Back to the Classics #12

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Shakespeare - Mark Van Doren

This collection of short essays on Shakespeare's poems and plays was released in 1939. Mark Van Doren as a critic was new to me, since I only knew him as a disappointed father due to the trouble his son Charles walked into during the infamous quiz show scandal.

Mark Van Doren was a literature professor at Columbia from 1920 to 1959. He was a poet too, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his verse in 1940. This book in fact starts with an examination of the Bard’s poetry. Poets are as tough on each other as artists are tough on each other when they are not discreet or coy. He says, "The poems of Shakespeare are seldom perfect. The songs that shoot like stars across his plays are brightest at the beginning, and often burn out before the end." This too is interesting:

"Shakespeare's poetry is idiot-pure …. Seldom is it being written for its own sake, as if poetry were the most precious thing in the world. To Shakespeare it was apparently not that. The world was still more precious - the great one he never forgot, and the little one in which he knew how to imprison its voice and body. What he dealt in was existence."

Van Doren goes over the plays in their chronological order. I’m not a Shakespeare expert so who I am to take issue with his takes on plays? Here are some quotations so the reader can decide for herself whether this book is right.

Re The Merchant of Venice

"Shylock is so alien to the atmosphere of the whole, so hostile and in his hostility so forceful, that he threatens to rend the web of magic happiness woven for the others to inhabit. But the web holds, and he is cast out. If the world of the play has not all along been beautiful enough to suggest its own natural safety from such a foe, it becomes so in a fifth act whose felicity of sound permits no memory of … long knives whetted on the heel."

Re little appreciated Coriolanius

“The movement of Coriolanus is rhetorical …. Shakespeare is interested in the character and the situation, but he is conscious of being interested…. The writing has a steady, dogged strength which the judicial critic may admire; but it has its limits, and there are clearly defined a list of the things Shakespeare has taken out in talk…. Coriolanus is a tragic hero whom we listen to and learn about entirely in his public aspect…. His character is of that clear kind which calls for statement; but in poetry and drama statement is one of the obscurer mediums…. Coriolanus remains - a strange thing for Shakespeare - cold, and its hero continues until his death to be a public man whom we are not.”

Van Doren probably wrote this book for college students, not other scholars, because the writing style is vigorous and pleasant to read even for us non-experts. So getting something out of this book would be readers who looking for appreciations of Shakespeare on the order of Anthony Burgess’ affectionate if fanciful biography Shakespeare.