The field of Shakespearean studies is cluttered with the fossils of past discussions - recorded in words and phrases like 'character,' 'themes,' 'poetic drama,' 'order,' 'vitality,' 'moral vision' and somehow or other we have to pick our way round them.
In a prefatory dialogue the reader finds himself in the company of those obstructive entities and of their often amiable proponents, here attempting to state a reading of Twelfth Night and failing because of incompatible notions of 'how to read.' The brisk argument that ensues opens questions which have too long been closed.
The four essays in this book, on Hamlet, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, are, in the same spirit, unspecialized, free-ranging and openly argumentative. The authors' lively and entertaining procedure is accounted for, not as a lack of seriousness, but by their understanding that 'comedy is the friend of the serious and seeks to protect it from the preposterous.' Thus the readings are by no means always the familiar ones. The idea that Coriolanus is a thinking man, or that comic inspiration predominates in Hamlet, may surprise at first sight. But the argument is tied at all points to the text and the scene, and can be met, stimulatingly, on that ground.
Shakespeare wrote out of and about a common humanity and it is with humanity, common and uncommon, that we must read or watch him. This book is accordingly addressed as much to the ordinary literate reader or playgoer as to the academic or the student.
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