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Mr. Murry’s Shakespeare. A review of Shakespeare, by John Middleton Murry
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- document
- Additional Information
London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. Pp. 448.
Mr. Murry has written a book about Shakespeare which, for several reasons, is a very good book indeed. It was evidently a book that Mr. Murry wanted to write: one cannot read it without becoming convinced that he has worked on the subject for a long time, and has made himself perfectly familiar with the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It conveys an impression throughout of an easy command of the material; and Mr. Murry appears to have acquainted himself with Shakespeare literature so diligently and soberly that he neither parades his predecessors superfluously nor ignores them when their presence is desirable. Furthermore, his conjectures are always restrained by reason; and while scholars may perhaps be able to question some of his constructions, they cannot be allowed to deny that these constructions are illuminating, and valuable even if mistaken. Mr. Murry does not disguise conjecture as fact. And what one is more surprised to be able to make than any such commendations as the foregoing, is that Mr. Murry does not obtrude any views of his own about life and society, any more than we gladly consent to. The book is about Shakespeare and not about Mr. Murry.
The author’s first advantage is that he has an understanding which is uncommon, of the nature of poetry: more penetrating than that of most scholars and men of letters, and more comprehensive and catholic than that of most poets. For poets, when they meditate about poetry at all, are liable to generalize either from their own accomplishment or from their own designs; and their purposes and interests, if more exact, may also be narrower than those of their readers, so that their pronouncements should usually be considered in relation to their own poems. What the poet has to say about poetry, will often be most valuable when it consists of introspective observation of his own processes. The chief exception, or the nearest to an exception, consists of remarks here and there in the letters of Keats, a poet whom Mr. Murry has studied deeply, and here, certainly with great
I think that the author is right, to begin with (though I cannot prove it) when he says that “The probability is rather that the formative years of a poet of Shakespeare’s peculiar kind would have been not much more but much less strongly marked by idiosyncrasy than those of poets of a different kind” [29]. I do not think that Shakespeare quite fits into either the class of people who mature quickly or the class of those who mature late. Shakespeare arrived in a very short number of years at a maturity which seems
