Shakespeare: a Survey is a set of essays, one for each of Shakespeare’s plays, in chronological order of when they were first performed.
I enjoyed the mix of literary commentary and the analysis of the historicity of the plays – overall, Chambers generally skews in favour of Shakespeare writing the plays (Titus Andronicus is supposedly quite a controversial one), though for some of the minor plays he is doubtful.
Unlike your literature teacher in school, Chambers is willing to be critical of Shakespeare. Of particular note is his dislike of The Tempest, which is certainly a nonconsensus view – The Tempest is often lauded for its deep complexity:
The practical omnipotence which Prospero derives from his magic arts takes all vitality from the plots which he unravels and from the conflict between hero and villains which they represent.
Unless you are sentimentalist inveterate, your emotions will not be more than faintly stirred by the blameless loves at first sight of Ferdinand and Miranda.
Chambers’ criticism does somewhat resonate. Perhaps barring Prospero’s last soliloquy, The Tempest oftentimes feels flat and excessively fanciful. There is better tragedy to be found in King Lear, tragicomedy in The Merchant of Venice, and romance in Romeo and Juliet. Yet perhaps out of my literary ignorance, there are several complexities within The Tempest that I enjoy – the contrast of Ariel and Caliban despite both being slaves to Prospero; the metaphor of the playwright as the magician.
The Survey is somewhat old-fashioned, which I suppose is more than reasonable given that the essays were written at the turn of the 20th century. For instance, it presupposes that the reader is adept at reading some ancient Greek – “hubris” is rendered as ὕβρις (a physics degree was unironically good preparation for this). Furthermore, I confess that I often found my eyes glazing over for some of the essays on plays I haven’t yet read – the Survey requires a reasonable degree of familiarity with the works.
Overall, the Survey has been a nice way to renew my appreciation of Shakespeare’s classics, and equally, a source of motivation for me to go and fill in the blanks in my education.
Literature, unlike life, must simplify its issues, and that by selection and concentration alone can it hope to grip and fasten to the predetermined mood the wandering spirit of man
If literature were a 1:1 replica of life it would just be life.
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Here, then, is the function of the supernatural in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The mystery, so to call it, the inexplicability which is bound up with the central idea of the play, is the existence of that freakish irresponsible element of human nature out of which, to the eye of the comic spirit, the ethical and emotional vagaries of lovers take their rise”.
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The tragic ineffectiveness of the speculative intellect in a world of action, that is the keynote of [Hamlet]. In Hamlet, as in Brutus, the idealist gets the worst of it, and we are left to wonder at the irony of things by which it is so.
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In other respects, the grouping of Othello with Macbeth and King Lear is complete. Already the subtle change has come over Shakespeare’s attitude towards the problems of existence whereby cosmic tragedy has replaced the earlier psychological tragedy of Julius Caesar and of Hamlet. The issue has shifted from the relations of man and man to the relations of man and his creator.
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[On the supernatural]
“It is Shakespeare’s confession of ignorance, of the fact that in his observation of life he has come just there upon something which baffles analysis, something which is, but which cannot be quite accounted for”.
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The practical omnipotence which Prospero derives from his magic arts takes all vitality from the plots which he unravels and from the conflict between hero and villains which they represent.
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