SHORT NOTES (3) from CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE

Ch # 18: Shakespeare criticism in the twentieth century

In 1961 a polish critic, Jan Kott, published a book which, when translated into English under the
title Shakespeare “our contemporary (1964), seemed to herald a brave new world of
Shakespearian study. There would have been little need to address theoretical or ideological
groupings amongst critic or with some exceptions, to take about ‘schools’ with the rise of literary
theory and cultural studies, the very enterprise was ‘problematized’ requiring a defensive tone,
an awareness of warring factions within Shakespeare studies and an uneasy acknowledgement
that the texts of Shakespeare might not survive in importance into the twenty-first century.
Shakespeare has in the twentieth century been performed and studied in many countries and
translated into many languages.

A.C Bradley: moral philosophy and the dramatic poem

The root of twentieth-century criticism lay in the nineteenth, S.T.Coleridge and A.W.Schlegel
stressed the philosophical, metaphysical and poetic qualities of Shakespeare, and the later critic
who developed these aspects was A.C Bradley. His Shakespearian Tragedy has long been
acknowledged as the first serious and sustained work of academic literary criticism that matters.
But being a philosopher and the brother of metaphysician F.H.Bradley, he probed to find some
explanation for the mystery, something that links the surface factuality and realism of
Shakespeare’s plays.

William Empson and radical ambivalence

A quite different antithetical approach to Shakespeare developed alongside ‘the line of Coleridge
and Bradley’. William Hazlitt deserves credit as the Romantic precursor of resistant and radical
readings of Shakespeare. Hazlitt’s natural successor in the twentieth-century is William Empson,
who maintained a congenitally skeptical point of view encapsulated in the word ambiguity. His
book, “seven types of Ambiguity(1930), is one which now matters less for its local insights and
perceptions than for its overall argument that the richness of Shakespeare’s poetry and drama
lies in multi-dimensionality and refusal to yield up single meaning.

L.C. Knights and historicism

While L.C. Knights also practiced the kind of close stylistic analysis identified with new
criticism, what emerges in retrospect as more significant in his work is the study of texts in their
historical context with a decidedly Marxist and materialistic orientation. Drama and society in
the Age of Jonson (1937) can in many if not most ways be seen as the precursors of new
historicism.
Psychoanalytical criticism

Literary criticism has always been open to suggestion and ideas from other disciplines such as
history, and another fruitful interaction has been with the field of psychoanalysis. Freud’s central
distinction, which has been immensely influential over twentieth-century thought, is between the
conscious and controlling mind (the ego) and normally represent unconscious (id) driven by
desires, fears and fantasies.

Materialist Shakespeare

The general tendency has been to adopt a ‘materialist’ approach to literature in general. This
means that imaginative works are thought to issue not from universals or individual genius but
from material circumstances and from the economic, political, and gender attitudes that pervaded
society when the work was written or when it is red and performed.

Feminism and gender studies

A critical movement that is steadily and radically changing the field of Shakespeare studies in
feminism, and it is one where Grady’s claim of a paradigm shift is apt. Simon de Beauvoir and
most systematically developed by women in the 1970s. “the nature of women’s while the
collaborative the woman’s part(1980) which generally speaking, reinterpret Shakespeare’s plays
either by highlighting the role of women or reading resistantly, ‘against the grain’ to demonstrate
the pervasiveness of patriarchal ideas.

Intertextuality and reception

There used to be a branch of Shakespeare scholarship called ‘source and influences’. As with
other areas, there are now underpinned by more theoretical and critical rigour, and accordingly
they tend to be renamed ‘intertextuality’, ‘reception theory’, and reader response. Reception
theory, the analysis of recorded readers responses.
 SHORT NOTES ON CHAPTER # 13

Shakespeare in the Twentieth –Century Theatre

This chapter does not offer a chronological account of Shakespeare performances in twentieth
century. Instead, it explores some o the problems and solutions, drawing heavily on examples
from England.

1. The size of Theatre.

2. The shape of the stage
3. The experience of the director
4. The Choice of the play
5. The decisions about set
6. Music
7. Costumes
8. The cutting of the text
9. The work of the actors themselves
10. The range of emotional responses encouraged from the audience.

Alongwith these elements Peter Holand has mentioned the following steps.

Stage History

Peter Brook, the most radical and inventive English director of Shakespeare has
directed Titus Andronicus in 1955 at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre. The designed a simple
set of three massive but mobile pillars that suggested Rome and created powerful stage spaces
without making the production’s world too overly realistic. There was no space in such
production for audience laughter modern-dress productions were invented by Barry Jackson
while he ran Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Shakespeare’s Black Characters

Shakespeare’s black characters (Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Moroco and Othello)

were not only beginning to be cast more consistently with black actors but race became a newly
important problem.

Cross-Gendering

There is a long history of women playing Hamlet, but Fiona Shaw played Richard
II at the Royal National Theatre in 1995. Cross-gender casting makes gender into a performance
process, rethinking for twentieth-century audiences the ways in which gender has been explored
in early modern theatre when all women were played by boys.

Opposition Between Body and Voice

It is usually phrased as an assumption that the voice beautiful is to be preferred to

the body heroic.

Set Design

Sets had become capable of independent meaning, a meaning that could control
the audience’s response and the actor’s rehearsals. In Moscow in 1912 Craig designed ‘Hamlet’
for Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art theatre, using for the first time on stage monochrome flats as
mobile screens to metamorphic stage spaces.

The Nature of the Text

Recent textual scholarship had made scholars realize that the text is provisional
and unstable but the traditions of the theatre have always been prepared to rework the plays,
Warner’s ‘Titus Andronicus was remarkable for its refusal to cut. Rearrangement of the text are
equally common with lines transferred between characters, not only because of directorial
rethinking of the nature of Character but also as a result of the smaller cast sizes of late
twentieth-century theatre, for example “ Timon of Athens” in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in
1965 has a cast of forty six, whereas the 1999 production has only twenty.
 CH # 6: THE GENRES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

Shakespeare’s plays are typically divided into three categories:

1. Comedy,

2. Tragedy,

3. History

Shakespeare’s tragedy and history plays tend to be his longest. His comedies are also referred to
as romances, or romantic comedies. And Hamlet is not merely his most famous work; it is also
his longest.

Publication:

The first collection of Shakespeare’s work is known today as the “First Folio”. It was published
in 1623, under the direction of John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors in the King’s Men.
It contains 36 plays, of which half had never been printed before.

Collaborations:

 Just as there is debate over the correct chronology and accurate publication of
Shakespeare’s plays, there is also debate over authorship of certain works.

 We know for certain that William Shakespeare is the sole author of most of the plays.
But Pericles, Prince of Tyre? Henry VIII? Timon of Athens? Scholars believe
Shakespeare collaborated on a number of his plays, though the collaborations were often
no more than light revisions.

Shakespeare’s Comedy:

Shakespeare's comedy plays have stood the test of time. Works such as"The Merchant
of Venice." "As You Like It" and "Much Ado about Nothing" are among the Bard's most popular
and most often performed plays.

Features of a Shakespearean Comedy:

 Comedy through language: Shakespeare's comedies are peppered with clever wordplay,

metaphors, and insults.

 Love: The theme of love is prevalent in every Shakespeare comedy. Often, we are

presented with sets of lovers who, through the course of the play, overcome the obstacles
in their relationship and unite. Of course, that measure isn't always foolproof; love is the
central theme of "Romeo and Juliet" but few people would regard that play as a comedy.
  Complex plots: The plots of Shakespeare comedies have more twists and turns than his
tragedies and histories. 

 Mistaken identities: The plot of a Shakespearean comedy is often driven by mistaken

identity.

Shakespearean Tragedy:

A Shakespearean tragedy is a play penned by Shakespeare himself, or a play written in the style
of Shakespeare by a different author. Shakespearean tragedy has got its own specific features,
which distinguish it from other kinds of tragedies. It must be kept in mind that Shakespeare is
mostly indebted to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in his works. The elements of a Shakespearean
tragedy are discussed below.

How Is a Shakespearean Tragedy Different From a Regular Tragedy?

A Shakespearean tragedy is a specific type of tragedy (a written work with a sad ending
where the hero either dies or ends up mentally, emotionally, or spiritually devastated beyond
recovery) that also includes all of the additional elements discussed in this article.

Tragic Structure:

A tragic story (Shakespearean) can be divided into four parts and they are as follows:

 Exposition:

 Rising Action:

 Falling Action:

 Resolution:

Elements of Shakespearean Tragedy:

 1. The Tragic Hero

 2. Good vs. Evil

 3. Hamartia

 4. Tragic Waste

 5. Conflict

 6. Catharsis

 7. Supernatural Elements
  8. Absence of Poetic Justice

 9. Comic Relief

Shakespearean History Plays:

Many of Shakespeare’s plays have historical elements, but only certain plays are categorized as
true Shakespeare histories. Works like "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," for example, are historical in
setting but are more correctly classified as Shakespearean tragedies. The same is true for the
Roman plays ("Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus"), which all
recall historical sources but are not technically history plays.

Sources of Shakespeare's History Plays

Shakespeare pulled inspiration for his plays from a number of sources, but most of the English
history plays are based on Raphael Holinshed's "Chronicles." Shakespeare was known
for borrowing heavily from earlier writers, and he was not alone in this. Holinshed's works,
published in 1577 and 1587, were key references for Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
including Christopher Marlowe.