Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

We owe some of the best Shakespearean criticism ever written to the Romantics. Between 1808 and 1818, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt among others wrote lectures and essays that were revolutionary and detailed at the same time, and still have not lost their freshness of insight for the modern reader. It was on the basis of Shakespeare's work that the Romantics inaugurated close psychological analysis (“character criticism”), and developed the study both of the history of the stage and of the national and political setting in which a work of art is situated. Their turning to “practical criticism,” a close reading of texts, originated in the attempt to understand textual structures as “organic wholes,” centered and unified in a “germ” that had only to be laid open to give meaning to the entire work of art. The history of modern criticism and the emergence of a new hermeneutics became almost identical with the history of Shakespeare interpretation throughout Romanticism.The need to defend Shakespeare against the disparagement he had suffered from neo-Classicist critics such as Voltaire led to a rejection of the rules that had hitherto been regarded as prerogatives for dramatic art: the “Aristotelian” unities of time, place, and action; decorum and verisimilitude; the differentiation of (high) tragedy and (low) comedy according to the social ... log in or subscribe to read full text