Berrymans Shakespeare by John Berryman

Author:John Berryman [Berryman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Shakespeare
ISBN: 9781860646430
Google: POApkE6I1qkC
Amazon: 1860646433
Publisher: Tauris Parke Paperbacks
Published: 2001-05-15T14:13:54+00:00

COMMENTARY

MY FIRST MAIN PURPOSE in commentary will be to elucidate the text, which is likely to differ a good deal in the end from the received texts and will need at least in its new parts new treatment. Some familiar passages have never been satisfactorily explained. Others have been explained only in remote corners of unread books and dead magazines—material which wants sifting, condensing, assembling for readers of the play. Elucidation takes two principal forms, answering two questions: What does the text mean? and What is happening? Notes answering the first question will deal with Shakespeare’s language, grammar, phrasing, imagery, reference, symbolism. Notes answering the second will deal with the events of the play, with locality and time, with action on the stage (both Shakespeare’s and the modern stage), with other theatrical matter when necessary, with character when necessary; the general interests of Bradley and Granville-Barker, among modern critics, will define this range. Both kinds of explanatory notes will appear with the textual notes below the lines of text on the page; there will be no separate glossary. A reader, when he wants a question answered, wants it answered at once.

With broader literary or aesthetic interpretation—my second purpose—the case is different; a reader interested in such notes knows the play already, and they can be printed together at the end of the volume. Criticism of the play’s structure, style, imaginative design, essential struggle, essential meaning—at present scattered—can there be ordered and made accessible. I do not plan an omnibus like H. H. Furness’s New Variorum edition of 1880. I expect to find the criticism of King Lear which is of the first order for penetration and justice and power can be brought into a reasonable compass. The space which Furness expended in his desire to represent the history of Shakespearean taste and opinion, and which W. J. Craig, for instance in his Arden edition, expended in a mass of illustrative quotations, will be saved for such things as the remarks of Coleridge—to my mind the greatest of all Shakespearean critics—whose writings on Shakespeare were for the first time intelligently collected in 1930. How many readers of King Lear will buy or look out in libraries for those astonishing and expensive volumes? Between the monster of Furness and the admirable bare small editions done for the Clarendon Press by G. S. Gordon (unluckily he did not reach Lear) there is a middle ground in commentary which I mean to find and explore.

The Introduction will consist of five sections: (1) general; (2) textual; (3) the date of composition; (4) Shakespeare’s literary sources for the play, with some account of their unimportance and their treatment by him; (5) the stage history of King Lear. I may include a short discussion of the Elizabethan playhouses and of Shakespeare’s English. One matter usually ignored in editions of single plays I intend to treat at length: Shakespeare’s situation and his thought, his life, during the years immediately preceding the composition of King Lear in 1605–6.

1944

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