Wallace A. Bacon

Problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare

The major obstacle faced by students who come to the study of Shakespeare is likely to reside in the nature of the language itself. Students often find it difficult to believe that there are, in fact, “real” people in the plays and that the language they speak is the language of sentient human beings. This essay attempts to cope with the problem of the life of Shakespeares text in performance.

The Margery Bailey memorial lectures

These essays are an attempt to cope with the highly disparate—and often disparaging—positions taken with respect to two of Shakespeares plays, and to produce a balanced view of what the author believes to be major dramatic achievements. Henry IV, Part Two is seen as a play making use of morality effects to indicate the depth of Englands sickness and to show the pattern of life against which Hal arrives at the kingship; Hal is seen not as a man in whom the human touch dwindles as the hero emerges (Traversis view) but as a king who is also a complex and moving human figure.Troilus and Cressida is seen not as a set of contrasts between Trojans and Greeks but as a tapestry in which both camps suffer from a perversion of both will and judgment; Troilus and Cressida both, in this view, emerge as more than usually sympathetic characters.

Recent criticism of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans

SHAKESPEARE: A PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY. By F. E. Halliday with Photographs by Edwin Smith. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1957; pp. 147.

The dangerous shores: From elocution to interpretation

5.95. THE ELIZABETHANS. By Allardyce Nicoll. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957; pp. viii+174.

An aesthetics of performance

5.00. THE PELICAN SHAKESPEARE. Baltimore: Penguin Books. THE ENGLISH HISTORY PLAY IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE. By Irving Ribner. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1957; pp. xii+354.

The dangerous shores‐one last time

5.00. SHAKESPEARE SURVEY: AN ANNUAL SURVEY OF SHAKESPEARIAN STUDY AND PRODUCTION, X. Edited by Allardyce Nicoll. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957; pp. viii+171.

The elocutionary career of Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788)

4.00. SHAKESPEARE: MODERN ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. Edited by Leonard F. Dean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957; pp. viii+426.

I. A sense of being: Interpretation and the humanities

2.65.