the drama. For Nancy R. Lindheim the work is a pastoral tragedy, while William F. Blissett demonstrates impressively how almost all of the drama is devoted to Lear's difficult and protracted recognition (anagnorisis) of what he has done and of what he is. Finally, three authors discuss the ideational content of the play. First, F.D. Hoeniger returns to an insufficiently examined subject in his study of Shakespeare's incredible ability to recapture primitive elements of folk-tale and myth and to transform them into the highest kind of art. Then F.T. Flahiff suggests that we should recognize in Lear's successor, Edgar, the historical king of that name, who turned England toward the Tudor glory. Finally, Rosalie Colie's second essay opens up a vast area of questionable scholarship as it explores, mainly through Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, '558-,64', how Shakespeare's tragedy reflects the decline of the Elizabethan 'deference society.' Despite many a penetrating observation, Miss Celie unfortunately gives in to a tendency (all too noticeable elsewhere in the collection also) to get involved in issues at best incidental to the facets of the Lear prism. The result is that the play regularly disappears in the sociological bath water, so that in the end one is driven, in an irrational paradoxy that Miss Colie would surely have appreciated, to put the insistent question of Lady Bracknell: 'Prism! Where is that baby?' (s. WARHAFT) Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne.University of Massachusetts Press, xiii, 240, $11..00 'Guilt Culture' and 'enlightenment: or a seventeenth-century collision between the two, is the shared experience of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne, accounting more adequately for their air de famille than the putative kinship of metaphysical style or Anglican religion. Such is the...