Methods in Drama Criticism

Methods in Drama Criticism Roy Battenhouse Richard Levin’s New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), parts of which have appeared previously in journals, challenges three major approaches in drama criti­ cism: the thematic, the ironic, and the historical. While acknow­ ledging that these have been dominant in recent decades, Pro­ fessor Levin regards them as intrinsically invalid and generative of “most of the misreadings we encounter.” He therefore attacks with what the book’s dustjacket calls “exemplary thoroughness and devastating effect.”Whetherhis analyses are in fact thorough and devastating will be the subject of my comments. That they are being accepted asvalid in some quarters isevident in a recent Harper’s article (October 1979) entitled “Degenerate Criticism: The Dismal State of English Studies,” by Peter Shaw, Levin’s colleague at Stony Brook. But I am unpersuaded by character­ izations which rest on a wholesale denigrating. Granted that any approach can be misused by a clumsy practitioner, does this warrant our tarring with the same brush a competent and informed user? The author replies to this ob­ jection (p. 9) by saying that although skilful use of a bad approach will yield better results (better by what norm?) than an unskilful, he believes it possible to judge quite independently of individual ability the value of the three approaches, since within the definition he has given of each there are common assumptions and consequences inherent in the nature of the approach itself. He replies also to a second objection to his pro­ cedure—that it is entirely negative and unfairly fires at col­ leagues without giving them a target in return by offering his own interpretation. His answer is that his purpose here is not to advocate his own approach or any other, but simply to argue the invalidity of the three approaches he is discussing. There is an evasiveness in these replies and also a contradiction in logic. 230 Roy Battenhouse 231 For is he not advocating his own norms when formulating definitions which in themselves negate the value of those ap­ proaches? The real question (though he never admits this) is the adequacy of his own assumptions to do justice to the read­ ing of a text. In his chapter on “Thematic Readings,” for instance, let us notice how he defines their approach. It begins, he says, “with the assumption that a play cannot be about what it obviously seems to be about—namely particular characters engaged in particular actions—because it must be about something entirely different—a general idea—which is not at all obvious” (p. 21). Here he is evidently intent on driving a wedge between charac­ ters in action and what the actions signify. His own assumption is that any idea of the action’s significance is not in the play at all (p. 17). Rather it is an abstract concept which “replaces” the literal subject with one of a totally different order. It is arbitrarily supplied by the question the thematist asks, since the play itself does not present us with questions at all. The play is simply particular actions. To these the thematist brings his hypothesis which then is inevitably “proved” by detaching from their context selected aspects of data to fit his hypothesis. Using this definition, Professor Levin accuses the whole approach of a “thematic leap” out of the play into a world of concepts de­ termined only by each abstractor’s temperament and interests. Each thematist’s gestalt, he suggests, is like those first investi­ gated by gestalt psychology—“really a form of optical illusion residing in the eye of the beholder rather than in the object beheld” (p. 30). Is he suggesting here a kind of inkblot-theory of play design? Or is he under the sway of the sceptical premises of some of today’s structuralists who consider a play’s text indeterminate? In any case, he is challenging any approach that assumes for old plays (apart from those obviously presented as Morality plays) a “governing idea” which informs the shaping of their concrete particularity. Critics who make such a claim, he suggests, might be described (in...