Seven New Books on Shakespeare

Seven New Books on Shakespeare Somebody once said that enough books have been written on Shakespeare to repave the streets of London. Year after year, enough Dew books are appearing to keep up with London's sprawling suburbs. Of the seven books on my table, I would wish this fate to one or two; the rest I wish better; some indeed will occupy a treasured place in my library; and the last I should like to make required reading by all those who persist in believing in the Earl of Oxford. If Shakespeare's Holofernes had written his own Love's Labour's Lost, it might have vied in pedantry with Georg Heuser's rejection of the view that Shakespeare organized his plays in five acts, in Die aktlose Dramaturgie William Shakespeare: Eine Untersuchllng uher das Problem der Akteinteilung und angeblichen Aktstruktur der Shakespeareschen Dramen (Inauguraldissertation ; Marburg, privately printed, 1956, pp. x, 430). The contentions that there were two fundamental traditions affecting structure in Elizabethan drama, one classical and the other popular, and that the latter was stronger, may be reasonable; but to argue that Shakespeare ignored a five~act structure throughout his career, constructing all of his plays in a series of scenes rather than acts, is not. Heuser's disagreement with T. W. Baldwin's well-known Shakspere's Five-Act Structure, moreover, provokes him to a lengthy polemical and humourless attack. Baldwin may not have cODvinced all of us tbat Love's Labour's Lost and Troilus and Cressida have a five-act structure (and I for one fail to see any such structure in Hamlet or Antony and Cleopatra). Yet Shakespeare's main models for comedy were Plautus and Lyly, and to assert that in following them he ignored their five-act structure consistently is such an improbable assumption as to require better proof and evidence than are offered here. Towards the second book, Miss A. F. Potts's Shakespeare and The Faerie Queene (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press [Toronto: Thomas Allen Limited], 1958, pp. xiv, 269, $4.75), I should like to be more generous, but I find this difficult. The book begins with the sensible assumption that a comparison of the actions of Shakespeare's characters with those of Spenser in The Faerie Queene may cross-illuminate the works of both authors, so long as due attention is given to differences in form. It then develops the interesting thesis that until 1599 Shakespeare's plays reveal little or no awareness of The Faerie Queene, but that from All's Well on Spenser's narrative and dramatic devices, employed in the setting forth of ethical actions, are so frequently paralleled or echoed as to make it highly probable that Shakespeare came under Spenser's dominating influence. But as previous writers on Spenser and Shakespeare have noticed, close parallels between the two authors are remarkable for their scarcity. When thinking of Measure for Measure, it is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare was not familiar with 98 F. D. HOENIGER Spenser's Book of Justice, and Perdita surely owes something to Pastorella. That Shakespeare drew on the story of Phedon in the second book of The Faerie Queene while writing Much Ado seems almost certain. But a few established echoes apart, Shakespeare's indebtedness to Spenser is very hard to prove, however strongly one may be inclined to expect such an influence. Miss Potts's task was therefore fraught with difficulties from the outset, and she would have been wise to confine her treatment to a cautious comparison between the ethical atmosphere or assumptions that lie behind the actions of some of Spenser's and Shakespeare's characters, emphasizing those instances where not only Jonson but also Lyly and Sidney (the latter receives only ODe brief mention) provide a suitable contrast or at least illustrate a difference. However, in this book the complex traditions of romance are almost entirely ignored, and instead a whole series of parallels between Shakespeare's middle and late plays and The Fairie Queene are elaborated, a few successfully, most of them unconvincingly. The book is an example of a tendency to squeeze a11 the juice out of the lemons of evidence...