Reviews for American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850-1880, Vol. 64

The average rating for American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850-1880, Vol. 64 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-17 00:00:00 Ruth Korn Shakespeare's Reading (2000) is a practical, orderly, academic book. It never wavers from its defined task: to describe the influence of certain literatures on Shakespeare's work. Such a disciplined approach to the topic is useful because, as we have no explicit historical evidence of Shakespeare having ever owned or read a single book, the subject must be broached with rigorous hypotheses. The paucity of records is typical: thus Shakespeare scholarship almost always involves some imagination - informed guesses. Miola draws his conclusions based on very close reading and an impressive familiarity with Shakespearean performance history, from the early-modern stage to the postmodern screen. His well considered interpretations of the plays help make this rather programmatic book entertaining. Its programmed nature, though, does save it from gratuitous digression. Shakespeare's Reading opens with a concise survey of Elizabethan reading practices which quietly underpins the whole book. Here Miola emphasizes the Renaissance ideal of imitatio (manipulating classical sources without fear of "plagiarism"), aural sensitivity to verse, and the messy infancy of printing. Early modern literates read analogically, he says - that is, they did not read a text in isolation, but constantly sought parallels in a nexus of canonical texts (i.e. the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Latin classics). There was also a widespread didactic tendency: writers and publishers tried to mediate readers' ethical interpretations of works through prefaces and commentary. Shakespeare could not escape this moralizing idiom, but he played with it, always introducing ambiguities. Sketching out Shakespeare's reading practices turns out to be a very pragmatic approach to defining him (a task which centuries of idolatry has made daunting to many). He was not divinely inspired; he was a man, who lived for a defined period, who read a limited number of books based on their limited accessibility. Like most every writer, he wrote because he read. In fact, his writing, though informed by live events, can be seen as a consequence of his reading, as an extension of it. Proceeding thus, it is easy to say what Shakespeare's literary imagination was not: it was not Scandinavian, African, American, or Eastern European. It was Greek, Roman, Italian, French, British, and somewhat Spanish. We can safely guess that he read, for instance, Plutarch, Ovid, Ariosto, and Montaigne, most of them in translation. It is a strange relief to narrow down the scope of this creative behemoth. Miola goes on to survey Shakespeare's poems, histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances in light of their source texts. While some works draw heavily on their sources (e.g. The Merchant of Venice), others seem to have been born without direct sources (e.g. The Tempest). Although many of the play-specific revelations are intriguing, the real meat of the book lies in the general conclusions drawn from the analyses. Miola numbers ten fascinating takeaways in his conclusion (Here I quote and comment in brackets): 1. Shakespeare reads competitively [a factor of imitatio]. 2. Shakespeare reads eclectically [freely combining diverse sources]. 3. Shakespeare focuses on dramatic character in his reading. 4. Shakespeare expands the roles of women from his sources. 5. Shakespeare romanticizes eros and focuses on love [softening the brute eroticism of some sources]. 6. Shakespeare increases the ethical and intellectual complexity of his sources [which is why we read him more than, say, Plautus]. 7. Shakespeare adds to sources comic characters and subplots [ironizing, satirizing revered source material]. 8. Shakespeare emphasizes contrasts in locality [often improving upon sources by multiplication]. 9. Shakespeare reads retentively and reminiscently [certain allusions reappear often]. 10. Shakespeare reads experimentally and defiantly [devoid of the idolatrous devotion with which many modern critics have handled him]. In short, Shakespeare's reading practice seems to support or supply the strengths of his creative practice: transcendent plurality, clever irreverence, and profound emotional drama. This study is productive because it is practical. However, it also raises some murky theoretical questions. Mainly: how to define "reading" in this context? And how to define "sourcing"? Shakespeare worked within a mostly oral medium in a mostly oral culture. How could we possibly account for all the influence of auditory material ("orature") on his work? And at what point does material stop qualifying as a "source" (if we were to make a spectrum of "sourced-ness" beginning with direct quotation, followed by reproduction of content, then summary, then reworking, then verbal echo, then a reproduced general sense, a je-ne-sais-quoi…)? Miola's devoted pragmatism is a pose which assumes the primacy of a certain kind of reading and sourcing - but it is a useful pose. In the end, we often must resign ourselves to safe, responsible hypotheses about the bard's life and mind. But thankfully, such practical work can help us dream of wilder possibilities with more conviction.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-07 00:00:00 Julia Nelson If you want to know more about Shakespeare but you don't want to read a long book, this is probably more worthwhile than most of those "little introduction to Shakespeare" books. You learn way more about Shakespeare as an artist and jobbing-playwright here than you would from a biography or overview of his "times." Miola really knows Shakespeare AND his sources, so you see what choices Shakespeare made, what he invented, what he cribbed, and how he worked. Almost every play is discussed in about 2-3 pages each, with the proper respect for genre and audience. Highly recommended.