The Playwright as Magician. Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater by Alvin B. Kernan (review)

Reviews 191 relevant documents in the British Library, the Public Record Office, and the Harvard Theatre Collection. She makes judicious use of the con­ temporary accounts, of prefaces to the printed plays, and of prologues and epilogues. Where there are gaps, she makes sensible guesses. She acknowledges debts to recent scholarship, and uses it all with skill and discretion. The book is directed at the student of British drama. For the reader who is concerned as much with the growing conditions for literature as with its flowering, who respects an attempt to approach the complex and obscure truth about a bit of history, and who asks not only for judgments but for the arguments by which judgments are reached, this scholarly work will prove absorbing and useful. FREDERICK J. ROGERS Western Michigan University Alvin B. Keman. The Playwright as Magician. Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Pp. vii + 164. $10.95. But Shakespear’s Magick could not copy’d be, Within that Circle none durst walk hut he. Kernan, in a different way from Dryden, sees Shakespeare as a magician-playwright like Prospero: “Only at the end of his career, in The Tempest, did he create an almost ideal theater on a magical island where the playwright’s powers were seemingly limitless.” “Shakespeare,” he writes, “is following Marlowe in using the magician to prefigure the playwright, but Marlowe makes of the theater a form of black magic, instrumented by devils over whom the playwright has limited control. . . . It is a measure of Shakespeare’s greater confidence in the theater that his playwright-magician, like that earlier magical producer Oberon, commands ‘spirits of another sort’ and uses his power to create majestic visions and to effect moral reformation within the magic circle he draws where all ‘stand charmed’. Yet the Marlovian irony about the theater is still operative in The Tempest, where Prospero . . . calls his great masque only ‘some vanity of mine art’, and in the end, like Faustus, repents, drowns his book, and buries his staff in order to go, not to hell, but back to Milan.” Keman has written a thoughtful book about an important aspect of Shakespeare, “to follow the course of his thinking about his status as a poet in the theater.” Since the double-barreled titles of the first six chapters seem to me unnecessary, I shall mention the second title of each to indicate what the chapters are about: “Images of the Poet in the Renaissance”; “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Failure of Patronage”; “Actors and Audiences in The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, l Henry IV”; “Politics and Theater in Hamlet”; “The Morality Play in King Leaf”; and “The Public Play­ 192 Comparative Drama house and the Ideal Theater of The Tempest.” It is surprising that the book makes no mention of the Duke in Measure for Measure or of Rosalind as she plays Ganymede and stages the Masque of Hymen. They are actors rather than poets, but so are Falstaff and Hal, who hardly belong in this galley. Shakespeare, an actor-playwright, was not free to imagine himself a heroic poet like Petrarch or a courtly poet like Sidney. He had to make himself “a motley to the view,” to live by “public means which public manners breeds.” With sympathy and imagination, Kernan explores in the Sonnets “a tension between the style of poetry required by patronage and the real feelings and complexities which the poem discovers,” a movement “from a lyric to a dramatic conception of life.” He concludes that “the Sonnets are finally, whatever their nostalgia for old courtly ways, an apology for the necessity of working in the public theater.” Despite grave doubts, “The Sonnets justify the theater and the partici­ pation in it of professional writers with a high view of the importance of their art like Shakespeare, and they are the necessary first step toward the construction of a new image of the poet.” Perhaps the author goes too far when he imagines that “The fair young man as he first appears is the Muse of courtly...