Conceptions of Shakespeare (Schocken)

By Alfred Harbage

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0007HMCSO
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Length: 164 Pages

Customer Reviews

Insights into the many- sided Shakespeare

This series of essays was compiled by the prominent Shakespearian scholar Alfred Harbage for the four- hundredth anniversay of the birth of Shakespeare. The essays center more on the image of Shakespeare, than they do on the plays themselves. There is a certain leisurely quality to the essays a kind of pleasant rambling of the gentleman scholar. Still Harbage has important insights. In an excellent chapter analyzing and debunking those who would substitute some other person for Shakespeare as author of his work he sees that these anti- Shakespeareans, Twain, Freud, and others of lesser distinction,share a ' family romance fantasy', of replacing more distinguished parents for actual ones.. In writing of Shakespeare as an actor he says 'Shakespeare's unique gift for responding to Life as Everyman found its perfect use in his work as an actor writing for actors. His ability to get inside of his fictive persons, to see, think, love, hate, hope and despair with them as a high form of mimicry/ .. He could get out of his persons as well as into them, which is to say that he never became his characters, and they never became merely him- not his mouthpieces and stand-ins but discriminable identities abiding his and our judgment'. Harbage gives special attention to 'Lear' and about this he makes his most insightful comments. " The play portrays three of the most loving characters to be found in literature anywhere, Cordelia, Kent and the Fool... The focus of their love is Lear, and there is never a moment in the play when one or another of them is far from his side. Kent is beseeching his attention as he kneels by Cordelia's body. Lear dies craving the thing he has always had. It is in this sense that he dies unredeemed: he has not learned. An aura of martyrdom surrounds him because his suffering stems from the value he has placed on a thing of value, but he dies a martyr without faith.Still, and the point cannot be too much stressed, the ending leaves us in no mood for censure. Our own capacity for love is being probed. Throughout Cordelia has commanded our love for what she is, and Lear has implored it for what he needs. So far as we are capable of submitting one , our judgment is that no greater symbols have been offered anywhere of man's capacity for love, and need to love and be loved. "