Written as a series of lectures to sixth formers seeking to go to Oxbridge, this is old school literary criticism. It starts by insisting that literary creations should be compared to a canon of classics that have stood the test of time which immediately creates a prejudice against modern literature. It goes on to consider poetry and why poets write in verse (“piece of writing in which the syllables are so arranged as to produce a recurring rhythm.”; Ch 2) and how “the perfect union of sound and sense” (Ch 3) is achieved using imagery.
Needless to say, I was spitting feathers through most of this book. Repeatedly ageist, he managed at least once to be unthinkingly racist as well. Furthermore, he regularly made statements which I thought false. Nevertheless, I persisted, because he obviously knew the technical aspects of eg poetry and playwriting and he made a number of good points.
For example, he asks why we enjoy watching tragic drama, which often contains "that which would cause us unmixed pain in real life" (Ch 4), and suggests that the only way a dramatist can get away with this is by avoiding realism. But when he goes on to propose that this is why all great tragedy is written in verse, my eyebrows started to life. He also claims that tragic heroes must “tower above common humanity” so Hedda Gabler is too petty and limited to "move us to the depths of our being" (Ch 4). At this point I parted company with Schreiber.
He also suggests that the key difference between comedy and tragedy is that while tragedy makes us feel, comedy engages the head rather than the heart. Because it we had any empathy at all we wouldn't laugh at Malvolio: “the painful humiliation of a rebuffed social climber". (Ch 5) The only way in which we can laugh at people we also pity (he gives the example of Bottom) is if the setting is “the real world with the evil left out.” (Ch 5) That made me think! For example, Steinbeck's Cannery Row is funny and tender but a friend recently criticised it because, as he said, all the whores have hearts of gold and Mack isn't a nasty piece of work which is unrealistic. So I think Schreiber might have a point here. I'm not so sure when he goes on to say that this makes The Merchant of Venice a failure as a comedy because Shakespeare was seduced into making Shylock a character with depth and suffering rather than a sawdust villain. But on the other hand this justifies Peter Saccio (in a lecture in The Great Courses: 'William Shakespeare Comedies, Histories and Tragedies': https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/william-shakespeare-comedies-histories-and-tragedies) in his assertion that Merchant is fundamentally a fairy tale, ie not a real world or else a "real world with the evil left out" in Schreiber's phrase.
Schreiber goes on to consider the difference between classical and romantic in chapter 6, suggesting that the key difference is that classic literature seeks perfection within limits while the romantic seeks to transcend boundaries by rejecting rules.
Finally he considers the novel. He defines the difference between the traditional novel and the modern novel as the former's fundamental concern to tell a story. But he also distinguishes between good and bad in novels as whether, in the end, "it enriches us" or leads to “nothing but debilitation”: “The ultimate test of the quality of a novel lies, not in its ‘readability’, essential though this is, nor in a well-constructed plot, nor in its literary style, but simply and solely in the degree of truth which it embodies ... in the characters themselves, then in the picture of the world in which they are placed, and, finally, in the novelist’s sense of values” (Ch 7) I started spitting again. This seems to suggest that a trashy thriller in which the goodies triumph is a better novel that a work of art which leaves the reader questioning. I wasn't surprised that all his 'good' novels are from long ago. He particularly adores Jane Austen.
He finishes with notes on Aristotle's Poetics.
I'm glad I read it. It was easy to read and had some very interesting points, even those that I disputed.
August 2025; 196 pages
First published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1965
My edition was issued in 1969
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