Critics and Specialists
THESE two volumes promise, from the table :•f contents, to be more coherently planned than most collections of literary essays; and, up to a point, closer study bears this out. But they are in various ways disappointing. Apart from Shakespeare, who is later to receive separate attention, the Jacobean theatre is, first and fore- most, the theatre of Ben Jonson, and we do not get a really satisfactory picture of his achieve- ment from these 'four consecutive chapters.' William Armstrong writes crisply and informa- tively on Jonson's stagecraft, but he is next sandwiched between Dekker and Heywood in a very jejune chapter on 'Citizen Comedy' by Arthur Brown. The third of the four chapters, by G. K. Hunter, is excellent in itself, and casts a fresh light on the emergence of Italy in Jacobean drama 'as a mode of human experience rather than as a country,' but Marston, not Jonson, is Its principal subject. Finally, there is an intoler- ably crabbed and pretentious account of the Roman plays by Geoffrey Hill, in which the only oases of good, plain English are the quotations from Jonson and other seventeenth-century writers. All the other six chapters have consider-. able virtues. The most ambitious is Maynard Mack's 'The Jacobean Shakespearc,5 which, both in itself and in its contrast with some other chapters in both volumes, shows how much more important it is to get hold of a good critic than of a specialist in a particular corner of the field. (Not that Professor Mack is less than a sound Shakespeare scholar; but he is a great deal more.) Of the others, let me single out Philip Edwards— helpful, if not wholly persuasive to the uncon- verted, on FIctcherian tragi-comedy; and Peter Ure, who builds an excellent 'introduction to Chapman's tragedies on the exposition of a basic difficulty about how they are to be taken.
The second volume is less satisfactory. Edi- torial control seems to have slackened and there is too much that is textbookish. Donald Davie is stimulating on 'The Ocean's Love to Cynthia,' if also somewhat tantalising; and Frank Ker- mode's new interpretation of 'The Cave of Mammon' will certainly have to be taken ser- iously. In spite of unevennesses, these collec- tions are better than the average literary miscel- lany, and, to judge by the table of contents, the next volume, on the early Shakespeare, ought to be the most coherent and satisfying of the first
Previous page
