Shakespeare’s “More Than Words Can Witness”: Essays on Visual and Nonverbal Enactment in the Plays ed. by Sidney Homan (review)

Reviews 283 of Dukore’s book. The play selection is apt; the texts are easy prey, good targets for the discussion, and the nomenclature of hunting precisely describes what Professor Dukore has accomplished. He has caught in the snare of his critical net a group of plays and in a sense vanquished them. That he sometimes uses minor works of these men to make his points is an unkind and probably unfair cavil, better perhaps thought than said. The discussions are full and penetrating; at times, alas, they also resemble pedestrian glossings of the play under consideration and no more. They do not breathe with excitement and wonder, and that is probably this book’s problem. It is too worked over, too thought out, and its energy often wanes and dissipates in the face of perfervid critical activity. To use R. P. Blackmur’s winsomely snobbish phrase, this book, as criticism, is not “the formal discourse of an amateur.” It is the informed, intelligent, often wrongheaded efforts of someone who has no doubt taught, lived with, and thought about these plays for a long time. That the book, finally, does not succeed is due, I think, to the enormous pressure of the ratiocination used as the manuscript took shape. Professor Dukore has smothered his enthusiasms in “ideas”; he has explained his plays to the point of banality; he has wrenched every last gram of “meaning” out of this hunk of dramatic literature, and, in the process, has forgotten the profound importance and necessity of feelings in the theatre. JAMES COAKLEY Northwestern University Shakespeare’s “More Than Words Can Witness”: Essays on Visual and Nonverbal Enactment in the Plays. Edited by Sidney Homan. Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1980. Pp. 238. $19.50. I came to this particular book with considerable interest and enthusiasm, but I left disappointed. Its title and general concept promise much more than it delivers. Written by different people, the twelve essays that comprise the collection do not cohere well nor do they always correspond to the presumed topic of the book. Further, eight of the twelve have already been published or presented as papers at sundry gatherings, some dating back to 1960. Given the work that has been done on this topic of late, one wonders why the editor could not have put together new essays. According to Homan’s extensive “Preface”— a summary or mini­ review of the book—there are five groupings for the essays: Maurice Charney’s essay on Hamlet stands alone; three pieces on language; four on the “look” of plays; two that survey “the visual and nonverbal side of Shakespeare’s canon”; and two on film. One can admire Char­ ney’s “Hamlet without Words,” as I do, while being uncertain as to why it should stand alone in Homan’s organization of the book. Charney 284 Comparative Drama explores the sound effects, costumes, and properties used in a produc­ tion of Hamlet, thus offering a special insight into the play—perhaps a view of how the play might have appeared to the eyes of the original spectators. He notes, for example, how the properties closely “follow the symbolic concerns of the play” (p. 34). Charney’s refreshing per­ spective is a model of what the other essays might have been. Why there should be three essays, all previously published or de­ livered, on language in a book purporting to be about nonverbal elements in the plays is unclear. James Calderwood offers a compelling study of Shakespeare’s use of language in the second tetralogy of the history plays. Those familiar with Calderwood’s books will recognize the argu­ ment, namely that in these plays the dramatist explores and reveals his concept of language, that Richard II, for example, represents the “fall” of language. By the time Shakespeare reaches Henry V the emphasis “is upon means, techniques, devices, uses” (p. 59). Terence Hawkes moves from the plays’ language to focus on the “performed” language, its oral and aural qualities. The relationship of play text to performance he likens to that of “written” ragtime music to improvised jazz, the latter containing “demands of audience and performance, and of per...