Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow ed. by Richard C. Tobias, Paul G. Zolbrod (review)

Reviews 179 his notes. While it should be noted that Gardner’s study contains num­ erous stylistic and typographical errors, I shall cite only major scholarly blunders: p. 143 (Margery Morgan’s article), read “Vol. 39” for “Vol. 34”; p. 143 (Zumwalt’s article), read “Vol. 26” for “Vol. 25”; p. 144, n. 1 (Dunn’s article), read “1969” for “1970”; p. 146, n. 25 (Welsford), read “1927” for “2927”; p. 146, n. 27 (Reau), read “1955” for “1957”; p. 148, n. 7 (Pearl reference), read “Lines 577-88” for “Lines 507-88,” and on p. 44, 1. 585 of Pearl quotation, insert “Jjer” before “werne”; and p. 150, n. 1 (Cawley note on Iak Garcio), read "MLN, 68 (1953)” for “Speculum 28 (1953).” ROBERT J. BLANCH Northeastern University Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow. Eds. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod. Athens, Ohio: Ohio Uni­ versity Press, 1974. Pp. xiv + 235. $10.00. An important dynamic behind this collection of essays is the per­ sonality of Charles Crow to whom they are dedicated. As Richard C. Tobias’s Preface makes clear, Charles Crow is a brilliant and influential teacher as well as an important critic. All the essays are by Crow’s students except for those by Kenneth Muir and L. C. Knights; Crow’s presence in their critical approaches and attitudes towards Shakespeare is demonstrated throughout most of the essays. His warmly appreciative humanism is most apparent in Andrew Solomon’s “A Reading of The Tempest” which fittingly ends and caps the book; this essay is positive and even loving in its analysis of Prospero as a character and the play as a whole. Solomon does skirt dangerously close to sentimentality at times: “The only tears of sadness at the conclusion of the play come when we realize that these two [Ariel and Prospero] must now part forever” (p. 226). Most audiences feel relief when Ariel escapes from Prospero who is generally seen as considerably less lovable than Solomon suggests. Another critical approach of Crow’s is his exhaustively rigorous textual approach. Alex Newell’s “Early Modern English Idiom in a Prose Passage from King Lear” is a most brilliant linguistic analysis of Shakespearian English. By examining lexical, semantic, and syntactic differences in one short scene, he proves how badly we all misread Shakespeare, not because of big differences between the modern idiom and Shakespeare’s, “but by the cumulative effect of a large number of small ones” (p. 71). Crow’s interest in genre and its importance in considering various interpretations of a play is present in D. T. Childress’ “Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?” She takes up every definition of the term “romance” and proves how the last plays transcend each. My only complaint about this is that Shakespeare’s tragedies too transcend classical definitions of tragedy—in some ways, her essay is redundant and obvious. 180 Comparative Drama Probably the best thing this book does is present an index of most possible views of The Tempest. Kenneth Muir’s incisive and lucid essay stresses the polytheism of the last plays as indicative of Shakespeare’s metaphysics, concluding that “the virtuous actions of human beings are the best validation of the providential government of the world” (p. 43). Muir’s essay is counterpointed by Mike Frank’s “Shakespeare’s Exis­ tential Comedy,” a rather reductionist essay which finds Shakespeare in a godless world. Frank says that nature and the universe— everything “except human action and human will—has ceased playing a providential role in the later play” (p. 143). Frank also sees Prospero’s character as basically static and unchanging throughout the play; all the other authors in this book see him as changing. Theresa Coletti in “Music and the Tempest” shows how music as spirit leads and teaches Prospero. At the same time, she says, his magic is music and must be returned to the world of art and spirit when Prospero decides to become human rather than a demigod. Elton D. Higgs in “Post-Creation Freedom in The Tempest” emphasizes this choice of Prospero’s as emblematic of Shake­ speare’s belief in free will. L. C...