“Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” by Louis Adrian Montrose (review)

Reviews 279 of “Barker’s aesthetic revolution” (p. 105). Indeed, Playfair’s stylization, his contribution to “the real sense of change,” seems to have been directly indebted to Granville-Barker’s “Savoy experiments” (p. 122), as was Bridges-Adams’s stylized A Midsummer Nighfs Dream of 1932. Styan chronicles these relationships faithfully and points also to the influence of Granville-Barker on Barry Jackson. The puzzle, then, is why, in view of all the evidence he presents us, Styan does not consider the major change to be that wrought by Poel and Granville-Barker. One of the most interesting sections of the book is devoted to G. Wilson Knight, who is somewhat arbitrarily separated from Leavis, Traversi, and the other critics of the thirties. According to Stylan, “he may prove to be the one great critic of the century who pointed the way for post-war directors” (p. 174). The claim is large, but it is true that Knight, whose symbolic interpretations were often more extreme than those of other critics concerned with Shakespeare’s imagery, also wrote about ways of realizing on the stage the ideas suggested by the poetry. Hence it may be that “without the sense of Shakespeare as a dealer in visions, culminating in the kind of ‘interpretation’ associated with the name of G. Wilson Knight, Peter Brook would not have found the sur­ prisingly wide acceptance from academic critics that he has” (p. 232). Certainly, for good or ill, and regardless of academic acceptance, Brook and other directors have often emphasized themes brought to light by this sort of interpretation. I have implied that it may be an exaggeration of Peter Brook’s undeniable merits and significance to present him as the culmination of the whole revolutionary process described here, but it should be added that Styan is fair-minded in pointing out the failings of Brook and of his other heroes. He recognizes, for example, the serious disadvantages of Guthrie’s homosexual Iago and Brook’s rambunctious Lear. Thus he is not the victim of the simplifications which appear from time to time in his book, and which, if excerpted, would misrepresent it. These are, in any case, vastly outweighed by the virtues of an imaginative scheme which only someone with Styan’s knowledge of both literary criticism and the history of the theater could have devised. Not the least of the book’s attractions are its twenty-five illustrations of costumes, theaters, and productions, invaluable accompaniments to such a text. EUGENE M. WATTH Yale University Louis Adrian Montrose. “Curious-Knotted GardenThe Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare's “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, No. 56.) Salzburg, 1977. Pp. iv + 222. In the preface to his examination of Love’s Labour's Lost Professor Montrose observes that he is offering “a comprehensive study . . . dem­ onstrating the coherence of the play’s structural and thematic dimen­ sions” (p. iii). His notes at the least show how comprehensive his effort 280 Comparative Drama to consult the bibliography of his subject has been (although no one can any longer hope to be exhaustive in this respect) and in that survey he finds the warrant for his own undertaking: “The claims of Love’s Labour’s Lost to any serious and subtle intention have seldom been acknowledged” (p. 3). I find this an extraordinary judgment for it seems to me that there is a substantial body of criticism, going back to Granville-Barker, Dover Wilson, and Frances Yates, that treats the play with the greatest respect, as do so many of the writers Professor Montrose cites. What seems to be at issue is what the writer regards as “serious and subtle” and “com­ prehensive.” And as I go through these pages, reflecting on what is said about “Critical Contexts,” “Ethics,” “Language and Speech,” “Politics,” “Poetic and Erotic,” and some other categories, I believe I see what the writer means—that up till now we have not been in possession of the vocabulary that alone can do justice to works of art. We have not had control of the right terms that enable us to express a just estimate of the “dynamics” of composition...