Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare's Problem Plays (review)

Written within the context of a rich theater history that spans the twentieth century—from the early work of Alfred Harbage to postmodernist studies of Jean Howard and Douglas Bruster —Ira Clark's Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare's Problem Plays seeks to synthesize a number of strands of critical narrative in order to provide the thematic framework for a much-needed formalist attention to Shakespeare's famed problem plays. Clark resurrects Harbage's influential distinctions between public and private audience sensibilities and weaves into that study the work of later critics like Michael Shapiro, Ann Jennalie Cook, and Andrew Gurr, each of whom either supplement or qualify Harbage's grand paradigm. While this account is useful in rehearsing current thinking regarding the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean stage and the rise of an apparent satirical sensibility in the plays, the strategy detracts from what Clark characterizes as the "ground rhetorical" for this present study: the use of disparate rhetorical registers of high and low styles to juxtapose social and complex gender relations, and the use of classical tropes and deliberate sententiae to achieve complex effects for an attending audience well-versed in the works of George Puttenham and Henry Peacham. Ultimately, the study undermines the subsequent effort to apply this "ground rhetorical" to three Shakespearean plays: Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida.

The central section of Clark's book is composed of three essays that seek to place these plays within the cultural and social narrative through a careful attention to rhetorical strategies: the use of chiasmus, the interpretive force of aphorisms, and the reciprocal reflexivity that allows for manipulation of audience expectation. For Clark, Measure for Measure uses chiasmus in order to juxtapose the contradictory and nonnegotiable values that provide the tension within the play. Measure for Measure frequently anatomizes within chiasmus aspects of judgment and mercy, legality and clemency, in a society in which those values become arbitrary and diffuse. In All's Well, Clark considers the rhetorical use of aphorism as a means of generating plots and counterplots to produce a surprise ending conventional for the genre of problem plays. The most extensive (and, I would suggest, the most fruitful) chapter is that devoted to Troilus and Cressida. Its sustained treatment of rhetorical self-display for Pandarus, Ulysses, and Thersites demonstrates how reflexivity —presentation of the self to others for approval and judgment —is used in distinct ways by each character: Pandarus's effortless manipulation of his social intercourse, Ulysses' Machiavellian exploitation of his ethos to control audience reaction and urge civic engagement, and Thersites' barbed assaults on Ajax and the latter's failure to embody Greek heroism. In Clark's words, this play "blatantly presents egoistic displays of wit and drives for achievement as it anatomizes the rhetorical means of display of the self and of manipulation of others" (119).

In the retrospective conclusion, Clark attempts to offer an apologia for the design and execution of this study, and for its viability for other Renaissance drama and nondramatic genres. Throughout the conclusion, Clark defends this critical approach as a worthy enterprise, and it is his avowed use of Shakespeare's problem plays as test cases that leaves the reader dissatisfied with the work as a whole. One would have preferred that Clark had waited for a more complete synthesis of genre and approach before offering this prolegomenon. As it stands, this text seems a precipitous rough draft for a more extensive, formalist study.