The Stupefied Bystander: Complicity in 'The Taming of the Shrew'?

Various therapies have been applied to Katherina's final speech on the duty of wives to husbands, and especially to its conclusion: Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, And place your hands below your husband's foot. In token of which duty, if he please, My hand is ready, may it do him ease. According to different stage traditions, the actress may motivate Katherina by showing her falling in love with Petruchio at first sight, or by delivering the speech with a wink to the audience. Other options are to take it as the ritual fulfilment of the 'shrew' plot, conducted in a spirit of farce; or to see Katherina as an example of the battered wife; or to detect a bawdy innuendo in 'My hand is ready, may it do him ease'. The speech can of course be taken 'straight', as endorsing Pauline and Renaissance conceptions of the proper subordination of women. If this is indeed its intent, it is odd that everywhere else in his work Shakespeare's heroines should be so spirited and so enterprising. I incline to the view of those who sense some kind of game going on between Katherina and Petruchio, and I believe the evidence for collusion is stronger than has been recognized

The Uncomprehending Narrator in 'The Ancient Mariner'

In an article in Sydney Studies in English in 1982, G. L. Little revisited the question of the 'moral' of The Ancient Mariner, with the dissonant impressions given by the narrative and the gloss, and remarked 'Perhaps the Mariner himself understands least of all.' This note takes up the issue of the degree of that understanding. It is concerned with the poem as it appeared in 1798, at the threshold of Lyrical Ballads. The mariner belongs in the company of the Female Vagrant, the Mad Mother, the Convict and other examples of 'low and rustic life' who appear in that volume, and his functions as narrator are best understood in that context

Unconscious Motives in Jane Austen's 'Emma'

The words 'unconscious' and 'unconsciously' occur twenty times in Jane Austen's six novels, with various levels of meaning. The simplest instance is the 'unconscious Marianne' of Sense and Sensibility (p. 333), unconscious because she has fallen asleep. The word is applied in a similar way to the trees of Norland Park, in "Marianne's romantic imaginings about them after her departure: 'you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!'(p. 27) When Catherine Morland is despatched so unceremoniously from Northanger Abbey, and the post-chaise passes the turning to Woodston, she thinks of Henry Tilney 'so near, yet so unconscious' (p. 230), and her grief and agitation are excessive. In these instances 'unconscious' means inert, or unaware, or lacking the capability of awareness. On other occasions it applies to a state of abstraction, or of absorption in other things

'The Mill on the Floss' as Moral Fable?

"For if you think so highly of Middlemarch, then, to be consistent, you must be more qualified in your praise of the early things than persisting convention recognizes. Isn't there, in fact, a certain devaluing to be done?" F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition Allowing that the strong autobiographical element in The Mill on the Floss is inseparable from "the vividness, the penetration, and the irresistible truth of the best of the book", Dr Leavis argues that it is responsible also for "disastrous weaknesses in George Eliot's handling of her themes",1 Following his habit of regarding any novel as somehow a test of the self-control of the writer behind it, he finds here an occasion of "that kind of direct presence of the author which has to be stigmatized as weakness" (p. 44), and an identification of George Eliot with Maggie Tulliver through which the author's intelligence is overwhelmed by her feelings. "When George Eliot touches on these given intensities of Maggie's inner life the vibration comes directly and simply from the novelist, precluding the presence of a maturer intelligence than Maggie's own" (p. 54). The greatest admirer of The Mill on the Floss would concede its unevenness, as George Eliot herself did. Even in Middlemarch the St Theresa passages will coexist with the fine irony of the scene of Dorothea and Celia dividing the jewels. But is the presentation of Maggie Tulliver really so out of control

'The Tempest' and the Discourse of Colonialism

If the study of Shakespeare itself can be viewed as an act of cultural imperialism, a play like The Tempest can readily be seen as a text which is complicit with colonial power. Prospero is the usurping invader, nervous about the legitimacy of his rule, and Caliban is the representative of the subjugated race, his language lessons seen as an attempt to eradicate his own culture, or to bring it under imperialist control. The best way of entry into this debate is still Stephen Greenblatt's essay of 1976, 'Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century', though its implications may not yet have been fully grasped

A Note on the Use of Landscape in 'Persuasion'

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older'. Apt enough as a history of Anne Elliot, this account has been made to embrace Persuasion itself, and the development of Jane Austen's art as a novelist. Everyone would agree that Persuasion is a novel in which the heroine's consciousness comes to pervade the narrative, that it is marked by a new romantic feeling, and that it displays a more sensitive response to landscape. Yet the walk across the autumn fields at Uppercross, so focal to all these concerns, continues to be very vaguely characterized. It has been referred to as 'Anne's meditation on the decline of the year and happiness, youth and hope', although no 'meditation' takes place; it has been seen as presenting an 'intimate sense of landscape', although this intimacy is not easy to find in the text; and when is is described as a 'nearly lyric episode', resembling 'an Ode to Autumn in three stanzas', we may wonder if Jane Austen is becoming soft in the head. Although much of the point of view in Persuasion may be surrendered to Anne Elliot, the narrator retains a firm ironical control

The Narrator of 'Brighton Rock'

On re-reading Brighton Rock after an interval of over thirty years, I found myself being preoccupied by the narrative method. This would be partly a residual effect of the 'thriller', the mode in which the novel began, with Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps as Greene's exemplar of the genre. In later years Greene was apt to shrug off the 'thriller' element, claiming that 'the first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story', but of course the thriller 'plot' continues to direct the narrative, through the bet on Black Boy, the chance photographing of Spicer, and Ida's encounters with Cubitt, Colleoni and Dallow. Brighton Rock is still a detective novel to the point when Pinkie plunges over the cliff, although by then we are looking to other outcomes from the narrative. The book that had been styled 'An Entertainment' on the title-page of the first Penguin edition had been removed from that category by its author by the time of the Collected Edition of 1970

The "Compulsive Course" of 'Othello'

One tendency in Othello criticism in the twentieth century has culminated in an image of the Moor as "a kind of dazed, unhappy bull with Iago as a clever matador dancing round him". This shows the continuing effect of the Bradleyan anxiety about where, in Shakespearean tragedy, the "responsibility" for the outcome is to be fixed, and how the blame is to be apportioned. Critics examining Othello from these premises have found the Moor only too accountable for the disaster that overtakes him. Even the apportionment of responsibility between himself and Iago has turned to Othello's disadvantage, with Dr Leavis concluding that the secret of Iago's power is that "he represents something that is in Othello . . . the essential traitor is within the gates". The implication of this view, logically pursued, would be to cancel Othello from the list of Shakespearean tragedies. It would become the sordid chronicle of an ignoble figure who eventually meets the death he deserves. While this may be an accurate account of the tale Shakespeare found in Cinthio, I hesitate to apply it to the vastly different play he created from that material

The Dual Reading of 'Paradise Regained'

In discussing the incarnate Christ in the De Doctrina Christiana, Milton argues that Christ was at the same time completely human and completely divine, and that while these two natures were individually distinct, they were also indissolubly united. This doctrine, he says, 'is generally considered by theologians as, next to the Trinity in Unity, the greatest mystery of our religion'. It has continued to perplex critics of Paradise Regained. Some have seen the Christ of the poem as fluctuating between the two natures, or as being supported by his divinity at moments of crisis; others have seen him as exploring his own nature, and coming to realize or assert his divinity on the pinnacle of the temple, in the utterance 'Tempt not the Lord thy God'; there is a general tendency to look at least for some kind of psychological progression in the poem, with Christ 'undergoing a genuine adventure of testing and self-discovery' . I wish to argue in the first place that the Christ of Paradise Regained experiences the entire action in his human nature alone. While theologically he never ceases to be divine - and how this can be so is 'the greatest mystery of our religion' - we are to abandon any notion that the Christ undergoing the temptations in the wilderness has his divinity as a resource to call upon, that he need only snap his fingers to convert from the one nature to the other. He is the second Adam whose perfect obedience is to repair the deficiencies of the first, and it is only in his human nature that he can do this, with only the same equipment as other men

'Excellent Dissembling': A View of 'Anthony and Cleopatra'

'To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether on stage or in the study, is surely an error'. Bradley made this judgement on Anthony and Cleopatra in a lecture in 1905, after he had excluded it from Shakespearean Tragedy. His lecture may be read as an attempt to justify the exclusion. Why is Anthony and Cleopatra different from Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth? Why does Shakespeare present no 'inward struggle' in Anthony before he decides to return from Rome to Egypt? Why is there a 'sadness of disenchantment' at the end of it all, mingled with the 'reconciliation' that we might properly feel? Bradley's perplexity has been shared by later critics, some pointing to the contradictions in the source material, or to Shakespeare's questioning of the heroic, or to his attempt to move across the frontier of tragedy into some new dramatic terrain. Recent criticism has diagnosed an 'ironic gap' in Anthony and Cleopatra, so that 'word and action seldom coalesce' in the play, and 'the vows, the dreams, the ideals, the evocation through speech of human greatness in the characters are at odds with what we are allowed to see in their behaviour'. There is no one way of accounting for these different impressions. But there is an element in the play which certainly contributes to them, though it has not itself been particularly remarked