Abstract
Criticism too often consists in filtering out pleasure in the pursuit of meaning, in reducing poems to their lowest common denominator (‘life vs. death’), in counting how many images had Lady Macbeth. I would rather analyse delight. Shakespeare was, as Dr Johnson complained, ‘much more careful to please than to instruct’. His plays move and delight us still; I want to know how we are delighted, how we are moved, from unique moment to unique moment. For, though the pleasure of a single moment may depend upon the preparations of an hour, our pleasure remains a function of that lone moment. Therefore I am first interested in the immediacy of Shakespeare’s art, not its unity. (Cardboard boxes have unity; unity does not make them interesting.) Or rather, I am interested in unity only in so far as it contributes to the pleasures of the single moment. Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen that she was, of all great artists, the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.1 I want to catch Shakespeare in the act.
Bad commentators spoil the best of books So God sends meat (they say), the devil cooks
Benjamin Franklin ‘Poor Richard’ (1735)
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at Sixty’, The Nation, 15 Dec 1923, 433; repr. in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt, Twentieth Century Views (1963) p. 15. (The phrase quoted does not appear in the version of this essay in The Common Reader.)
References to Julius Caesar and Henry V are keyed to the Oxford Shakespeare edns, by A. R. Humphreys and myself, respectively; for all other plays I adopt the line references of The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (1974), though I have modernized them myself. The texts of King Lear create special problems, which I discuss below.
Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, trs. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (1951). For a summary of this aspect of this difficult book, see Susanna Millar, The Psychology of Play (1968) pp. 50–1.
Ian M. L. Hunter, Memory, rev. edn (1964) p. 78.
M. D. Vernon, The Psychology of Perception, 2nd edn (1971) pp. 149, 166.
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (1981) pp. 33–62. In my Oxford Shakespeare edn of Henry V (1982), I suggested that the disparities in interpretation noted by Professor Rabkin ‘probably tell us more about the nature of discursive literary criticism’ than about the play (p. 1). Amusing confirmation of this conjecture has been supplied by reviews of the edition. As the dustjacket itself proclaims, I argue ‘for a complex view of Shakespeare’s presentation of Henry’; yet one reviewer (Glasgow Herald, 2 Oct 1982) accuses me of being ‘Henry’s apologist’, while another claims that I ‘prefer’ ar ‘unsympathetic presentation of Henry’ ( Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 Nov 1982). In this case there can be no doubt about the author’s intentions, since these reviewers are talking about my intentions, not Shakespeare’s; yet the two reviewers, standing at opposite ideological poles, interpreted my equator in radically different ways.
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© 1985 Gary Taylor
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Taylor, G. (1985). Passing Pleasures. In: Moment by Moment by Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07544-7_1
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