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Shakespeare’s ‘War with Time’: the Sonnets and ‘Richard II’
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 November 1970, pp 69-78
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Summary
The plausibility of a close connection between Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his English history plays has long been recognized. The Tragedy of King Richard II in particular is one of the very first works to be noticed in several of the tables of parallels which, at various times, have been drawn up by students of the Sonnets for dating purposes. It is the first and, in fact, the only one of the ‘histories’ to be mentioned—after six other Shakespearian plays or poems—in Tucker Brooke’s edition of the Sonnets. Yet, though—as Professor Mahood says—‘the present trend of criticism is bringing Shakespeare’s poems and his plays together’, Richard II has received little attention from critics concerned with this kind of approach. Miss Mahood herself, whose penetrating essay starts from a consideration of the ‘sun/cloud’ metaphor in Sonnet 33, soon dismisses as less significant the occurrence of the same metaphor in Richard II, iii, iii, 62–8, to dwell upon that in 2 Henry IV, i, ii, 220–6, and upon its context in both Henry IV plays. A similar emphasis is traceable in T. W. Baldwin’s The Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets and J. W. Lever’s The Elizabethan Love Sonnet.
In 'Time's Subjects: The Sonnets and King Henry IV, Part II Professor L. C. Knights shows the same preference still more clearly. His point is that 'the sense of life's tragic issues' came to Shakespeare as 'a heightened awareness of what the mere passage of time does to man and all created things'. And just as
there are many of the Sonnets that show the impact of time and mutability on a nature endowed with an uncommon capacity for delight . . . it is surely no accident that one of the first plays in which we recognize the great Shakespeare—the second part of King Henry IV— is a play of which the controlling theme is time and change.
Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 January 1970, pp 15-26
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Summary
Exactly three hundred years ago, in September 1668, in the presence of the Russian ambassadors, Molière was performing his great success of that year, Amphitryon, a comedy based on a play of Plautus which, as it happens, Shakespeare had also used in his only imitation of the Latin poet. In the eyes of one who has been invited to speak of Molière on the occasion of a Shakespeare Conference—a rather perplexing privilege—the coincidence is too remarkable not to seem, as Duke Vincentio would say, ‘an accident that Heaven provides’. I see no reason to deny myself the benefit of this happy coincidence, especially since there is much more in common between The Comedy of Errors and Amphitryon than their comparatively unimportant debt to Plautus.
It is currently said that Shakespeare, whose plot is chiefly drawn from the more down-to-earth, naturalistic, Menaechmi, went to the play of Amphitruo for the sake of additional comic effects, the double master-servant theme, and the incident of the husband locked out of his own house. This may be true, but does not invalidate deeper motives. Always a very intelligent reader, he may well have been shrewd enough to recognize that The Menaechmi and Amphitruo are substantially the same kind of story.
Shakespeare as ‘Corrupter of Words’
- Edited by Allardyce Nicoll
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 02 January 1963, pp 70-76
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Though the fact has often been deplored, it is perhaps a good thing for us, in France, that we have had no ‘classic’ translation of Shakespeare, comparable, for instance, with that by Schlegel and Tieck. Shakespeare in Germany, because of the lasting success of this remarkable version, tends to remain, as L. W. Forster puts it: ‘a member of the eighteenth-century classical tradition, an author of the “Goethezeit” on a par with Schiller and Goethe himself’. But no French translation has been good enough to naturalize the Elizabethan dramatist as a contemporary of Voltaire, or Victor Hugo, or Gide. Neither has the use of a kind of sixteenth-century idiom enabled learned translators like Derocquigny to turn him into the contemporary of Montaigne that he actually was. Shakespeare’s text does not belong to our past and we must therefore refer it to our present. With each new generation we have to conquer him anew, to render him in our own language for our own times.
At least we are challenged to do so. But we may wonder whether the task is not of special difficulty today, when French dramatic style is largely represented and influenced by writers who seem mostly intent on calling the bluff of language. Playwrights, who deal necessarily with the idiom of their day, cannot but reflect a situation in which an intemperate use of the written and the spoken word goes along with a growing sense of their untrustworthiness. Thus, in the plays of Beckett or Ionesco, language—having ceased to be of real use as a means of communication between people, or of people with themselves—proliferates like a senseless, and a threatening, object. Hence the impulse not only to denounce but also to destroy the menacing absurdity. In a way, it may seem the poet's first duty to shatter common speech—when it has hardened into lifeless phraseology—in order to make room for a new growth.
The Simplicity of Thomas Heywood
- Edited by Allardyce Nicoll
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 January 1961, pp 56-65
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The time is past when it was possible to maintain, with Hazlitt, that ‘Heywood’s plots have little of artifice or regularity of design to recommend them’. The complaint, it is true, could still be heard not so long ago: even in A Woman Killed with Kindness, it was said, ‘the subplot continually interferes with and interrupts the important main action’ and the author ‘might better have employed the “two hours traffic” of his stage in filling out the story of the Frankfords’. But the use of double plots is a thing we have learnt to know among other conventions of Elizabethan art. No one today, it may be assumed, would miss their significance.
In Heywood's case in particular, as Miss Townsend has shown,2 it is clear that they meet artistic requirements. The story of the Mountfords, in his best-known play, is hardly less important than that of the Frankfords: main plot and subplot are bound together by common themes into a complex whole which must be considered in its entirety if the play's dramatic purpose is to be grasped at all. To those who have studied it in this new light, A Woman Killed with Kindness has yielded evidence of its thoughtful intricacy of structure and given scope for renewed interpretation.
However, this technique of the dramatist has not always been vindicated in such a way as to do much for his reputation. Miss Townsend, for her part, is mainly concerned with the 'artistry' of his double plots, and only incidentally with their dramatic meaning. Of the seven plays which she considers, three only, in her estimate, can be regarded as combining two plots 'which complement each other, or which taken together, illustrate some central theme'. A second class comprises two other plays 'whose plots are related by a cause-and-effect relationship'. The remaining two—that is, The Captives and The English Traveller—are works 'in which there seems to be no thematic or causal relationship between the two plots'. Thus, in the majority of cases, there would be only the most outward connexion, or even no connexion at all, no relationship of any significance between the two stories which the author puts together.