The University of Notre Dame

Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays by Wolfgang ClemenReview by: Joan M. WylieNotre Dame English Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Fall, 1972), pp. 54-57Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066598 .

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statement may occasionally be misleading, such as the following found under the entry "wommen":

Even in the midst of the unreadable moral tale of M Melibee" (B 2246), one finds the narrator (Chaucer) saying: ltI seye that alle wommen been wikke, and noon good of hem alle," which he supports by al- luding to Scripture. This occurs in a tale in which the point is that Melibee wants to avenge his daughter (who was, or is, presumably a female) who has been mortally (?) wounded in five places by marauders.

It is not "the narrator (Chaucer)" intruding himself into the tale; it is the character Melibee who is speaking to his wife Prudence and supporting his statement by alluding to Scripture.

Ross writes not only with scholarship but with urbanity and ease. Chaucer's Bawdy will perhaps do more for the reader of Chau- cer than Partridge's book has done for the reader of Shakespeare.

PAUL E. BEICHNER, C.S.C. University of Notre Dame

54 NOTRE DAME ENGLISH JOURNAL

Wolfgang Clemen. Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays. London: Methuen, 1972. Pp. x, 236. $9.00.

In his latest contribution to Renaissance scholarship, Wolf-

gang Clemen continues to develop critical themes voiced in 1936 in his now-standard study of imagery, Shakespeares Bilder. A phrase in The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery, the English version of the early work, provides one key to the German critic's approach. Shakespeare's technique, says Clemen, is "a problem of evolution." Although the idea of a clearly chronological development is not so succinctly presented in the new volume, it does in fact underlie con- clusions in more than half of the book's eight essays. Accompanying Clemen's depiction of Shakespeare's increasing complexity and proficiency as a dramatist is his admiration for Shakespeare's re- markable variety. Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, like Shakespeare's Imagery, treats both the refinement and the range of artistic ma- terials, repeating Clemen's conviction that the playwright's methods are not to be considered in isolation from the total effect of the drama. Near the start of the first article in the recent collection, "Shakespeare's Art of Preparation. A Preliminary Sketch," the writer

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BOOK REVIEWS 55

typically puts his subject in context: "It is one of the aims of this

study to enquire into the correspondence existing between the kind of

preparation used and the other constituent elements of each play" (p. 10).

Clemen's double concern with individual components of Shake-

speare's drama and with the literary sum of the parts reflects the extremes of German criticism as described in a recent article by Werner Habicht and Hans Walter Gabler: "Close interpretations of the texts or of specific aspects of the texts on the one hand, and re-

peated attempts at. synthesizing such observations on the other" (Shakespeare Survey, 23 [1970], 114). Habicht and Gabler cite Cle- men's Das Drama Shakespeares (Gottingen, 1969), a German gathering of four of the pieces reprinted in Collected Essays, as touching both

"polarities." The same careful attention to details of the drama which impressed reviewers of his Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard HI (German ed. 1957, English ed. 1968) is evident in the major sections of Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. But, not content with classification, Clemen also demonstrates the unifying sensibility which once led him to go beyond Caroline Spurgeon's simple cate- gories in order to relate the subject of imagery to the much broader subject of the play.

To suggest that Clemen has consistently maintained a critical balance between textual study and theorizing is not to say that each essay in his miscellany is of equal value to the student of Shake- speare. The fact that publication dates of the eight selections cover a twenty-year span immediately alerts the reader to suspect that particular statements may have been superseded by later researchers. Clemen, who admits that his words are far from final, even presents specific topics for investigation by other scholars. No doubt critics of the past three decades owe many unfootnoted debts to his stimu- lus. Nevertheless, some full-length treatments of subjects only skimmed by Clemen make the articles less exciting to today's reader than they must have been to earlier audiences. "Appearance and Reality in Shakespeare's Plays," for example, published in German in 1959, contains intriguing comments on self-deception in King Lear. But in 1967 Paul A. Jorgensen's Leafs Self -Discovery went even further by placing the tragedy within the nosce teipsum tradi- tion. Moreover, "Appearance and Reality" (or Schein und Sein) was probably less of a critical cliche before the psychological sixties.

It should be added that the datedness of Clemen's chapters is relieved to some extent by his frequent revision of notes to include

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56 NOTRE DAME ENGLISH JOURNAL

studies not available to him at the time of his first writing. And there are perhaps more important considerations --intended audience, for instance - in determining the usefulness of a given article, "Characteristic Features of Shakespearian Drama," delivered as a lecture on the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and "How to Read a Shakespeare Play," the introduction to a German edition of Shakespeare, are appreciative rather than exploratory works. "Shakespeare and the Modern World," reprinted from Shake- speare Survey, handles a broad idea with broad comments. These three sections, probably the most dispensable of the group to those familiar with Shakespeare, are well placed at the end of the book, just as "Shakespeare's Art of Preparation" -- the longest, most pro- vocative chapter and among the most fully documented - merits its prominent position.

This chapter, the only essay not printed before its appearance in Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, invites extended research into Shake-

speare's techniques of readying the spectators and the preliminary action of his plays for the sequence of events. Clemen concentrates on the effectiveness of the language in eight of the histories and

tragedies, dropping generous hints for future dissertations on non-

linguistic techniques of preparation in the comedies and romances. Of special interest are his remarks on connections between prepara- tion and both the genre of drama and the concept of time; he finds a

growing subtlety in Shakespeare's use of this device, to the extent that, in the later tragedies, preparation may blend with atmosphere, motivation, and even thematic structure.

While Clemen invariably impresses one as a reliable inter-

preter, the reader too must remain a critic. The author's distinctions at times seem slightly distorted to support his premise of the drama- tist's progressive development (see, as one example, the rather cursory dismissal of Titus Andronicus as a "negative proof" on pp. 37-38), though his textual evidence is generally very convincing. A second caution concerns nuances of tone. In "Shakespeare's Art of

Preparation," and to a lesser degree in "Shakespeare's Use of the

Messenger's Report"- a fine examination of the playwright's place in a long dramatic line - readers may be disturbed by his repeated insistence on the presence of irony. Clemen himself points out in

"Shakespeare and the Modern World" that contemporary criticism's "search for irony and ambiguity in Shakespeare's texts seems fre- quently to have been overdone" (pp. 196-97). Usually, as in "Past and Future in Shakespeare's Drama" and "Shakespeare's Solilo-

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quies," he is more sparing with this and with other labels which would relegate him to a particular historical period. "As a rule," says Clemen, "Shakespeare does not raise expectations which are not fulfilled in some way or other" (p. 92). Although most readers will find these essays varying in scholarly worth, Shakespeare' s Dramatic Art in several ways fulfills the expectations aroused by the name of this distinguished critic.

JOAN M. WYLIE

University of Notre Dame

BOOK REVIEWS 57

J. Robert Barth, S. J., ed. Religious Perspectives in Faulkner's Fiction: Y oknapatawpha and Beyond. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972. Pp. 233. $8.95.

We did not need this book, but we will find it useful. I hope this statement does not sound absurdly contradictory, an obnoxious

example of reviewerese. But Harvard Professor Barth has created a collection of critical essays on Faulkner (yet another collection of

essays on Faulkner, to set alongside the several already in print!) which, while it smells somewhat of the fermenting vita, should because of its deliberate topicality eventually find an audience of its own making, hopefully one larger than that of undergraduates pur- suing a theme for a Theme.

Barth has had the good grace to leave alone the most often

anthologized sorts of materials, probably the fringe benefit of the decision to deal exclusively, though broadly, with the "new and fresh encounter between theology and imaginative literature" as it

appears in various disguises in the body of Faulkner's writings. Differing both from single-author treatments of Faulkner which con- cern themselves largely with the "religious aspects of his work," and, on the other hand, from collections of critical essays which do not focus on a single theme, this book, its editor claims, occupies a clear and unique position on the Faulkner-criticism shelf. That narrowly defined, the situation is as he describes it. Is it enough?

The contents include editor Barth' s own "Faulkner and the Calvinist Tradition," reprinted from Thought; Harold J. Douglas and Robert Daniel's "Faulkner's Southern Puritanism," from Tennessee Studies in Literature; and Herbert A. Perluck's "'The Bear': An Unromantic Ending," from Accent. Thus far, well and good: these are interesting and little-known choices. Barth' s own preface attempts to

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