Ibsen's Drama Book

Russ McDonald was one of the greatest Shakespearean scholars of all time. Like R. A. Foakes, and Frank Kermode, and Harold Jenkins, reading McDonald is reading a way to appreciate the words that Shakespeare wrote.

What I found useful was the way he situated Shakespeare in the Renaissance context of his time, while at the same time looking at and gleaming from the plays ideas of how his attitudes toward and use of language developed as he moved from the rhetorical bombast of the Henry Vi plays to the confidence in language in the comedies to the skepticism about it in the tragedies and finally to a greater and renewed appreciation of it in the last plays.

I also tend to think that, with regard to Shakespeare's renewed faith in language and art in the last plays, though Shakespeare wrote his grandest plays in the tragedies, as a dramatic poet he was his finest and richest when he wrote the last plays. The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest are perhaps better as poems than, say, something like King Lear. But that's a subjective judgment. Frank Kermode thought the late language at times obscure. But from my perspective, the opulence and experimentation in the last plays shows Shakespeare going for real emotional resonance and poetic beauty to a greater extent than he did early on. The great tragedies for me are his greatest plays, along with the great comedies and histories. But the last plays show him at his greatest as a poet. Then again, I'm something of a Bardolater when it comes to appreciating Shakespeare as an artist from early to late, showing genius and, if not always pitch-perfect genius, then experiment and skill in what he did (see the Henry VI plays, King John, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII).

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.