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Shakespeare on Style, Imagination, and Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alwin Thaler
Alwin Thaler*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee
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Extract

The irresistible whirl of change moves faster as the world grows older, but the student of history and letters may still take uneasy comfort in the reflection that old legend dies hard. It lives long and, grown old, may be born anew if it be good legend—a challenging fable, a pointed parable, a tale which holds old men from the chimney corner because it has poignancy, beauty, truth, even if it be not the whole truth. And as with legend so with certain legendary literary judgments which have captured, as it were, the imagination of men. So it is, for instance, with Wordsworth's famous dictum concerning Milton: Milton's soul was like a star, but he did not dwell far apart from the world of affairs nor from warm and kindly human relationships. Yet Wordsworth's Milton lives, not only because the conception has in it an element of real, though partial truth, but more especially because it is dramatically effective—because it characterizes a complex figure in sharp, clean-cut, easily understandable lines. So it is also, I believe, with a fascinating old half-truth of critical legend which has had a curiously varied revival in our own time: the legend—one of Milton's own sponsorship though neither of his only begetting nor yet of Ben Jonson's—concerning the divine “easiness,” the gloriously unstudied artlessness of “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,” warbling “his native woodnotes wild.”

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1938, pp. 1019 - 1036
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938

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References

Note 1 in page 1019 Hemings and Condell, “To the . . . Readers,” First Folio.

Note 2 in page 1019 “One of the most curious things about Shakespeare [is] his ridicule of poetry and poets. He does not handle genuine poetry and poets; he may have thought that unprofessional. He doesn't ‘talk shop’ in his plays. In the two plays in which he introduces professional poets, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens, they are treated with utter contempt. [In] Bartlett's Concordance . . . the words ‘Poem,’ ‘Poetical,’ ‘Poet,’ and ‘Poetry,’ combined, do not make half a column . . . He has more references to worms than to poets! The first if not the only passage that occurs to anyone as Shakespeare's tribute to his art is that in A Midsummer Night's Dream beginning ‘The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling’; and all it says is that it is ‘airy nothing’. . . The word ‘feign’ occurs six times out of the thirty-two that the words ‘poet,’ ‘poetry,’ and ‘poetical,’ occur. . . It is interesting to hear poetry thus condemned . . . “—Henry David Gray, “Shakespeare: A Person,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, vii (1932), 159. Cf. Professor J. M. Manly: “The passages which indicate that [Shakespeare] was . . . keenly interested in the actor's art. . . as compared with the allusions to sport. . . are few in number, as if the author were a little shy of ‘talking shop.’“—”Shakespeare Himself,” Memorial Volume to Shakespeare and Harvey, University of Texas Bulletin No. 1701 (1917), p. 20.

Note 3 in page 1020 “Poetry, or the poet, Shakespeare barely mentions. If the well-known passage in Midsummer Night's Dream and phrases in the Sonnets may be said to be praise, other passages are in sardonic vein; and Shakespeare ‘shows singularly little desire to magnify his office as artist,‘ as Sir Edmund K. Chambers says. … In Shakespeare no conscious art is apparent. Shakespeare holds no theory about himself as artist, about the ideas which may be said to pervade his work, or about the form which embodied them. ”—Arthur H. R. Fairchild, Shakespeare and the Arts of Design, University of Missouri Studies, xii (1937), i, 173.

Note 4 in page 1021 i. ii. 146.

Note 5 in page 1021 Sonnet, 21.

Note 6 in page 1021 Ibid., 59.

Note 7 in page 1021 Ibid., 21, 130.

Note 8 in page 1021 Ibid., 16.

Note 9 in page 1021 Ibid., 32.

Note 10 in page 1022 v. iii. 179.

Note 11 in page 1022 Much Ado, v. ii. 30–41; iv. 86–88; As You Like It, iii. ii. 174–180, 119, 104.

Note 12 in page 1022 As You Like It, ii. iv. 57–60.

Note 13 in page 1023 Timon, i. i. 180, 20–22.

Note 14 in page 1023 Merry Wives, i. iii. 51.

Note 15 in page 1023 Much Ado, v. ii. 6.

Note 16 in page 1023 2 Henry VI, i. i. 111.

Note 17 in page 1023 Much Ado, v. i. 37.

Note 18 in page 1023 Richard III, iv. iv. 360.

Note 19 in page 1023 I Henry VI, iv. vii. 72.

Note 20 in page 1023 Ibid., iv. vii. 70.

Note 21 in page 1023 Love's Labour's Lost, v. ii. 406–413.

Note 22 in page 1023 “So well thy words become thee as thy wounds; They smack of honour both”— Macbeth, i. ii. 43–44.

Note 23 in page 1023 Cf. above, n. 13 and text; Hamlet, ii. ii. 193–195; v. ii. 84–202.

Note 24 in page 1024 iii. iv. 44; iv. iii. 35.

Note 25 in page 1024 See above, n. 11 and text.

Note 26 in page 1024 iv. i. 31.

Note 27 in page 1024 iv. i. 107–108.

Note 28 in page 1024 “Did Julius Caesar build that place. . .?” “He did, my lord, begin that place. . .” “Is it upon record, or else reported Successively from age to age, he built it?” “Upon record. . .” “But say. . . it were not registered, Methinks the truth should live from age to age, As 'twere retailed to all posterity, Even to the general all-ending day?” (iii. i. 69–78).

Note 29 in page 1025 I. e., “Art thou god to shepherd turned” etc., iv. iii. 30–46.

Note 30 in page 1025 ii. i. 423–467.

Note 31 in page 1025 v. ii. 89–119.

Note 32 in page 1025 Op. cit., p. 10.

Note 33 in page 1025 ii. i. 18–20.

Note 34 in page 1026 Twelfth Night, ii. iv. 44–49, 21–23.

Note 35 in page 1026 On Shakespeare's architectonics in tragedy, see Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 68.

Note 36 in page 1026 “Literature,” Idea of A University, Works, ed. 1923, pp. 283 ff.—Mr. Granville-Barker, in the most recent of his Prefaces to Shakespeare, Third Series (1937), pp. 1–2, genially pretends to defer to the popular cry. “Let us cheerfully admit,” he writes, “that [Shakespeare] ‘wanted art’; he was the genius of the workshop.” But the art he “wanted” is merely “a scheme of consistent principles and a studied method of expressing them. . . There is an aspect of him which turns towards pure beauty of form, and the discipline and the limitations involved” (Italics mine).

Note 37 in page 1026 Unless it be, here and there, in the Sonnets.

Note 38 in page 1026 See above, notes 10, 19, 20, and text.

Note 39 in page 1026 Op. cit., p. 4.

Note 40 in page 1027 iii. i. 69–70.

Note 41 in page 1027 i. i. 150–156.

Note 42 in page 1027 As You Like It, ii. vii. 114–125.

Note 43 in page 1028 Julius Caesar, v. i. 117–122.

Note 44 in page 1029 1 Henry IV, ii. iv. 425–461; A Midsummer Night's Dream, i. ii. 42.

Note 45 in page 1029 iv. v. 49–60. (Cf. the equally artificial choric wailing in Richard III, ii. ii. 77–79: iv. iv. 26–45, etc.)

Note 46 in page 1030 As Professor Kittredge observed long ago.

Note 47 in page 1030 Cf. Greenlaw, “Shakespeare's Pastorals,” SP, xiii, 154 ff.

Note 48 in page 1030 Professor Van Doren has kindly allowed me to quote from his essay on Metaphysical Poetry read at the 1937 meeting of this Association.

Note 49 in page 1031 iii. ii. 72.

Note 50 in page 1032 Prologue, Acts i, v, iii, iv, iii. (Cf. The Winter's Tale, iv. i. 19–21; Pericles, iii, Gower 58–61.)

Note 51 in page 1032 See above, n. 2.

Note 52 in page 1032 Nor yet in spite of Apemantus's cynical exchange with Timon's poet: “Art not a poet?. . . Then thou liest. . . In thy last work thou hast feigned him a worthy fellow . . . That's not feigned” (Timon, i. i. 226–230; As You Like It, iii. iii. 17–27).

Note 53 in page 1033 “Of Truth”: “Poesy filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie”; cf. Gosson's School of Abuse and Sidney's Apology.

Note 54 in page 1033 Cf. n. 52, above.

Note 55 in page 1033 i. v. 207–208.

Note 56 in page 1033 As You Like It, ii. vii. 181; cf. “flatter, face, or feign,” I Henry VI, v. iii. 142.

Note 57 in page 1033 3 Henry VI, i. ii. 31; cf. Merchant, v. i. 79: “The poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,” and Timon, i. i. 64: “I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feigned fortune to be throned.” (On “feigning” and “feign,” cf. N.E.D., which does not, however, cite these passages, nor those from Sidney quoted immediately below.)

Note 58 in page 1033 Later in the Apology Sidney adds: “a feigned [imaginary] example hath as much force to teach as a true example. ”—Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 160, 169.

Note 59 in page 1033 “A dream. . . is but a shadow” . . .Hamlet, ii. ii. 266.

Note 60 in page 1033 Romeo and Juliet, ii. ii. 141; A Midsummer Night's Dream, i. i. 144, 148.

Note 61 in page 1034 Love's Labour's Lost, iv. ii. 107.

Note 62 in page 1034 Ibid., iv. ii. 125.

Note 63 in page 1034 Macbeth, i. iii. 127–129; Antony and Cleopatra, v. ii. 217.

Note 64 in page 1034 Troilus and Cressida, ii. iii. 230; Romeo and Juliet, i. iv. 7–8.

Note 65 in page 1034 I Henry IV, iii. i. 134.

Note 66 in page 1034 Coriolanus, v. iii. 40.—Other references, passim.

Note 67 in page 1034 “Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. ”—Romeo and Jidiet, ii. iv. 41; “I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here”—Merry Wives, i. i. 206.

Note 68 in page 1034 See above, n. 3.

Note 69 in page 1035 Though Miss Spurgeon in Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 45, finds but “a small number” of images “from the theatre.”

Note 70 in page 1035 See, for example, Twelfth Night, iii. iv. 140.

Note 71 in page 1035 ii. iii. 230; Hamlet, iii. ii. 289–291.

Note 72 in page 1035 Taming, Induction, 139–141.

Note 73 in page 1035 See above, n. 2.