Ethics and Imaginal-on
Shakespeare and the Rose of Love. By John Vyvyan. (Chatto and Windus. I 8s.) MR. VYVYAN'S first book. The Shakespearean Ethic, was valuable for its fresh insights into par- ticular plays, for its insistence on the close re- lation between irnagin'ation and moral values, and for its useful promptings to see Shakespeare's dramatic method in the light of a tradition that was not afraid of allegory. Yet it wasn't a book that one could recommend without reservations.
To me it made good sense to say that in Shakespeare subordinate characters may some- times appear as embodiments of powers in the mind of the hero (since Maud Bodkin coined the phrase we have got used to thinking of lago as 'the shadow-side of Othello') or that, as we watch
or read, a given dramatic setting may take on the qualities of a landscape of the mind But I was left with a sense of possible danger in treat- ing symbolic overtones as though they were parts of a fixed allegorical scheme : Shakespeare's, subtly responsive exploration of life demands' a more flexible reading than that. The virtues of The Shakespearean Ethic outweighed its occa- sional weaknesses; but Polonius as Fidelity seemed to be a warning signal.
In Shakespeare and the Rose of Love Mr. Vyvyan continues his analysis of structure as a guide to Shakespeare's underlying ethical con- cerns. Almost all the comedies, he points out, have to do with the transforming power of love, just as the tragedies trace the destructive power of hate and violence. Since these themes are as large as life itself, whilst drama by its very nature demands a firm patterning of events, Shakespeare adapted to his own purposes the Terentian five-act structure. This, with its clearly defined phases, gave him a basis on which to explore many different strategies in the conflict of love and its opponents. He retained the em- phasis on brisk intrigue which originally de- termined the dramatic pattern, but from the start his plays were designed to express the uni- versal laws of moral health or disease, projected and defined in each particular dramatic story. In the development of this method, which de- mands from the audience some degree of in- terpretation of the outward action, Shakespeare was influenced both by Renaissance Platonism and by the tradition of allegorical interpretation associated with the literary expression of courtly love.
There is much of interest here, and one is grate- ful for the tip to look to the Chaucerian Romance of the Rose, with its direct method of objecti- fying emotional states, as a possible influence both on Shakespeare's thought and on its dram- atic expression. Whether or not it is 'a pervasive presence in Shakespeare's early love-plays' is something that needs further investigation and consideration—like so much else concerning the availability of medimval modes of thought in the later sixteenth century. But Mr. Vyvyan, rightly, is only concerned with 'influences' in so far as knowledge of them may lead to a firmer grasp of Shakespeare's meanings, and the chap- ters in which he examines three of the early plays in the light of his general theories exhibit both the strength and the weakness of his .approach He is good on Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. and his account of these
plays should be read by all who think that the first is no more than sophisticated fun and the second no more than simple romantic tragedy. But the search for a consistent allegorical method leads him to make some strange claims for The Two Gentlemen of Verona- I for one find it hard to believe that the forest and the outlaws of the last act have. even in intention. the sym- bolic significance attributed to them. or that the rather puerile comedy of Launce's dog is in fact a parable. And the claim for the dual nature of the Shakespearean heroine—both, individual woman and a -lathy in the soul of the hero— is not strengthened by admitting Silvia into the company of Desdemona and Cordelia. The play simply does not develop the right kind of pressure.
The full impact of a Shakespeare play, its continuing life in our minds, is largely determined by our responsiveness to those overtones of meaning that the poetry distils from the overt dramatic situation. To suggest the nature of those overtones we sometimes need to use the terms 'symbolism' and—more rarely—'allegory.' But the qualities indicated by these words emerge only when there is a particular kind of prompting in the poetry and dramatic structure. To assume that they are everywhere present, and every- where with much the same kind of effectiveness, is not only to blur distinctions between degrees of imaginative power but to make us less sen- sitive to the range of Shakespeare's achievement. It would be a pity if Mr. Vyvyan were to refuse to ask himself some fundamental questions about his key terms, for he clearly has something valu- able to say about 'the ethical and philosophic unity' of Shakespeare's work as a whole.
L. C. KNIGHTS
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