13 FEBRUARY 1959, Page 30

Shakespeare Moralised

The Shakespearean Ethic. By John Vyvyan. (Chatto and Windus, 18s.) The Shakespearean Ethic. By John Vyvyan. (Chatto and Windus, 18s.)

MR. VYVYAN undertakes to refute A. C. Bradley's statement that 'we cannot be sure . . . that in his [Shakespeare's] works he expressed his deepest and most cherished convictions, or even that he had any.' I think that in the course of his essay Mr. Vyvyan sometimes confuses Bradley's view with the view (which is logically, and practically, distinct) that the plays invariably leave us in doubt as to what moral attitude we—the audience—are meant to take of the characters and action. How- ever, he does as a rule face up to the difficulties of refuting Bradley's statement in its strict mean- ing. He therefore argues that Shakespeare had a philosophy, the expression of which was his over- riding concern. The only way of making a con- vincing case for thii would be to point out where Shakespeare 'wittingly sacrificed stage effect in order to pursue the ethical as distinct from the dramatic problem.' And this Mr. Vyvyan tries to do.

The attempt is hardly successful. Mr. Vyvyan has much too limited a notion of 'stage effect': he can even say that it is 'not good theatre' (though 'good allegory') when Hamlet shows Claudius how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. Mr. Vyvyan sometimes confuses a pro- ducer's bright idea with genuine evidence of the dramatist's intentions: a case in point is his belief that Florizel and Perdita in The Winter's Tale are projections of Leontes's mind and so on a different 'plane of reality.' This cannot be satis- factorily shown. Dreams and visions, it is true, are frequent in Shakespeare, and occur in the late plays, but their status as dreams and visions is always unambiguously indicated in the text. Mr. Vyvyan's argument depends heavily on an elaborate interpretation of Time's speech :

Impute it not a crime To me, or my swift passage, that I slide O'er sixteen years .

since it is in my power To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour To plant and o'erwhelm custom.

But Shakespeare is not here talking about 'planes of reality,' but extenuating his neglect of the dramatic Unities (which are the 'law' and 'custom' referred to).

Mr. Vyvyan gets into difficulties because he rests too uncritically on the assumption that Shakespeare, since he cannot have been a mere theatre-poet, must therefore have been a philo- sopher as well. But this exclusive antithesis is unwarranted, and Mr. Vyvyan does nothing to make it seem less so wheb he concludes that Shakespeare 'probably wrote for two publics: dramatically for the many, and philosophically for the few.' Why assume this? Mr. Vyvyan hints darkly at the need for secrecy and speaks of 'the prosecution of Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh for "atheism." ' But the undogmatic Christian- humanist philosophy Mr. Vyvyan ascribes to Shakespeare (a 'syncretism of Classical reason and Christian grace') does 'not sound the sort of thing that would have offended a more tyrannical government than Elizabeth I's or James I's ever was.

This book is representative of much in modern Shakespeare criticism. I respect its intentions and its earnest sincerity. But it is merely the latest of many surely misguided efforts to turn a fox into a hedgehog. I cannot believe in this esoteric, allegorical Shakespeare ('his background was the mysticism of the Middle Ages'). It is true that Shakespeare does not show a sense of responsi- bility towards all his characters: but many of them are highly specific, and it is utterly arbitrary

to assume that whatever 'symbolical' element left, after all the, specificity has been deducted, the essential element of the character in question Yet this is an assumption which Mr. Vyvyan like all the allegorisers of Shakespeare—has con stantly to make.

W. W. ROHS°