Free English Literature Dissertations - 182) Of The Drama Of The Play, Driving Hamlet, Say, From The Opening
182) of the drama of the play, driving Hamlet, say, from the opening conversational scene between Marcellus and Barnardo to the passionate eloquence of its title character in his confrontation with the Ghost. In the face of the Romantic rejection of the neo-classical unities, a new ‘unity of interest’ (Angela Esterhammer in Newlyn p.147) is proposed and Coleridge, during the course of his critiques of Shakespeare seems to move from a process of highlighting favourite passages to an attempt to find that ‘idea’ that inspires and is woven through each play. Coupled with this is a nascent form of psychological analysis of individual characters which, although in places strikingly similar to that used by theatrical practitioners of the Stanislavski and Method schools, always stresses Shakespeare’s skill as an artist in not merely slavishly copying nature, but closely observing it in order to create something founded in nature, but filtered through his own mind and poetic perspective, since
we see all things in him, as Images in a lakeonly more splendid, more glorified
(in Foakes vol. I p.528),
and
in the plays of Shakespeare, every man sees himself[as] a figure of gigantic proportions and of such elevated dignity that he only knows it to be himself by the similarity of action.
(in Hopkins p.111).
Both the Restoration and Romantic periods were ones of socio-political foment, the former in England itself, the latter in the English colonies and mainland Europe. Both produced radically different responses to Shakespeare; the former most obviously in the adapted plays of Dryden, a critique to be actively performed in the name of Shakespeare, and the latter most obviously in the extensive marginalia and notations of Coleridge, to be read as a concomitant to the ‘authentic’ Shakespearean text in the study. Both were highly distinctive forms of interpretative criticism engendered, as has been discussed, not only by the specific political conditions of the time, but also by the development of the theatre, the influence of other literary schools (such as the French neo-classicists) and a gradually increasing veneration for the concept of Shakespeare as a if not the defining figure in English literature and history. Every age will, undoubtedly, take a new stance on the criticism, analysis and staging of the Shakespearean canon, but every age is, in turn, influenced by the schools of the past. Nowhere is this clearer at the current time than Shakespeare’s fixed position in the school curriculum where, Coleridge-like, he is immovably fixed as a text to be studied and annotated.
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