"The Art of Reading Poetry" by Harold Bloom

 In this thin book, Bloom defines poetry as "figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.” (Ch 1) and suggests that one needs to master "allusiveness" to appreciate great poetry. When considering how to judge whether one poem is better than another, he cautions against "extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies" (Ch 7) and rely principally on what he calls "inevitability" which seems to mean using a word or a phrase that seems to the reader to be unavoidable and yet not predictable, much like Aristotle in his Poetics asserts that a plot twist (he calls it a 'reversal') should come as a surprise and yet be causally connected to the previous events in such as way that, in retrospect, the reader (or viewer of a drama) should see it as an inevitable consequence of what came earlier. Finally, Bloom suggests that a great poem expands our consciousness through what he calls "strangeness".

It is an interesting book although Bloom uses some difficult words which I had to look up (including the word 'etonym' which I can't find in my dictionary; is it a misprint for 'metonym'?)

The third of the book is a (long) list of recommended poems.

April 2026; 82 pages

• The book is an excerpt from The Best Poems of the English Language by Bloom, published in 2004 by Harper Collins.
• My copy was published as a paperback in 2005

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"An Introduction to Literary Criticism" by S M Schreiber

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

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare in Company" by Bart Van Es

What made Shakespeare different from and better than the pack of other playwrights of his age?

This book suggests that the key moment came in 1594 when, after some promising plays, he became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He was almost unique in being, at the same time, an actor, a playwright and a sharer in the profits of what was a stable company, soon to become one of only two official acting companies in London. At this point he began to write plays which focused on the relationships between different characters, using the personalities of the other members of his company as models. From this point on he eschewed collaboration (the standard practice among other playwrights) until 1608 when the theatres were closed due to plague. By the time they reopened, Shakespeare had left off acting and moved back to Stratford and his later work is more influenced by other playwrights, especially those with whom he began to collaborate, than his fellow actors. 

It's a compelling argument, no where more convincing than when Van Es considers the company member who provided the comedy lead. Until 1599 this was Will Kemp, a clown, famous for his physical ability and his jigs. Shakespeare wrote the parts of Bottom in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and possibly Falstaff in Henry IV (parts 1 and 2) and The Merry Wives of Windsor. After 1599 the comic character changes completely. Robert Armin, replacing Kemp, was a 'fool' in the old jester tradition. His portrayal of Touchstone in As You Like It signalled a change to a much more reflective humour which, via Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Lavatch in All's Well That End's Well, culminated in the Fool in King Lear.

The book also helped me understand why Shakespeare should have been so willing to collaborate in his later plays - Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio - with John Fletcher. Shakespeare was interested by Fletcher's development of dramatic art, perhaps especially because Fletcher was experienced in writing for indoor spaces (and the Blackfriars Theatre was now in use). Fletcher's 'The Shepherdess' seems to have been a source for both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. “Ultimately, what the connection with Fletcher amounts to is the embrace of conscious literary artifice.” (Ch 13)

It's also very interesting on Senecan revenge tragedy. 

Selected quotes:

• “Shakespeare's early drama is often spectacularly imitative and as a result his personal voice is much less distinct.” (Ch 1)
• “The phenomenon of the attached poetic playwright (writing for only one company) was initiated by Shakespeare.” (Ch 4)
• “Very likely the role of Starveling was taken by John Sincler, a hired man of the Chamberlain’s company, who was famously emaciated.” (Ch 4)
• “The boys’ theatre had something of a modern arthouse culture” (Ch 10)

An intriguing theory backed up by a convincing argument in a very readable book.

June 2025; 311 pages

Published by the Oxford University Press in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers" by Darren Freebury-Jones

 An attempt to portray Shakespeare as a dramatist developing his craft by learning from, collaborating with, and sometimes borrowing from other dramatists of his time.

The title refers to the 'Upstart Crow' gibe by Robert Greene in which someone called 'Shake-scene' is described as "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers". 

There sometimes seems to be a belief that Shakespeare was a genius so unique that he, unlike every other great writer, never had to learn from others. This does a disservice to other great playwrights of the time who have been so overshadowed that they stand in danger of being forgotten. Maybe, it is conceded, Christopher Marlowe wrote some interesting stuff as Shakespeare was just getting going perhaps Ben Jonson penned some amusing plays. But Shakespeare ...

There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a box office draw and he is one of the very few writers of the time who escaped an early death in poverty. But he was not the only writer of best-sellers. The crowds flocked to see not only Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus but also Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This book even suggests that Shakespeare wrote The Contention between York and Lancaster’ and ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ (now known as Henry VI parts 2 and 3) in response to the smash hit 'Harey the vi' and that later. when his company got its hands on the rights for that play, he revised it, adding a few scenes, and presented it as the first part of his Henry VI trilogy.

This book uses textual similarities to establish whether and to what extent Shakespeare was influenced by earlier writers. It suggests that his bombastic characters such as Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost and Falstaff in Henry IV (1 and 2) and Merry Wives were inspired by the style in which John Lyly wrote his best-selling prose romances 'Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit' (1578) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580). There are echoes of Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta' and 'Edward II' in Shakespeare's Shylock and Richard II. George Peele worked with Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus and John Fletcher on Henry VIII (All if True) and The Two Noble Gentlemen. 

But the biggest influence may be that of Thomas Kyd. Hamlet contains a number of echoes of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, including a ghost, a character called Horatio, and a play within a play. Kyd might also have been the author of King Leir, the original for Shakespeare's Lear, and for an ur-Hamlet which has now been lost. 

The arguments that Freebury-Jones use make extensive use of similar words and phrases that occur in different plays, the suggestion being that Shakespeare the actor remembered these when writing. I didn't find this evidence especially convincing. More interesting was the percentages of things such as 'feminine' endings (iambic pentameter lines that have an extra, eleventh, syllable added, as in "To be or not to be, that is the question"): Shakespeare's used a far higher percentage of such lines than most dramatists of the time, especially Marlowe. Other stylistic differences included the percentage of lines that rhyme and the amount of 'end-stopping' (rather than enjambment). 

I would have liked to learn more about these but this information wasn't presented in a consistent way which made it hard for a general reader like myself to decide whether the case had been made for influence, or collaboration, or sole authorship. 

It was a fascinating introduction to a group of playwrights whose work deserves better recognition. I have seen and enjoyed both The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Changeling but there are lots of other plays that need performing.

April 2025; 205 pages

Published by Manchester University Press in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power" by Stephen Greenblatt

In this wonderful book, Greenblatt dissects some of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes (including Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus) and uses the depiction of the tyrants to draw lessons about the nature of tyranny, power politics and fraudulent populism. This book works both as literary criticism and a forensic examination of how people grab power and what this does to them and those around them.

Brilliant and acute.

Selected quotes:

• “Even those at the centre of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.” (Ch 1)
• “Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth by great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable.” (Ch 3)
• “He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt.” (Ch 4)
• "Richard’s deformity - or, rather, his society's reaction to his deformity - is the root condition of his psychopathology ... a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop a certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.” (Ch 4)
• “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Ch 7)
• “Societies, like individuals, generally protect themselves from sociopaths. We would not have been able to survive as a species had we not developed the skill to identify and deal with noxious threats from within as well as without. Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them. That is why tyranny is not the norm of social organization.” (Ch 10)
• “The elite perceive the poor, and the urban poor in particular, as a mere drain upon the economy, a swarm of idle mouths demanding to be fed. After all, most of the land and what it produces, along with the houses, the factories, and almost everything else, belongs to the patricians. To them, looking down from the top of this mountain of possessions, the poor, who own virtually nothing, seem like parasites.” (Ch 10)
• “It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. ... Then when the wealthy are proved wrong - when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system - they long for the disorder they promised to quell.” (Ch 10)

October 2022; 189 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide" by John Sutherland.

 I bought this expecting to learn how to improve my critical faculties and therefore make the reviews in this blog sharper, better informed, more useful, and perhaps even more entertaining. I didn't. This book is mistitled. It should be called "How to Choose which Novel you are Going to Read." He starts by noting the overwhelming avalanche of novels available to the modern reader. Then he suggests how to cut that number down by considering a wide variety of things such as the author's reputation, the bestseller lists, reviews, the blurb, the title and page 69 (among other things) and more or less concludes that none of these methods is foolproof. So you don't even get helpful advice towards what the title should have been.

Otherwise he is frequently informative, mostly entertaining and sometimes amusing.

Selected quotes:

• "Selecting one's reading matter is less important nowadays than deselecting it." (Ch 1)
• "It is not that life is too short to read carefully: the task is too great to be done attentively." (Ch 1)
• "Reading novels is not a spectator sport but a participatory activity." (Ch 1)
• "One reads, as one dreams, defecates and masturbates - alone." (Ch 3)
• "If, when you're buying a book, you feel a tender hand on your genitals, the other hand is probably feeling your wallet." (Ch 5)
• "Unlike baked beans, loaves of bread, or Fuji apples, books, once consumed, do not disappear. Despite political legend, they are extremely hard to burn." (Ch 6) 

October 2022; 246 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare: Richard II" by A R Humphreys

This slender monograph of literary criticism was published in 1967. It offers a commentary of Shakespeare's Richard II. Whilst there is interest in its enumeration of Shakespeare's sources, and in its description in the political atmosphere of the time (there was a contemporary debate between the concept of the Divine Right of Kings and that of Justice), its greatest failing is that there is no mention of the undoubted fact that Shakespeare wrote this play to be acted by actors upon a stage. It is as if the work is one of poetry (and Humphreys is excellent in describing how the style of the poetry varies both according to character and according to what is happening) and was never staged.

Selected quotes:

• “In structure and theme, as well as in certain phrases, there is considerable resemblance to Marlowe’s Edward II.” (p15)
• “It opposes the old ceremonies of courtly form (often a mask for misrule) to the strong and realistic exercise of power, as it opposes the histrionic fantasies of Richard to the practical cogency of Bolingbroke.” (p17)
• “The striking impact of Richard’s exchanges with Aumerle, Bagot, Greene, and Bushy in Act 1, scene iv, results from the sudden dropping of courtly pose in favour of a venomous realism.” (p18)

October 2022; 60 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Road to Middlemarch" by Rebecca Mead

 Subtitled "My Life with George Eliot" this book is part personal memoir, part literary biography, and part literary analysis of Middlemarch and George Eliot's other works. It is structured so that the chapter headings correspond to the names of the Books in Middlemarch.

I have read Middlemarch and found it heavy going but this book has inspired me to read it again.

It's very readable and shows considerable insight into the book. It does the usual thing of trying to equate characters with people (was the then Rector of Lincoln College Oxford whom  the model for Casaubon whom Eliot knew?: he had married late and unhappily to a much younger wife, his most ambitious book was never completed and he wrote a book about Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon) and fictional places with real places (was Middlemarch based on Coventry where Eliot lived for a while?: it had new hospitals and a new railway station at the right time).

It notes one or two inconsistencies (mistakes?) in the text:

• It treats Dorothea's being an orphan with scant regard and is vague about when they died, saying it was when Dorothea and her younger sister were “about twelve years old" though they can’t both have been.
• It points out that “For all Dorothea's purported longing to be learned she doesn't take much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle's no doubt well-stocked library.” (C 1)

But it is particularly interesting when Mead makes observations pertaining to the craft of the novelist:

• She sees Middlemarch as Eliot’s “ ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, if instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one.” (C 1)
• “Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls ... ‘the home epic’ - the momentous, ordinary journey travelled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood.” (C 1)
• Eliot is unwilling "to let one sentence stand for many” (C 2)
• “Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack.” (C 2)
• “The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot's fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned.” but Leslie “ Stephen suggests that Eliot's use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown up people. ... By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. ... We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, then is available to their neighbours down in the world of Middlemarch.” (C 2)
• “It is central to Elliot's novelistic intention that the reader understand the unfolding of events from the perspectives of multiple characters.” (C 5)
• “Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work.” (C 7)

It was interesting to me at any rate, having lived in Bedford for nearly thirty years, that when Eliot (as Marian Evans) worked as a journalist on the Westminster Review, living over the shop at 142 Strand, London, a colleague and fellow-resident was William Hale White who would go on to become the similarly pseudonymous (but rather less celebrate) novelist Mark Rutherford.

The character of Casaubon is, I presume, named after the scholar Isaac Casaubon who knew James I and is credited with, among other things, dating the esoteric magical writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, previously thought to date to the time of Moses, to the third or fourth century of the Common Era, as noted by Ross King in his novel Ex-Libris, set at a time roughly contemporary with Casaubon. 

Selected quotes:

• “A book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the parts untrodden and the choices unmade.” (Prelude)
• “Novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity.” (Prelude)
• “When I first left England as a young woman, I didn't consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each goodbye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.” (Prelude)
• “Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she [Eliot] sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.” (C 1)
• “Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavour; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the sight of creation.” (C 1)
• “Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, up.and so is realizing, years later, that's the truth might be more nuanced.” (C 2)
• “Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing.” (C 2)
• “the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavour.” (C 5)
• “To ... intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone.” (C 7)

This is a well-written, easily readable yet authoritative, introduction to the work of George Eliot, especially what is regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch

George Eliot wrote the following books, reviewed on this blog:

• The Mill on the Floss

December 2021; 278 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Genius of Shakespeare" by Jonathan Bate

Bate seems to want to prove that Shakespeare was:

• not a genius in the Romantic sense of a prodigy, created rather than taught, but a talented Elizabethan grammar school boy whose gift for poetry was fortunately combined with his profession as actor allowing him to improve on the work of others
• but a genius whose especial gift was for creating complex characters whose qualities were often inconsistent, in part by stripping away the motivations ascribed to the characters in his source-material. These multi-faceted and enigmatic characters enable actors and directors to interpret the plays in many ways (but not in any ways) and this has made Shakespeare's drama adaptable and able to evolve.

The Life
He starts by considering the facts of Shakespeare's life and shows that we know much more about him than the anti-Stratfordians pretend:

• “In his will the Stratford man left money to buy mourning rings to ‘my fellows, John Heminges, Richard Burbage and Henry Condell’.” (p 69)
• Ben Jonson “knew Shakespeare intimately ... as both an actor - Shakespeare was in the cast of at least two of Jonson’s plays - and a writer ... he christened him ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’.” (p 69 - 70)
• “When in 1613 ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon’ ... bought a gatehouse in Blackfriars, one of the trustees he named in the purchase deed was William Johnson, the owner of the Mermaid” where Francis Beaumont, who know of Shakespeare as a writer, drank. (p 70)
• “William Camden ... describes Shakespeare as a leading writer and answers a complaint about granting a coat of arms to the player by delineating Shakespeare’s Stratford pedigree.” (p 70)
• “John Davies of Hereford ... published an epigram addressed to Will Shakespeare, which simultaneously alluded to his acting and praised him as a great playwright.” (p 71)

He also finds evidence in the plays. For example, in the Merry Wives of Windsor (A4 S1) “a boy called William is given a Latin grammar lesson by Sir Hugh Evans, a Welsh schoolmaster. Was this scene written by an earl such as Oxford who never set foot inside a grammar school in his life?? Or by a man called William who as a boy was entitled ... to attend the grammar school at Stratford-upon-Avon, where there was a Welsh schoolmaster, one Thomas Jenkins? The lesson ... is based on the Latin grammar book that was the standard school test of the period.” (p 8) “Many of the ‘wise saws’ for which Shakespeare’s plays have become so renowned ... can be traced back to the Adagia or comparable textbooks.” (p 10) The Adagia being a collection of the works of Erasmus that were used as a basis for writing exercises in grammar schools. 

In school S would have learned to “take a piece of received wisdom ... turn it on the anvil of your inventiveness, and ... give it new life.” (p 12) This is a pattern for the way S wrote his plays.

He also seeks, as so many do, for the Dark Lady of the sonnets, finding it in the wife of an Italian called John Florio who worked in the household of the Earl of Southampton (and may have been the source of Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian). Florio may have inspired the title of Love's Labour Lost from a passage in a language manual he wrote: “We need not speak so much of love, all books are full of love, with so many authors, that it were labour lost to speak of Love.” (p 55 - 56)

The Sources

Of even more interest (for me, OK, I am a geek) is when Bate discovers sources for Shakespeare's work. For example:

• “Sir John Falstaff ... dies in Hostess Quickly’s tavern, calling out for sack and remembering a woman called Doll in an uncanny repetition of Greene’s death.” (p 19) Robert Greene, Cambridge MA, one of the ‘University wits’ like Marlowe, who were poets and playwrights, was the one who described Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow’ for not being university educated and presuming, as a mere actor, to write plays; he died in a shoemaker’s house, his death described by ‘Hostess Isam’ the shoemaker’s wife; on his death bed Greene “called for a penny-pot of Malmsey and then scribbled a letter to his abandoned wife” who was called Doll. 
• Greene also wrote the novella Pandosto, the source material for The Winter's Tale
• Shakespeare’s early comedies patterned after the comedies of John Lyly, the “leading writer of comedies” when Shakespeare first came to London. (p 136)
• Marlowe was both rival and inspiration:
• Richard II is patterned on Edward II: “The structure of the two plays is identical: the King is surrounded by flatterers and pitted against an assemblage of nobles with vested interests of their own, then isolated and uncrowned, stripped of his royal identity, thus forced to discover his inner self by means of a supple, reflective soliloquy delivered whilst humiliatingly in prison. In each play the Queen is pushed to the margins in part because of the king’s homoerotic leanings.” (p 113)
• Titus Andronicus is modelled on the Jew of Malta: “Aaron the Moor’s catalogue of villainous misdeeds ... is closely modelled on an exchange between Barabas and his slave Ithamore in which they outdo each other in outrageous ill-doing.” (p 115)
• Henry V is like Tamburlaine in the story of the conquering King with the weak son. In Henry IV Part 2 Pistol misquotes Tamburlaine’s “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia/ What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?” (when Tamburlaine enters in a chariots pulled by two kings) as “hollow pampered jades of Asia/ Which cannot go but thirty miles a day.” (p 121)
• When in The Tempest Prospero says “I’ll drown my book” this echoes Faustus: “I’ll burn my books” (p 129)
• Rosalynd, a 1590 novella by Thomas Lodge, was the model for As You Like It. “It begins with the legacy of a gentleman to his three sons and the ill-treatment of the youngest at the hands of the eldest. The latter plans to do away with his brother by having him killed in a bout with a supposedly invincible wrestler at court; amazingly, though, the youth wins the wrestling match and in doing so attracts the eye of Rosalynd, daughter of the rightful king who has been forced into exile by a usurper. Further schemes against the hero, Rosader, force him to leave home; he goes to the forest of Arden, in company with his faithful retainer, Adam Spencer,; there he meets up with the exiled king and his courtiers.Meanwhile, Rosalynd is banished. Alinda, the daughter of the usurping king, determines to go with her. Since two women travelling alone would be vulnerable, the tall Rosalynd dresses as a boy and pretends to be Alinda’s page; they call themselves Ganymede and Aliena. In the forest they encounter an old shepherd and a young man, the latter complaining about his unrequited love for a shepherdess named Phoebe. The princesses in disguise give financial help to the shepherds; the court-in-exile gives civil welcome to young Rosader and hungry old Adam. The princesses meet up with Rosader, who has been busy writing love poems in praise of Rosalynd. Ganymede pretends to be Rosalynd, so that Rosader can rehearse his wooing of the real Rosalynd ...” (p 141) It is clear that As You Like It was an adaptation of Rosalynd. However, Shakespeare adds the clown Touchstone and the melancholic Jacques, who are probably the keystone characters of the play. (p 142)

Motiveless

One of Shakespeare's peculiarities was the way he tended to strip motive from his source materials:

• In Twelfth Night Viola chooses to dress in male clothing; in the source this is explained as a result of a near-rape.
• In The Winter’s Tale, from Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the sudden jealousy of Leontes is “better accounted for in the novella”; the ridiculous incident of the statue coming to life is Shakespeare’s invention.
• In the source for Othello, but not the play, Iago is motivated by his unreciprocated love for Desdemona
• In King Leir “Leir abdicates because his wife has just died ... Leir does not want Cordfelia to marry a foreign potentate and live abroad ... In Shakespeare’s play ... neither the abdication not the staging of the love-test are properly justified.” (p 148)

Bate suggests that this is because of a difference between novels and plays: “Logical plot development and long-term psychological motivation are two of the glories of the novel ... But a play is not a novel. Theatre audiences care not a hoot about Viola’s reasons for dressing as a boy; they are too busy watching her” (p 146) He concludes that this removal of motivation is what gives Shakespeare's characters their power: “The peculiar power of Shakespearean characterization stems from the way in which the motivations that drive his source-narratives are removed. Instead of being predetermined, identity is performed through action. At the same time, a vacuum is created in the space that belongs to motive; spectators and readers rush in to fill that vacuum.” (p 332)

Ambiguity

Bate also suggests that the infinite adaptability of the Shakespearean capacity was the way in which Shakespeare could represent multiple points of view, even those which are oxymoronic.  “Shakespeare was receptive to every mood, every position and disposition: hence the intermingling, the layering and counterpoint, which is one of his stylistic hallmarks. He was receptive to everything but reductive singularity: hence his stripping of unitary motive from such characters as Leontes and Lear.” (p 152) William Hazlitt, reviewing Measure for Measure, said: “Shakespear was the least moral of all writers; for morality ... is made up of antipathies, and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature.” (p 296) “Shakespeare’s greatest cunning is ... he knows that there is more drama in a complex question than a pat answer.” (p 354)

Shakespeare also flouted the rules. Lope de Vega, a contemporary (and perhaps equally great) playwright ecommended “locking away all classical precepts and concentrating instead on pure entertainment for the masses.” (p 339) Shakespearean drama “with its loose and episodic scenic form, its multiple plots, its vertiginous course from tragedy to comedy and back again, its motley assemblages of character, its profligacy of vocabulary and speech idiom, its jumble of verse and prose.” (p 160) repeatedly broke the established rules of the canon. “From a neoclassical point of view, Shakespeare’s verbal inventiveness and his mingling of kings with clowns were unforgivable ‘irregularities’.” (p 165)

Bates illustrates Shakespeare's progress towards rebellion with Romeo and Juliet. Their first speech at the ball is a sonnet: “Romeo speaks the first quatrain, Juliet the second (but picking up on Romeo’s rhyme of ‘this’ and ‘kiss’); the third quatrain is divided between them, then each delivers one line of the closing rhyming couplet. ... Their speaking in a sonnet, the conventional form of courtly love, establishes their relationship in the terms of traditional courtly artifice. Juliet’s unobtainability ... is of a piece with this. ... As then play progresses and the love is intensified, the poetic language is loosened. ... The aubade, in which lovers part at dawn, was another conventional courtly form, but when Romeo looks out on the morning sky, he is no loner impeded by the sonneteer’s rhymes and end-stops.” (p 279) Bates concludes that “Romeo and Juliet was crucial to Shakespeare’s artistic development, because its way of representing the intensification of Romeo and Juliet’s love led the dramatist towards the fluid blank verse that her perfected in his mature tragedies.” (p 280)

I adored this brilliant analysis of Shakespeare's fabulous work.

Other wonderful moments:

• “Ovid would have us believe that one of the functions of love poetry is to persuade people to jump into bed with you.” (p 24)
• “It is not coincidental that British detective fiction came of age ... in the 1860s, the decade immediately after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.” (p 101)
• “The device of overhearing is a stroke of comic genius because it dramatizes one of the chief processes through which comic satisfaction is constituted: dramatic irony, whereby we in the audience know more than the character on stage.” (p 139)
• “It is we in the audience who are really in the position of the gods. We know how things are going to turn out. That is one of the reasons why we like comedies: we know that, give or take a few loose ends, they will work out as we would want them to. Which is not something we can say about our own lives.” (p 139)
• “The poetry of a teenager in love is sincere: that is what makes it bad.” (p 150)
• “Our posture and gesture as we read or watch and listen; our return to what we have read or seen or heard before, through which in our clumsy way we re-perform the work: these are the testing-grounds of aesthetic greatness.” (p 320)
• “Asked what a piece of his music meant, Robert Schumann played it again.” (p 321)

A wonderful book.March 2020; 357 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In Bluebeard's Castle" by George Steiner

Subtitled some notes towards a re-definition of culture, this book is based on four lectures given at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, as a response to the 1948 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture of T S Eliot.

It is written in four parts (presumably originally four lectures):

The Great Ennui
This attempts to characterise the period between 1820 and 1915 which has been called the “garden of liberal culture”. Steiner rightly points out that this period is seen in hindsight through spectacles tinted a heavy shade of rose. “Anyone who takes the trouble to find out, will come to realise what a day's work was like in a Victorian factory, what infant mortality amounted to in the mining country of northern France in the 1870s and 1880s ... that the intellectual wealth and stability of middle and upper middle-class life during the long liberal summer depended, directly, on economic and, ultimately military, dominion over vast portions of what is now known as the underdeveloped or third world.” 

Nevertheless, Steiner seems to believe that he can see trends within this period, involving the great shake-up of the French revolution and Napoleon, and involving the spread of urbanization, which caused the development of a distinctive culture of ennui (defined as “febrile lethargy; the drowsy nausea ... of a man who misses a step in a dark staircase.”) Sex was beginning to be written about: “Nothing that I know of at an earlier period truly resembles the self-dramatizing, self-castigating eroticism of Hazlitt’s extraordinary Liber Amoris (1823).” (But what about Ovid?) Cities were growing: “The megalopolis whose uncontrollable cellular division and spread now threatens to choke so much of our lives ... The urban inferno, with its hordes of faceless inhabitants, haunts the nineteenth-century imagination.”

In the end, he seems to suggest, every culture will destory itself but it will burn most brightly at the end like a supernova star: “Is it reasonable to suppose that every high civilization will develop implosive stresses and impulses towards self-destruction? Does so delicately balanced, simultaneously dynamic and confined an aggregate as a complex culture tend, necessarily, towards a state of instability and, and finally, of conflagration? The model would be that of a star which, after attaining a critical mass, a critical equation of energy exchanges between internal structure and radiant surface, will collapse inward, flaring out, at the moment of destruction, with just that magnitude of visible brilliance which we associate with great cultures in their terminal phase.”

• “Most history seems to carry on its back vestiges of paradise. At some point in more or less remote times, things were better, almost golden. A deep concordance lay between Man and the natural setting.”
• “Madness, death are preferable to the interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form.”
• Salammbo by Flaubert: “This frenetic yet congealed narrative of bloodlust, barbaric warfare and orgiastic pain.”

A Season in Hell
Here he argues that Eliot’s 1948 work was necessarily incomplete in that it failed to address the Nazi genocide of Jews. He sees the distinctiveness of anti-semitism as somehow bound up with the fact (as he sees it) that Moses invented monotheism.
“In polytheism, says Nietzsche, lay the freedom of the human spirit, its creative multiplicity.”
“Pauline Christianity ... while retaining something of the idiom and centralised symbolic lineaments of monotheism ... allowed scope for the pluralistic, pictorial needs of the psyche ... in their proliferation of saintly and angelic persons.”

“We conduct a good part of our lives amid the menacing jostle of the crowd.”

In a Post-Culture
Here he argues that art is an attempt to gain immortality: “There is nothing natural, nothing self-evident in this wager against mortality ... In the overwhelming majority of cases - and the gambler on transcendence knows this in advance - the attempt will be a failure, nothing will survive.”

This may imply that perhaps, perhaps as a result, the preservation of a work of art may be worth a few, or even many, deaths: “Where it is absolutely honest, the doctrine of a high culture holds the burning of a great library, the destruction of Galois at twenty-one or the disappearance an important score, to be losses paradoxically but none the less decidedly out of proportion with common deaths, even on a large scale.”

“It may be that the coherence of an ancient thing is harmonic with time.” so you can replicate but not recreate it.
“Voltaire and Arnold regarded as established the crucial lemma that the humanities humanize.” but we know that death camp commandants enjoyed classical music.

In the old days there were divisions between strata of society: “The line of division separated the higher from the lower, the greater from the lesser; civilization from retarded primitivism, learning from ignorance, social privilege from subservience, seniority from immaturity, men from women. And each time, ‘from’ stood also for ‘above’.”“The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.”


“We know now ... that material progress is implicated in a dialectic of concomitant damage, that it destroys irreparable equilibria between society and nature. Technical advances, superb in themselves, are operative in the ruin of primary living systems and ecologies.”

Tomorrow
I found this bit hardest to accept. He is arguing for the preservation of his favoured culture. The problem, as I see it, is that globalism and the technological explosion have led to an exponential increase in art and culture and that each one of us no longer has a sufficient lifetime to master everything. Two hundred years ago a well-read man might have had a library of a thousand books. I have read and reviewed on this blog over a thousand books over the last few years and yet I am only aware of how many books I have not yet read and the impossibility of keeping pace with the tsunamis of books being published each year. So, if you are going to argue that Homer and Racine and Goethe ought to be read by everyone there needs to be massive evidence to back up your argument. Steiner does not offer evidence, he just orates.

• “Would we have something at least of the main legacy of our civilization made accessible to the general public of a modern, mass-society? Or would we rather see the bulk of our literature, of our interior history, pass into the museum?”
• “Already a dominant proportion of poetry, of religious thought, of art, has receded from personal immediacy into the keeping of the specialist.”
• “The catastrophic decline of memorization in our own modern education and adult resources, is one of the crucial, though as yet little understood, symptoms of an after-culture.”
• “Let us suppose that the Victorian public school boy ... to whom the text of Homer, of Racine, of Goethe, offered natural purchase, were always but a small number, a conscious elite. ... Restricted as it may have been, that elite embodied the inheritance and dynamics of culture.”
• “The absence of the history of science and technology from the school syllabus is a scandal. It is an absurdity to speak of the renaissance without knowledge of its cosmology, of the mathematical dreams which underwrote its theories of art and music.”
• “The flower-child in the Western city, the neo-primitive chanting his five words of Thibetan on the highway, are performing an infantile charade - founded on the surplus wealth of that same city or highway.”
• “Grasp the riddle of ... our apparently imprinted a sense of harmonic accord, and you will touch on the roots of human consciousness.”

The problem with all of this work is the lack of evidence. Steiner may be a very well read man and it may be that everything he has read has led him to develop these ideas. But he sounds so dogmatic and so certain of his ideas and they seem to be founded on so little evidence and, crucially, he never seems to consider that there might be alternative theses developed from a different selection of readings. So I wasn't convinced.

I love the power and beauty and elegance of his rhetoric though.

“We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads ... on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control ... because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.”

September 2019; 107 pages

"Shakespeare's Workmanship" by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

This book is based on lectures given at Cambridge and was first published in October 1918. It analyses some Shakespearian plays from the point of view of what Q-C calls the 'workmanship' which involves identifying what Shakespeare as a jobbing playwright was attempting to achieve and then considering how (and whether) he achieved it. So it sort of chimes with what James Shapiro (in, for example, Contested Will) achieves in when he offers detailed evidence to tie the plays with the company of actors that Shakespeare was writing for.

The plays Q-C considers are Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Hamlet, as well as considering the five later plays of Pericles, Henry VIII, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest both as a group and individually. He makes some brilliant points:

• “The great artist dies into his work, and in that survives.” 
• "The half of artistry consists in learning to make one stroke better than two. The more simply, economically, you produce the impression aimed at, the better workman you make all yourself.” (C 1)
• “Tragedy demands some sympathy with the fortunes of its hero.”  
• Shakespeare’s liked to use darkness:
• R&J: action starts on moonlit balcony, ends in tomb
• Hamlet starts on battlements at night
• Othello starts on a dark street
• King L: dark heath and blindness
• Macbeth: sleeplessness and sleep-walking, murder at night; darkness pervades MacB
• In every Shakespeare play there is the Point of Rest, the punctum indifferens: “something apparently insignificant.” (This follows Coventry Patmore’s Principle in Art): “Each of these characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate; a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference.”
• Kent in King Lear
• Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet
• Horatio in Hamlet
• Cassio in Othello
• Bassanio in Merchant of V
• How Macbeth is like a Greek tragedy: “Though it is full of blood and images of blood, the important blood-shedding is hidden, removed from the spectator’s sight ... Duncan is murdered off the stage; Lady Macbeth dies off the stage; Macbeth makes his final exit fighting, to be killed off the stage. There is nothing here like the blood-boltered culmination of Hamlet.”
• Shakespeare’s uses some typical tricks/ per devices: “Shakespeare, having once employed a stage device with some degree of success, never had the smallest scruple about using it again.”
• The woman disguised as a man
• Shipwreck
• Mistaken identity
• Jealous husband or lover
• Potion which arrests life without killing
• Commanded murderer whose heart softens
• “A dramatic author must start by mastering certain stage-mechanicsn. Having mastered them, he must - to be great- - unlearn reliance on them, learn to cut them away as he grows to perceive that the secret of his art resides in playing human being against human being, man against woman, character against character, will against will - not in devising ‘situations’ and ‘curtains’ and operating puppets to produce these. His art touches climax when his ‘situations’ and ‘curtains’ so befall that we tell ourselves, ‘It is wonderful - yet what else could have happened?’” This reminds me of Aristotle who says in the Poetics that when the plot twists we must be surprised and yet realise that this is the only thing that could have happened.
• “Every artist knows ... that the more you complicate your plot - the more threads you tie together in your nexus - the less room you leave yourself for invention and play of character.”
• “Shakespeare ... set up a permanent artistic principle in the treatment of history by fiction; ... your best protagonists ...[are] some invented men or women - pawns in the game - upon whose actions and destinies you can make the great events play at will.”
• “It is never a test of the highest art that it is unintelligible. It is rather the last triumph of a masterpiece - the triumph definitely passing it for a classic - that all men in their degree can understand and enjoy it.”
• “Every artist of the first class ... tires of repeating his successes, but never of repeating his experiments.”
• “A great artist, choosing to abandon something he has done consummately for a shot at a longer range, is liable to miss his target.”
• “Shakespeare ... was instinctively chary of love-scenes save when he could handle them with raillery.”

A great deal of fascinating insight into how a (great) writer works. July 2019; 362 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God