old-school lit crit
...is fun. From Hardin Craig's Shakespeare, published in 1931:
This book attempts to present Shakespeare as a unified and connected subject of study -- his life, his work, his reactions to his age and upon it, his significance to our age, and the opinions of other times and nations. It attempts to enrich in various ways the study of Shakespeare in schools and colleges. The stress is laid, not on passages, characters, scenes, and plays as independent units, but on these things as they are related to drama, to the development of Shakespeare's powers as a dramatist, and to Renaissance literature as a whole. Recent critical and textual work on Shakespeare is so important that it deserves to be...made intelligible to students, who are sometimes obliged to study Shakespeare in disconnected single works and from points of view which, if not antiquated, are at least more restricted than they need to be.
And then there's some more stuff to the effect of "Shakespeare's plays totally need context, man!" Which makes me smile, but it also makes me wonder what sorts of things people in 70 years will say modern scholarly/pedagogical practices are sadly and hilariously lacking. Which, in turn, makes me boggle a bit at my inability to wrap my brain around the concept of cutting-edge Shakespeare studies in 2077, assuming, you know, we've still managed to avoid transforming the planet into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where mutants wander the streets eating brains and a few people with grungy movie-star looks run around blasting them with improbable weapons, or melting the polar ice caps and thus living underwater most of the time. On the other hand, maybe New Criticism will have come back, or something. Or, if we are running from mutants or catastrophically high ocean levels, that sounds like grounds for a revival of New Historicism to me. Only, you know, more so.
It is now used-book sale season, and my aunt, who is nice and likes to spoil me, has purchased a metric fuckton of nifty used books for me in the last few days, including a surprising number of Arden Shakespeares, a complete works from the 1950s illustrated lavishly with production photos (it's weird seeing pictures of people like Paul Scofield and Ian Holm when they were young, incidentally), some Cambridge School Shakespeares which have some fairly hilarious exercises in them, and a lot of really old-school criticism like the thing I quoted above. Also, I now own 16 copies of the Henry IV plays (combined, but not counting complete works), which is sort of unreasonably many and probably not healthy. It's become sort of a Thing. I am amused, too, at how many of the older editions of the Henriad have introductions which argue that, yes, Shakespeare, in keeping with Elizabethan beliefs about Authority and Social Order and the Great Chain of Being, really did think the Lancastrian kings (except for Henry VI, who gets no love from anybody) were all that and a bag of chips (or whatever the Elizabethan equivalent of chips is), and people who think otherwise are either thinking anachronistically, excessively sentimental, or bolshie weirdos.
I probably am an excessively sentimental bolshie weirdo, of course, but Shakespeare rarely thinks anybody involved in politics is all that and a bag of the-Elizabethan-equivalent-of-chips.
(Of course, another thing I got was Gary Taylor's Oxford edition of HV, which, while featuring an introduction more evenhanded than stuff I've seen him say about the play in more recent years [especially since the war started], still probably balances out my book-purchasing-scholarly-political karma. Or something.)
This book attempts to present Shakespeare as a unified and connected subject of study -- his life, his work, his reactions to his age and upon it, his significance to our age, and the opinions of other times and nations. It attempts to enrich in various ways the study of Shakespeare in schools and colleges. The stress is laid, not on passages, characters, scenes, and plays as independent units, but on these things as they are related to drama, to the development of Shakespeare's powers as a dramatist, and to Renaissance literature as a whole. Recent critical and textual work on Shakespeare is so important that it deserves to be...made intelligible to students, who are sometimes obliged to study Shakespeare in disconnected single works and from points of view which, if not antiquated, are at least more restricted than they need to be.
And then there's some more stuff to the effect of "Shakespeare's plays totally need context, man!" Which makes me smile, but it also makes me wonder what sorts of things people in 70 years will say modern scholarly/pedagogical practices are sadly and hilariously lacking. Which, in turn, makes me boggle a bit at my inability to wrap my brain around the concept of cutting-edge Shakespeare studies in 2077, assuming, you know, we've still managed to avoid transforming the planet into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where mutants wander the streets eating brains and a few people with grungy movie-star looks run around blasting them with improbable weapons, or melting the polar ice caps and thus living underwater most of the time. On the other hand, maybe New Criticism will have come back, or something. Or, if we are running from mutants or catastrophically high ocean levels, that sounds like grounds for a revival of New Historicism to me. Only, you know, more so.
It is now used-book sale season, and my aunt, who is nice and likes to spoil me, has purchased a metric fuckton of nifty used books for me in the last few days, including a surprising number of Arden Shakespeares, a complete works from the 1950s illustrated lavishly with production photos (it's weird seeing pictures of people like Paul Scofield and Ian Holm when they were young, incidentally), some Cambridge School Shakespeares which have some fairly hilarious exercises in them, and a lot of really old-school criticism like the thing I quoted above. Also, I now own 16 copies of the Henry IV plays (combined, but not counting complete works), which is sort of unreasonably many and probably not healthy. It's become sort of a Thing. I am amused, too, at how many of the older editions of the Henriad have introductions which argue that, yes, Shakespeare, in keeping with Elizabethan beliefs about Authority and Social Order and the Great Chain of Being, really did think the Lancastrian kings (except for Henry VI, who gets no love from anybody) were all that and a bag of chips (or whatever the Elizabethan equivalent of chips is), and people who think otherwise are either thinking anachronistically, excessively sentimental, or bolshie weirdos.
I probably am an excessively sentimental bolshie weirdo, of course, but Shakespeare rarely thinks anybody involved in politics is all that and a bag of the-Elizabethan-equivalent-of-chips.
(Of course, another thing I got was Gary Taylor's Oxford edition of HV, which, while featuring an introduction more evenhanded than stuff I've seen him say about the play in more recent years [especially since the war started], still probably balances out my book-purchasing-scholarly-political karma. Or something.)