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Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare

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Kenneth Burke, the great American literary critic and intellectual, has a very original approach to Shakespeare. He takes an anthropological perspective, paying close attention to tragedy's origins in sacrificial ritual. He asks, for example, how and why the tragic protagonist's death is justified for the audience. His approach can also be characterized as rhetorical; he's very interested in the effects of a play in an audience, and how Shakespeare crafts his plays in order to create certain effects. Basically his approach is eclectic: he was also influenced by Freud and Marx (although he criticizes the limitations of both thinkers) and discusses historical and class issues. For example, his essay on Coriolanus discusses the play as a response to the enclosure acts and resulting riots in the early 17th century in England. Coriolanus doesn't fit the traditional tragic paradigm in interesting ways, and Burke discusses Coriolanus as a "grotesque tragedy" and both Coriolanus and Timons of Athens as "scurrilous" heros. Obviously his ideas are hard to summarize.

Burke was not apparently a professional academic (although he held various temporary teaching positions), so he is refreshingly free from critical dogmas. He's very interested in method: there's always a metacritical dimension to his writing, as he reflects not just on the play but also on his critical approach to the play or work. He has a great respect for the actual text of the dramatic work as it was crafted by a writer, performed by an acting company, and received by an audience. I like that he doesn't try to force the work into some critical straightjacket. In his concern for the underlying structure of a work, he could be characterized as a proto-structuralist, although a humanist structuralist, if that is not a contradiction in terms. His style reminds me of Montaigne, the great Renaissance French essayist. Rather than starting with a sharp thesis, he patiently explores the meaning of a work in all its contradictions.

This book includes essays on Hamlet, 12th Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timons, Antony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer's Night Dream, and Macbeth. The essays are collected from various books and articles from Burke's writing career. This book is recommended for anyone who is intellectually curious and interested in Shakespeare's dramatic art.

My introduction to Kenneth Burke was a classmate in graduate school whose enthusiasm was such that we were going to get him a t-shirt to wear to bars that said, "At my first mention of Kenneth Burke, stop serving me." Exposed to different theories of human communication it was Burke's dramatistic approach that appealed to me the most. It is simplistic to say that Burke provides a synthesis of Marx and Freud, but it does suggest the level of his critical thinking, the extent to which it speaks to the human condition, and the reason to despair that he is not considered the equal of that particular pair, especially since he work on rhetoric and aesthetics has more contemporary value. "Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare" gathers and annotates all of Burke's thoughts on Shakespeare, including previously unpublished notes and lectures. The result is not as epic as Harold Bloom's ""Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," but just as insightful on its own terms. You will learn more about the Bard, but probably even more about Burke, which might be even better.

For me the most important essay by Burke has always been "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle," because of the way in which his critique of "Mein Kampf" exposed Hitler as a psychopathic snake oil salesman committed to escalating violence as a means to ignoble ends. However, his essay I have used the most in classes has been "Antony in Behalf of the Play," Burke's critique of "Julius Caesar" that is the third essay collected here. It is a stellar example of synchronic analysis, as Burke looks at how Antony's celebrated funeral oration worked upon Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience, showing how the Bard dictates the reactions of the playgoers almost as precisely as he scripts those of the Roman mob on the stage. Burke pays as much attention to syllables as he does to psychology and works out the dynamic of one of the great scenes (and speeches) of all time. The other dozen essays (nee chapters) collected here include his look at "Hamlet" to develop the relationship between "Psychology and Form" and "'Othello': An Essay to Illustrate a Method," along with looks at "Twelfth Night," "Venus and Adonis," "Timon of Athens," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolanus," "King Lear," "Troilus and Cressida," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and his notes on "Macbeth."

The Editor's Introduction, "Renewing Kenneth Burke's 'plea for the Shakespearean drama,'" is designed to "prove a series of entry-points" to Burke's work and prove "a recursive gathering of different perspectives on what exactly makes his Shakespearean meditations so (demandingly) reward." Following the essays a lengthy Appendix provides a look at "Additional References to Shakespeare in Burke's Writing." This goes all the way back to quoting Flaubert that Shakespeare was "not a man, but a continent," included in the 1921 essay "Three Adepts of 'Pure' Literature" that was republished in "Counter-Statement," and ends with references to "Troilus and Cressida" and "Othello" as examples of the manifestations of the "hierarchal" motive, taken from a 1955 essay published this year in "Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955." The excerpts show Shakespeare was a recurring touchstone in Burke's writing, and also give an indication of the scope of his intellectual grasp.

The story I heard was that Burke dropped out of Columbia University and continued his education by reading everything in the New York Public Library. Certainly this tale is apocryphal, but it is easy enough to believe when you read Burke and he gets going. The lecture that Burke delivered entitled "Shakespeare Was What?", which serves as the introduction to the 13 essays that make up the main part of this volume, not only references over a dozen Shakespeare plays but also works in Aristotle's' "Poetics," the British mathematician George Boole, "The New Criticism" of John Crowe Ransom, a poem by Henry Rago, the German word "Geworfenheit," and sundry other points of reference for his thinking. When you read Burke there will always come a point where his examples will leave you in the dust and send you to your library (or the Internet) scrambling to find a clue so you can try and get back on the same page.

When Daniel Webster gave his last great speech during the Senate debate on the Compromise of 1850, his introduction asked his audience to "Hear me for my cause." Apparently he assumed that most Americans, or at least most educated Americans, would recognize the quote from Brutus' funeral oration in "Julius Caesar," and therefore appreciate the deep sense of irony involved in its usage. I shudder to think of how few Americans today would recognize the quote, but when it comes to keeping up with Burke's encyclopedic knowledge I cannot imagine anyone can really keep up. That is why it is helpful that the essays and excerpts in this book are essentially annotated. Footnotes are reserved primarily by Burke's omissions from each work, the result of having access to the original manuscripts in preparing this edition, while the annotations that make up for the educational gap between Burke and his readers are provided as Notes following the book's Appendix. My preference would have been for the notes to be footnotes, but then I like annotated works as opposed to edited ones. Those who come to this volume looking for Burkeian insights into a particular play will find an Index of Works by Shakespeare before the book's regular Index; there is no breakdown of particular elements play by play, but that will simply compel you to flip through most of the book.

It is interesting that another reviewer found the book narrow as I found myself overwhelmed at first by the breadth. Really, can one edit a volume on Kenneth Burke and produce a simple overview? Even if Professor Newstock had chosen to cover Burke's writings on the Bible, I would guess the material available would have been difficult to summarize for a general audience.

I come from a family that waits each year with eyes fixed on the horizon for the latest Shakespeare books. I was very excited to receive this book in the mail and devoured the lengthy introduction the first day. (Then, I re-read it the second day, because I felt I missed some key points.) I admit that I had never read Kenneth Burke before I came across Newstock's edition. For an outsider, I found the book academic, but readable to a non-specialist. I felt I was able to develop a sense of the rogue Burke from the rich editorial comments. Rather than a dry, chronological biography with clichéd references to Burke's key themes on drama and character development, this book provides a multi-faceted approach to deciphering both Burke the critic and his writings. I felt myself transported through the twentieth century, watching Shakespeare studies evolve (and devolve) through Burke's essays and rebuttals to his work.

Newstock performed an amazing feat by making Burke accessible and relevant without resorting to thinly-veiled hero worship. Because Burke himself seems to have moved through the canon in a nonsystematic approach, shifting narrative and thesis with each essay, I would think it would be hard to edit a coherent volume on his Shakespeare writings. This is where I found the book most valuable, and Newstock's knowledge of the subject matter and crisp writing style most apparent. This is a real edited volume and I recommend it to readers like myself who are not familiar with Kenneth Burke but want to continue their scholarship of Shakespeare and his prime critics. This volume is not narrow but rather rich and expressive and quite readable and enjoyable. It became this year's book present among our family.

All of Kenneth Burke's writings on Shakespeare have been assembled in one place in this book, and even a compendium of brief mentions of Shakespeare, through the assiduous efforts of Scott Newstok. And what a treasure trove it is. As an undergraduate, I remember working my way diligently through Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and A Grammar of Motives and being dazzled by the breadth and depth of this man's thinking. I thought I might have to dust off these volumes in order to approach this collection, but I did not find that necessary. The work stands solidly on its own, touching on Burke's dramatistic analytical approach, but not requiring any special knowledge beyond the scope of the essays themselves. Burke is quirky, and though he has a definite critical system, he is not essentially systematic. These essays range widely, both individually and as a collection. For the Shakespeare scholar, each one is a gem worthy of contemplation; for the neophyte or undergrad, this is a fine book to read piecemeal, on a "need-to-know basis."

From a scholarly perspective, I am most struck by the prescient sensibility of Burke's thinking. His work seems to percolate up through the current generation of literary critics, largely latent and unacknowledged, but there for the perceptive reader to discern. In places a Marxist perspective emerges, as in brief discussions of the enclosure acts, calling to mind H. R. Coursen's The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad. Yet Burke is no doctrinaire Marxist. Elsewhere, insightful psychological approaches both to characters and to the audience's experience of the play emerge. But there is no Procrustean psychological deformation of the works. Most markedly, Burke seems to anticipate many of the new-historical perspectives so prevalent today. In Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, I hear echoes of Burke. Though best known as a rhetorical analyst, the scope of Burke's critical project is made clear in his work on Shakespeare.

For anyone who finds the previous paragraph "inside baseball," do not lose hope. This book is ideal for the beginning and intermediate Shakespeare student as well. Burke's treatment of Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear will provide any student of the Bard's tragedies with fresh perspectives and unique insights into Shakepeare's tragic vision. The essay on Caesar is especially illustrative of the uniqueness of the Burkean approach. In the essay, "Antony in Behalf of the Play," Burke gives a meta-dramatic view of the play through the persona of Marc Antony, exploring the motives of the characters, the playwright, the audience within the play (the crowd), and the audience of the play. "Psychology and Form," the essay on Hamlet, ranges far and wide, offering insight into Burke's extensive knowledge and synoptic approach to literature. Here, he develops a theory of the development and resolution of psychological expectations in an audience and compares this to the listener's expectation of resolution in music (the condition to which all art aspires, as Walter Pater memorably put it).

Burke is a great thinker and a gifted writer. This book does an invaluable service by assembling all of his writing on the greatest writer in English in one place. This is a book that will be treasured by the expert and can teach the student to treasure Shakespeare's work. It is highly recommended.

This work gathers together all of Kenneth Burke's writing on Shakespeare, thirteen major essays and a host of notes and remarks scattered throughout his writings. It contains an introduction by its editor,Scott L. Newstok which explains his own work on the volume, and Burke's general approach to Shakespeare criticism. The book also contains on its back cover laudatory words from among others Harold Bloom and Stephan Greenblat, that is from among the most distinguished literary critics working today.

Burke is an original in his approach to Shakespeare. He focuses often on the opening of the play, and is very concerned with the effect of the play on the audience. He again and again shows how Shakespeare is master playwright creating the effect he wants the work to have on the audience. For Burke whose basic view of drama derives from Aristotle 'action' plays the central role.'Character' is if not subordinated then not given the central place in his analysis as it has in the work of arguably the greatest Shakespearean critic of all A.C. Bradley.

While understanding Burke's brilliance and originality I have never been a strong fan of his writing. I have always found it somewhat difficult and academic. His learning is vast and he makes sudden shifts in his discourse which I find hard to follow. I too find often that the kinds of dramatic questions, the questions relating to how the dramatist achieved the effects he did, are not those which primarily concern me.

However the volume as scholarly collection and edition of Burke's work is comprehensive and carefully referenced. It is a real contribution to Burke scholarship and should be made good use of by all those who take interest in his scholarship.

The most valuable aspect of Scott L. Newstok's recent "Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare" is his inclusion of a talk, delivered by Burke, entitled "Introduction: Shakespeare Was What?," which serves as a useful primer to Burke's system of reading Shakespeare. As the lecture establishes, Burke is ultimately concerned with what literature does (i.e. how it functions). Accordingly, Shakespeare is, in Burke's mind, an artist who "spontaneously knew how to translate some typical tension or conflict of his society into terms of variously interrelated personalities." As Burke explains, Shakespeare's ability "was to let that whole complexity act itself out, by endowing each personality with the appropriate ideas, attitudes, actions, situations, relationships, and fatality" (18). Shakespeare, above all other dramatists, constructs plays in which his characters' engagements with each other constitute the play's movement while dictating meaning to its audience. And Burke, perhaps above all other critics, articulates the anatomy of these engagements for us.

Without a doubt, Burke scholars will find Newstok's compilation of additional references to Shakespeare invaluable. While the sections that Newstok provides can't possibly offer full context, the well-versed Burkean will certainly have the texts in question (A Grammar of Motives, Attitudes Toward History, and so on) at hand. An impressive piece of scholarship, Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare will prove to be an essential work for a variety of audiences, including Shakespearians and Burkeans.

The editor's introduction delivers a very engaging and useful introduction to Burke's work that contextualizes the selections while giving the reader insight on Burke's background and career. The introduction prepares the reader for Burke's style and wit, while situating and commenting upon some of the reasons for Burke's somewhat fringe status in the critical canon and overviews the reception of his commentaries on Shakespeare and their acknowledged and tacit influence in how Shakespeare has been read by others.

Newstock not only did a great job of gathering and situating these scattered essays and bringing together Burke's intent of collecting all of his Shakespearean writings in one place, he also has added a valuable appendix of which offers a nice addition of other prominent discussions of Shakespeare's work in Burke's other writings.

Burke's essays themselves clearly demonstrate his affinity for the works of Shakespeare and to my mind show a level of interaction with the plays that cuts beyond common textual criticism.

Burke throughout draws references to philosophical matters and figures, social and individual psychology, cultural critique, history and also political issues (including biting commentary, such as his asides to the war on Vietnam, as in his King Lear essay). These make his essays even more broadly entertaining and engaging as he is adeptly able to step out of the context of the works in order to bring the Shakespearean works into a broader discussion, and also to play out these external discussions and intellectual considerations in the context of the plays.

Stylistically, Burke proves to be more fun and of broader interest to the non-specialist than one might expect, and for students of Shakespeare, Burke's essays offer a wealth of insight and perspective that will surely spark discussion and reconsideration of the plays themselves.

Kenneth Burke was a restless thinker ever-alert to what makes Shakespeare's plays work. Scott L. Newstok, with admirable bravura in a profession that tends to undervalue the editing of collections, recognized the importance of committing himself to the painstaking project of recovering Burke's writings on Shakespeare. The result is a treasure-trove both of some landmark essays in his career (most notably the 1951 Hudson Review piece on Othello), and also of the bric-a-brac of intellectual history scattered throughout Burke's work from the 1920s through the 1980s. Newstok unearths and reproduces sections that Burke crossed out from a lecture, thus offering windows onto his compositional process. Among other works never fully revised for publication, he edits and annotates the typescript of Burke's response to a graduate student's paper on Troilus and Cressida. As importantly, Newstok gathers what appears to be every excerpt from Burke's lifetime of writing that mentions Shakespeare. The process of obtaining permissions alone is staggering, but it is a further tribute to Newstok' s professional integrity and passion for the project that he gained full cooperation from the Burke estate and the endorsement of surviving family members.

The volume begins with a cogent survey of the key issues and terms (including a glance at Aristotle, "Burke's classical mentor") that played a generative role in Burke's Shakespeare criticism. He ends with suitably terse yet remarkably helpful notes; for example, indicting where precisely in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria we can find the reference to which Burke alludes in passing. Newstok gives sufficient identifying tags of dramatists, writers, philosophers, and artists whom Burke assumed his audience knew, and covers in detail the original settings of the works discussed and, when applicable, where they were printed previously.

This much having been said, the larger question still looms: Do we need so much--indeed all--of Burke's Shakespeare criticism gathered in one place? The answer this volume convincingly urges is: yes. The Editor's Introduction establishes the impressive influence Burke has had on a number of critics and dramatists, as well as on important movements in literary scholarship and dramatic criticism. The claim of kinship to Burke's work is wide and diverse, ranging from Edward Said to Angus Fletcher. In a long note Newstok gives an initial roll call of upward of fifty Renaissance literary scholars who have profitably engaged Burke's work. He goes on to point out that Northrop Frye annexed Burke as one of his antecedents in "the archetypal approach," and Harold Bloom called Burke "my heroic precursor." And yet it is often through indirection that debts to Burke's ideas are acknowledged. Buried in a footnote, for example, Stephen Greenblatt tellingly relates: "As so often happens, I discovered that Burke's brilliant sketch had anticipated the shape of much of my argument."

In part this reluctance to give Burke pride of place in one's own scholarly work is the result of the unmistakably Burkean tone and trajectory of thought to be found in his often idiosyncratic approach. Unlike literary critics who develop systems that others dutifully can follow, Burke does not leave a coherent methodology, notwithstanding his "Pentadic analysis" and his, at times, deeply moving readings of Shakespearean scenes. Rather readers receive insights--the kinds that he left for a general audience rather than a coterie of the initiated. Although he "appreciated the favorable attention from academia," finally he was more concerned with inspiring "others to join his ecstatic readings of Shakespeare, and gain contact with the energy at the heart of Shakespeare's plays."

One example illustrates just how useful having access to these essays can be, especially in a properly edited edition. Recently when teaching Timon of Athens to undergraduates, I turned to Burke's typical mode of beginning an investigation as presented in Newstok's book. It supplied just the heuristic jump-start required: "First, let's force ourselves to decide exactly what Timon of Athens is about." Written originally as the introduction to an edition of Timon, Burke intelligently recounted the main strokes of the play, act by act. He then treated the main characters in turn and examined their function in the drama: "Apemantus serves to keep the play from falling simply into contrasted halves." He also considered relations among the sexes, showing how women in this play function "only in a supernumerary capacity." That there are only courtesans and no mothers, sisters, or wives, fits well with Burke's judgment on Timon as "an almost brutally end-of-the-line character, his life coming to a close in rabid talk of total human rot." The one moment of pity, supplied by the faithful retainer Flavius, is a touch that Burke sees as "quite Shakespearean, at least in the sense that a Shakespearean tragedy has a scene that softens the audience with tears of pity just before the final outbreak of victimage." He compares Flavius speech instructively to Desdemona's willow song, a connection discussed at greater length in Chapter Six, Burke's landmark essay on Othello (another reason why it is good to have all of these essays collected in one volume). When all is said and done, Burke is a reliable and subtle expositor of Shakespeare's plays.

The second part of this essay turns to consider the nature of Timon as a dramaturgic invention. With all of the rigor shown in his Rhetoric of Religion (1961), Burke explores "invective," "lamentation," and "praise" seen as "the three freedoms." Fortunately Newstok restores paragraphs apparently excised by Burke's editor, Francis Ferguson. These are instructive paragraphs indeed, as they make clear why these three are linked and how they help explain the ineluctable humane movement charted out in Timon of Athens. Granting the disputation of authorship, Burke makes a solid case for Timon's "radicalism"--in its usual, literal, and etymological senses--and concludes that, although it "is not pretty," it is "extremely thorough."

Likewise Burke is thorough and radical in his approach to the plays as a whole. He covers all of the chief topical issues and he seeks to dig to the root of things that often remain undetected by virtue of alluring speeches and the fast-paced sweep of a drama's action. Consequently this is a book that should be placed next to The Riverside Shakespeare on one's bookshelf. As a teacher I anticipate returning to it often, especially when sorting out what should go into an introductory lecture on a given play. And it is for this same reason that people outside the academy will want to have ready access to Burke as well: he gets to the bottom of things.

An iconoclastic American intellectual, the late Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) was an exceptional and prolific literary critic whose writings and commentaries were respected -- even by those who occasionally disagreed with either his assumptions and conclusions. In the pages of "Kenneth Burke On Shakespeare", academician Scott L. Newstok (Assistant Professor of English, Gustavus Adolphus College, and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University) has gathered together under one cover all of Burke's Shakespeare literary criticism (including previously unpublished notes and lectures) that had such wide-spread influence on his contemporaries. Drawn from a profusion of sources, including literary magazines, academic journals, Newstok has accomplished a truly impressive task of research and recovery. The result is a compendium of analytical commentaries on Shakespearean dramas and comedies. Enhanced with the inclusion of an appendix (Additional References to Shakespeare in Burke's Writings), extensive notes, and 'Index of Works by Shakespeare', and a general index, "Kenneth Burke On Shakespeare" is a welcome and enthusiastically recommended addition to academic library Shakespearean Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

This book is extremely interesting because it collects what can be considered as all Kenneth Burke's writings on Shakespeare. This single fact makes this book an indispensable source of information if you are interested both in Kenneth Burke and Shakespeare. What's more the editing is very careful and rich because the editor systematically adds, in his notes, the variants and cut off passages of these texts that you could not find in standard editions. His end-notes provide you with all translations of foreign phrases and the references of all books or quotations in Kenneth Burke's text. All that makes the book easy to use and rich. Kenneth Burke was an essential character in criticism (he started with music and then moved to textual works), but also beyond this an essential actor in the definition and setting up of post-modernism. He was one of the best as for deconstructing received ideas or texts and reconstructing them along an open line that was also extremely original. So you may have great expectations when entering this volume. But do not push your expectations too far. Strangely enough all these studies, articles, monographs or notes, apart from a very few side remarks, are dealing with only the dramatic approach of the plays, hence with one side of Kenneth Burke's contributions, i.e. dramatism. Kenneth Burke considered that Shakespeare's plays were to be dealt with only from this point of view because they were fundamentally dramas. It is well-done, open-minded and open-ended, definitely deconstructing (post-modern critics may say today queering) some received ideas. But why did Kenneth Burke not use the clustering method he advocates in other books and particularly when he studies religious texts like Genesis or Saint Augustine. Here he does not deal with Shakespeare's poetry, his music that develops on a basic binary - iambic - equilibrium systematically disturbed by the ternary rhythm of the inconstant moon or the thrice-crowned goddess. that can unite Hecate, Selene, and Diana under one head, death and life, night and day, moon and sun, all of these together. He would have discovered that starting with sounds and rhythm Shakespeare moves to words, syntax, images, semantics, symbols and even more cabalistic numbers that can unite and identify a play. Richard III is nine. Antony and Cleopatra is eleven, etc. In other words he misses the stylistic grammar of the very language of the play that supports and even inspires the dramatic architecture. Why did not Kenneth Burke use his own concept of "grammar" to approach Shakespeare's style? Because probably he was only interested in the dramatic side of the plays. So, though this book under review is essential, we definitely have to get into Burke's other books, particularly when he deals with logology, the grammar of motives or the Rhetoric of Motives. It might also be necessary to widen the scope to understand how Kenneth Burke is a keystone in the vault of modern and post-modern thinking, he who never had a stable permanent university position, though he got his work through nicely. But he might have been more productive if he had had the chance to be on a campus for twenty years. The hunting for publishers and the small format of articles in journals would have become marginal, which it was not in his own time.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne