Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies

by Maynard Mack

Everybody’s Shakespeare brings the insights and wisdom of one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of our century to the task of surveying why the Bard continues to flourish in modern times. Mack treats individually seven plays—Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra—and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.

Table of contents

1. Everybody's Shakespeare
2. Audience and play
3. Play and History
4. Romeo and Juliet
5. Julius Caesar
6. Hamlet
7. Othello
8. King Lear
9. Macbeth
10. Anthony and Cleopatra
11. Shakespearean tragedy

NOTES

Genres: Shakespeare, Theatre, Literature

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a preliminary review.

This book is a collection of essays by the author on seven of Shakespeare's tragedies, two of the Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra), Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, KIng Lear, Macbeth and Othello plus three introductory chapters (Everybody's Shakespeare, Audience and play, Play and History) and a final chapter on Shakespearean tragedy).

The essays on each of the tragedies, are long, somewhat rambling, and after their first half become quite involuted. There are useful insights and arguments scattered throughout them, but I have the impression that they would have benefitted from further editing into a tighter organisation. I particularly liked the first half or so of the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra. and King Lear.

The first chapter (Everybody's Shakespeare>) is more introductory in nature covers familiar arguments on what makes Shakespeare outstanding; the second chapter (Audience and play) is the importance and the impact of playing to an audience and what it is that make them "engage" in a play, particularly a play by Shakespeare. Mack's aim in his third chapter is explore:

...some of the relationships [...] between the fictional worlds that Shakespeare gives us in his plays and the historical "real" world of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The particular cluster of relationships I have in mind concerns the family: both as Shakespeare shapes it for his own structural and expressive purposes onstage and as it actually existed and functioned in the cities, towns, and villages of England, and in the manors and great houses of the squirearchy and aristocracy.In the final chapter, What happens in Shakespearean Tragedy he attempts to

...examine some of the principles of construction [...] which give his tragedies their distinctive "feel", their form and pressure.

He takes as his starting point A. C. Bradley's:

...pioneering analysis in the second of his famous lectures, published some ninety years ago. Bradley's concerns was with what today would be called the clearer outlines of Shakespearean practice -the management of exposition, conflict, crisis, catastrophe, the contrasts of pace and scene [...]

. Mack acknowledges the pertinence of Bradley's analysis, and attempts to complement his work by contributing some ideas on the "inward structure" of the tragedies, that is to say, structures that are not "generated by the interplay of plot and character.", aspects such as tragic hyperbole, importance of the characters who play a foil to the hero and thus confront two very different outlooks (e.g. Horatio to Hamlet, Cassius to Brutus, Iago to Othello) and the poignant confrontations between the hero or an important lofty character and simpler, earthier people (e.g. Hamlet and the gravedigger, Desdemona and Emilia).

I hope to eventually have time enough for a closer reading of this book in order to improve this review...

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was helpful.