George Washington University

Macbeth, a Complete Guide to the Play. by J. Wilson McCutchan; Julius Caesar. An OutlineGuide to the Play. by Irving Ribner; Othello. An Outline-Guide to the Play. by Paul A.Jorgensen; As you Like it. An Outline-Guide to the Play. by S. Schoenbaum; King Lear. AnOutline-Guide to the Play. by Mark Eccles; Hamlet. An Outline-Guide to the Play. by FredsonBowers; A Midsummer Night's Dream. An Outline-Guide to the Play. by ...Review by: Hugh G. DickShakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1968), pp. 95-97Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2867855 .

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REVIEWS 95

further subdivided with separate essays on the four tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. The collection is overweighted with twentieth- century criticism, but Kermode makes no apologies for this disproportion.

In his introduction, Kermode, surveying Shakespearian criticism, observes the tendency to debate whether art and learning or nature predominate in Shakespeare. He seems not to have noted the recent critical debate over how Christian Shakespeare was in his plays and poems, but it may still be too early to assess this trend in criticism.

However invidious these may be, certain comparisons come to mind. Kermode has done in briefer space what D. Nichol Smith and Anne Bradby did less fully a generation ago in their two volumes in the Oxford World Classics. Nor is Kermode's book such a gallimaufry of tidbits as is Eastman and Harrison's Shakespeare's Critics from Jonson to Auden. It is also better balanced in its selections than is Siegel's recent collection, His Infinite Variety. My only regret is that Kermode's volume is not hardbound.

Emory and Henry College ROBERT H. GOLDSMITH

Focus Books Nos. 70I-7I0. J. WILSON MC CUTCHAN, general editor: Macbeth, a Complete Guide to the Play. By J. WILSON MC CUTCHAN. Pp. iV + I24. Julius Caesar. An Outline Guide to the Play. By IRVING RIBNER. Pp. V + i2i. Othello. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By PAUL A. JORGENSEN. Pp. [iV] + I24. As You Like It. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By S. SCHOENBAUM. Pp. iV + I24. King Lear. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By MARK

ECCLES. Pp. Vi + i22. Hamlet. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By FREDSON BOWERS. Pp. iV +

I24. A Midsummer Night's Dream. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By MATTHEW BLACK.

Pp. vi + i2i. The Merchant of Venice. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By WALDO F. MC NER.

Pp. vi + i2i. Romeo and Juliet. An Outline-Guide to the Play. By RICHARD HOSLEY. Pp.

iv + I24. New York: Barnes & Noble, [i963-i965]. Paperbound 950 each, in Canada $i.io. Focus Books Nos. 7I0-7I2. Plot Outlines of Shakespeare's Comedies Scene by Scene. Pp. Xviii + i74. Plot Outlines of Shakespeare's Histories Scene by Scene. Pp. viii + i84. Plot Outlines of Shakespeare's Tragedies Scene by Scene. Pp. xx + i65. By J. WILSON MC-

CUTCHAN. New York: Barnes & Noble, [i965]. Paperbound $I.25 each, in Canada $I.35.

Clothbound $3.50.

A generation ago, in I934, Barnes and Noble issued their paperback Outlines of Shakespeare's Plays by Watt, Holzknecht, and Ross, the progenitor of the present series of Plot Outlines and Outline-Guides. As a result of the paper- back explosion, that modest volume, which cost 75 cents in the Depression, has fissioned into twelve volumes costing more than sixteen times as much. The price of such progress is disproportionately high, and for such users as merely seek synopses, gone is the convenience of a single volume with a single index.

Yet there is no doubt that the synopses offered in the original Outlines could no longer serve today, for there the compilers took great liberties with the order of scenes in the plays themselves and freely omitted scenes and episodes judged unessential to an understanding of the plot, a decision that produced countless striking omissions. It is not too much to say that the original hand- book drew a quite arbitrary line between "plot" and "play", strove to furnish readable rather than faithful synopses, and gave users a Shakespeare adapted and improved, so to speak, in abstract. Both the present series forego any such attempt to improve upon Shakespeare at second hand and furnish instead faithful scene-by-scene synopses.

Such synopses indeed comprise most of each of the three volumes in the present Plot Outline series prepared by the late Professor McCutchan. The

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96 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

volumes on the Comedies and the Tragedies contain additionally a chapter on how to read Shakespeare's plays adapted from that in the original Watt, Holzknecht, and Ross volume, together with a one-page tabular chronology of the plays and an index of characters. The chapter on reading Shakespeare, which appears also in some of the Outline-Guides, is dropped in the volume on the History plays to make room for a biographical index of the historical characters. The three volumes of Plot Outlines seem to be designed almost entirely for reference.

A more elaborate apparatus accompanies the Outline-Guides to the single plays, so that these seem intended more for student use than for simple ref- erence. Some of this apparatus is furnished by Professor McCutchan as Gen- eral Editor and is duplicated in whole or in part from one volume to another. Such are the "Suggestions for Reading Shakespeare" adapted from the earlier volume and the brief summary accounts of the English drama to Shakespeare's time, England and London (0558-i6I2), the drama and theater in Shakespeare's day, the poet's life, and the chronology of his plays.

The extent to which this handbook material is duplicated from one volume to another depends upon Part 2 of each volume, which is the part furnished by the individual contributors to the series. Where their materials are extensive the accompanying handbook materials are correspondingly curtailed. But each contributor offers (i) a scene-by-scene synopsis of the given play, (2) an account of its sources, (3) an appraisal of theme, setting, and action, (4) a guide to the language of the play-a feature that varies markedly from one volume to another, (5) an analysis of the characters, (6) brief selections of a paragraph or so from leading critical commentaries on the play in chron- ological order, (7) an account of staging and production, and (8.) suggestions and questions for study, review, and essay topics.

The two most debatable features of the Outline-Guides as a total enter- prise are the sections on character analyses and on the language of the plays. As for the former, one wonders what real purposes are served-or who exactly is served-by a running list of quoted speeches with accompanying prose explications in words of one syllable arranged seriatim under topics and illustrating the innocence of Desdemona, the avarice of Shylock, the sufferings of Lear, or the loyalty of Kent, the graciousness of Duncan, the femininity of Titania, and the like. The long columns of quotations under these subject headings, with the highly simplified explications, seem too ex- tensitive to serve any general reference use; and if they are intended for student use, they posit (quite unrealistically, I believe) an almost total incapacity on the students' part to understand how character and emotion are expressed in speech.

Similarly, though on different grounds, one must question the running glosses offered as guides to the language of the various plays. It seems scarcely conceivable in this day of annotated texts that either a general user or a beginning student will have the patience to sit with the text of Shake- speare in one hand and a copy of the pertinent Outline-Guide in the other- and all the more because the line numbering of the Guides is pegged to no single accepted text.

Two of the contributors have made useful departures on this score. Pro- fessor Jorgensen dispenses with a glossary to Othello and briefly treats the thematic imagery of the play instead. Professor Bowers, on the other hand, offers a full running commentary on the speeches in Hamlet that adds up to a total interpretation of the play. Of all the volumes in the series his alone looks steadily beyond the most elementary readers of Shakespeare to the needs

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REVIEWS 97

of adult users, to whom (including the select body of readers of this quarterly) it can indeed be recommended as a useful and significant contribution. By the very same token it gives every promise of being the most rewarding volume to students too. University of California, Los Angeles HUGH G. DICK

Teatr epokhi Shekspira (The Theater of Shakespeare's Time). By A. ANIKST. Moscow: Publishing House "Iskusstvo", i965. Pp. 328. i ruble, 44 kopeks.

Nash sovremennik Viljam Shekspir (Our Contemporary, William Shakespeare). By GRIGORIJ KOZINTSEV. Moscow, Leningrad: Publishing House "Iskusstvo", i962. Pp. 3I7.

54 kopeks.

Viljam Shekspir. Ocherk Tvorchestz'a (William Shakespeare. An Essay of his works). By I. A. DUBASHINSKIJ. Moscow: Publishing House 'Prosveshchenije", i965. Pp. 228. 42 kopeks.

Teatr is a very good and useful book intended primarily for a serious student of the Elizabethan theater. Prepared with obvious love and care, well docu- mented, the book presents a detailed picture of the theater during Shake- speare's time. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the theater: theater if London and the provinces, actors, censorship, theater owners, acting, scenery

and costumes, rehearsals, audiences. The book is provided with numerous useful charts and interesting illustrations. One can only regret that such an excellent book has neither an index nor a bibliography.

The second volume, a slim, interesting book, is a collection of travel notes, reviews and essays by the well known Soviet motion picture director G. Kozintsev, who is known to American audiences for his production of Hamlet.

The first chapter includes sketches and impressions of the author's visit to England. Since there are relatively few travel notes published by Soviets who have travelled abroad, this part of the book seems particularly interesting. Unfortunately the chapter is much too short and his comments on the con- temporary theater and cinema are all too brief. One would like to know more, for example, of the author's views of Peter Hall's productions, recent motion pictures, or even his reactions as a tourist.

The second chapter is a series of very enthusiastic reviews of the Stratford Memorial Theatre performances in the Soviet Union in i958. The third chapter discusses scenery and costume designing made for Shakespeare productions in Leningrad by a very talented Soviet artist, little known in the West-A. G. Tyshler. The other chapters are essays on King Lear, Hamlet, and Falstaff. Mr. Kozintsev shows a thorough knowledge of the plays, but his approach to the characters seems to be largely an expansion of Belinski's interpretation of Hamlet.

It is unfortunate that books of the type of I. A. Dubashinskij's are still published in the Soviet Union and in such a large number of copies (37,000).

Intended as a study of Shakespeare's works, this is more a study of Shake- speare's evolution as a sociologist, a revolutionary, but never as a dramatist, and least of all as a poet. Not once in the book is there a mention of Shakespeare's poetic language or imagery, and in the last chapter one may be even surprised to discover that he was a poet. Even chapters on the Sonnets and two early poems omit a discussion of poetry.

What is really bad is that the book is written with a pedantic dead-pan seriousness bordering on the ridiculous. Such gems as these are scattered on every page: "A particularly great activity is manifested by those lovers, who are entirely subordinated to love" (p. 84). "The ardent breath of the people

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