2 results
Shakespeare and the Puritan Dynamic
-
- By Harold Fisch
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
-
- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 05 December 1974, pp 81-92
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows; or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see If power change purpose, what our seemers be.
Measure for Measure, i, iii, 50-4Not to take the term in too narrowly confessional a sense we may identify three Puritans in Shakespeare: they are Shylock, Malvolio, and Angelo. The problem of usury in Shakespeare's time, dramatized in the relation of Shylock to Antonio, is one that had arisen specifically as a result of the new Calvinist social ethics. The capitalist individualism of Shylock and his distance from the aristocratic world of Belmont indicate that he represents to an important degree the new Puritan middle class and their problems. 'Lord Angelo', we are told, is 'precise', i.e., a precisian. As for Malvolio, he is indeed once actually named a Puritan by Maria (though she soon afterwards modifies the charge) but even without this we would have recognized him as a Puritan by his kill-joy attitude to the Twelfth Night celebrations of the merry folk. ' Thinkst thou because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale'-could stand as a warning against what Puritanism threatened to do in the seventeenth century to the tradition of Merrie England.
‘Antony and Cleopatra’: the Limits of Mythology
-
- By Harold Fisch
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
-
- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 02 November 1970, pp 59-68
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When critics speak of myth and ritual in Shakespeare they have in mind chiefly the symbolic structure of the plays. Thus The Winter’s Tale which begins in winter (‘a sad tale’s best for winter’, i, i, 25) and ends in high summer (‘not yet on summer’s death nor on the birth of trembling winter’, iv, iv, 80) perfectly corresponds to the fertility rhythm. The accent on fertility in the sheep-shearing in Act IV gives to the structural form its emotional and spiritual content, whilst the symbolic revival of Hermione at the end rounds off the pattern of death and resurrection so basic to ‘the myth of the eternal return’. Such an archetypal structure is older than Christianity (in spite of the Christian colouring) and perhaps older than the conscious memory of man.
In King Lear the symbolic structure of the play viewed as myth-ritual is defined by the image of the wheel. Lear speaks of himself as being bound on a wheel of fire (iv, vii, 47); Kent bids Fortune turn her wheel (ii, ii, 173); the Fool speaking of the fate of his master bids himself 'let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill' (ii, iv, 71); whilst Edmund acknowledges at his death that 'the wheel is come full circle' (v, iii, 174). The circular movement thus intimated has behind it a sense of a cyclical order, the rise and fall of kings ordained as a means of guaranteeing the fertility of the land and the orderly sequence of the seasons. Such imagery, more than it is a statement about Lear as a Nature-god (though he is that too), is a statement about his predetermined fate, and about the structure of the play in which that fate is projected.
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)