Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times. Perspectives and Commentaries by Harry Levin (review)

356 Comparative Drama Harry Levin. Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times. Perspectives and Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. 334. $15.00. Harry Levin’s new book is a collection of the miscellaneous essays and lectures on Shakespeare that he has produced in the last thirty years. Although the book may at first seem to be merely a collection of unre­ lated writings, a serious attempt has been made to fashion them into a more connected form. In emphasizing the importance of the subject for him, Levin suggests in an introductory note that his previous book-length publications have been “divagations” while these essays’ “object of common concern has been the central thread in my teaching for thirtyfive years.” To explain these concerns Levin had added the only pre­ viously unpublished essay in the book, a fascinating induction about his own life and his career at Harvard. The rest of the book includes four essays (“Perspectives”) on broad subjects related to Shakespeare, eight essays (“Commentaries”) on specific plays and topics, and finally four more essays (“More Perspectives”) on drama generally, but par­ ticularly on Elizabethan drama. Of these sixteen essays, eleven were originally lectures or papers (four papers at MLA and seven lectures at various universities or association meetings). Of the other five essays, one is a review-article, one an introduction to an edition, two are con­ tributions to symposia, and one is what Levin calls “an expanded stagedirection ” (p. 6). Almost all seem to be the responses of a busy and influential Shakespearean scholar to the demands of various occasions, not the result of extended specific research on sharply defined topics. In his autobiographical induction, Levin describes his life-long rela­ tionship with Shakespeare: theater-going as a boy, training at Harvard under Kittredge, friendship with his fellow Minnesotan E. E. Stoll, and years of teaching the Shakespeare course at Harvard. Recording his personal experience allows Levin to analyze the state of Shakespeare studies in this country during this period. Levin sees the faults of Kit­ tredge as being his pedantic scholarly method resulting from his lack of interest in the theater and in the history of ideas and from a failure of imagination in approaching the text; Kittredge failed to recognize the responsibility of a Harvard professor to interpret “our greatest author” (p. 19) to the generation of graduate students who were to become the nation’s teachers and scholars. It is clear that in his career Levin has attempted to do what he thinks Kittredge did not, to apply the best of twentieth-century critical methods to the understanding of Shakespeare. At one point Levin describes Shakespeare criticism as “a sort of lay religion, a humanistic source of precepts and parables, whose rites we celebrate in a time-honored liturgy” (p. 6). In such a religion, the professors are the priests and have the responsibility of communicating the best of the world of scholarship to the educated population. The dangers of thinking of your vocation in such elevated terms are not entirely avoided. In Levin’s “anecdotal ramblings” (p. 25) he seems at times to represent himself as the ideal student, teacher, and interpreter of Shakespeare and to imply that everything that is important goes on at Harvard. No doubt the problem is partly one of finding a suitable tone, Reviews 357 but a larger issue is also involved. In discussing a drop in enrollment by half in his Shakespeare course, Levin generalizes that “Shakespeare’s position has been eroded. . . . Interest in his work continues to be substantial, but not quite so central as it has been. He stands farther from the core of the curriculum, if indeed it still has one, and by implication farther from the center of our culture, wherever that may be” (pp. 21-22). Levin may be right, but it may also be that his regret about the passing of the core curriculum and a common culture has made him overlook what I suspect is the fact, that Shakespeare has managed the transition to our present culture very well indeed. Incident­ ally, in his essay on “The Primacy of Shakespeare” (1973), Levin sounds more optimistic. There he documents...