|
COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays by Nicholas Marsh. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pp. x-280. Cloth $60.00; Paper $18.95.
The first question that comes to mind while reading Nicolas Marsh's new book Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays, is who is his audience. As part of a series called "analyzing texts," it appears to be addressing readers who have no experience whatsoever with reading literature. As Marsh says in the "General Editor's Preface," "This series is dedicated to one clear belief: that we can all enjoy, understand and analyse literature for ourselves, provided we know how to do it." This is an admirable goal, and the insights and methodologies of analysis offered on the "problem plays" might be helpful to the inexperienced reader. Certainly the strategies of the "old new criticism" continue to be a good way to begin. In his introduction, which pays substantial tribute to E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's Problem Plays (1950)--tribute that is later reinforced as Tillyard becomes one of the five critics discussed in detail--Marsh also acknowledges more recent approaches to these plays, such as the concern for their cultural, material contexts and the concern for performance. He, however, makes very little use of these approaches. Although he stresses that these are plays and therefore must be conceived of "as a performance" (3), he offers little insight as to how performance is an interpretive endeavor. The introduction also gives a bare-bones "handbook" explanation of blank verse, iambic pentameter, caesurae, couplets, and imagery. This study then is divided into part 1: "Analysing Shakespeare's Problem plays" and part 2: "The Context and the Critics."
Part 1 consists of six chapters; the first is called "Openings" and provides excerpts or extracts from the first scenes of All's Well that Ends Well (1, i, 23-68), Measure for Measure (1, i, 1-52), and Troilus and Cressida (1, i, 1-38). Marsh notes the discordant exchange of the opening of All's Well that signals that "something is missing in the relationship between mother and son" and that Bertram "discounts the Countess: as a woman, she is not important--her feelings and her life are treated as of no consequence, while his father, and the King are significant to him" (14). Since the issue of wardship is conspicuous in the opening, one might expect some discussion of the abuses pertaining to it at the time of the play's composition, but Marsh ignores Marilyn Williamson's excellent analysis of this matter. (1) The excerpt presents us with "characters who are cut off from each other by disparate wishes and misunderstandings .... the audience's expectations are quickly and repeatedly undermined. We are likely to feel destabilized by this play, which begins by throwing riddles at us, then striking off in a new direction before we have had time to digest, let alone solve, them" (16). The dominant impression generated by this extract is "one of uncertainty." In sharp contrast, Measure for Measure opens not with a dying king but with the Duke in...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
