Shakespeare and the Ritualists

Gilbert Murray began his pioneer study of myth and ritual in Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet and Orestes’ (1914), by describing the reactions of two friends to whom he had shown his lecture: ‘one friend has assured me that everyone knew it before; another has observed that most learned men, sooner or later, go a little mad on some subject or other, and that I am just about the right age to begin.’ Since then, these contradictory criticisms of the approach Murray was inaugurating have been echoed many times. Philip Edwards, for example, has pronounced such interpretations of Shakespeare’s last plays to be ‘banal, trite, and colourless’ ( Shakespeare Survey II, p. II), while William T. Hastings has found comparable interpretations in Myth in the Later Plays of Shakespeare to be forced, ingenious, startling, and lacking ‘a sense of the ridiculous’ ( Shakespeare Quarterly , July 1950). Certainly there have been extravagances. Yet Murray was only the first in a long line of critics—both original and sane—who have found ritualistic qualities in Shakespeare; and, although it may be too soon to say that ‘the use of anthropological methods has come to be taken for granted’, there are signs that these findings are receiving scholarly acceptance. The myth and ritual approach has thrown light on Shakespeare’s histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances, illuminating lines, scenes, characters, rhythms and patterns of action, plays, groups of plays, and his whole ‘idea of a theatre’.

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