Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans

John Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. ix + 266, hb. £40, ISBN: 0199248516Collections of academic writings that call themselves 'essays' do not always precisely deserve the title, but the pieces in this gathering across ten years of John Kerrigan's work epitomise the form. Taut and provocative, they are born of a deep and detailed knowledge of canon and context; elegant, witty and resonant, they respond to intellectual pressure as readily as the writings they investigate. Related to each other formally, and by the period of which they treat, the essays however speak in individual and discrete voices, their disparate destinations informed by disparate points of departure, their tenor tuned intrinsically to the work in hand.Alignments of this kind have been a distinguishing feature of Kerrigan's work over the last fifteen years. Strange bedfellows enlighten each other in his ambitious 1996 study, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, and the largely chronological journey through the essays in the present collection recalls this predilection for making strange through the motif of achronological juxtaposition. As the collection unfolds, there is evidence of an increasing impatience with overly prescriptive approaches, and this is where the thorough assimilation of the essay form comes into its own. By writing at once precisely and provocatively, requiring and then rewarding an enormous degree of concentration from the reader, Kerrigan reveals through enactment as well as description the 'process of individual but self-consciously communicative reading' (p. 132) on the part of both writer and reader.His quite astonishing ability to work a wide range of forms into a meaningful pattern is almost belied by the fluency and delicacy of the prose itself. But regularly, the precise alignment of style and statement makes the reader pause crucially. For example, in Shakespeare as Reviser (1987), the prose quietly enacts and adumbrates the observation:'I should be wise, for honestie's a foole', Iago says, 'And looses that it workes for:' halfline pause, characteristic of his methods:I see sir, you are eaten vp with passion,I doe repent me that I put it to you,You wou'd be satisfied.Oth. Would, nay, I will. (14)Kerrigan argues for considered revisions, Shakespeare as 'a poet willing to engage with his own work critically, as reader and rethinker' (9). As he carefully shows how the adjustment of a single word or of the rhythm of a phrase sends resonant repetitions across a revised play, or even from play to play across the canon, his own choice of vocabulary subtly intimates a similar ear for his own writing, or a tacit admission of subjectivity, as when, discussing the power of the pronoun, he observes, 'Desdemona's wedding sheets switch distressfully from 'our' to 'my

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Renaissance Literature and Culture · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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