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...envisaged as the source of coherence, meaning, and truth. Freudian criticism, such as Ernest Jones and others applied to Hamlet, purported to revise drastically the terms of modern understanding, but may be placed as a more elaborate kind of character criticism.
In the early- and mid-twentieth century, there were two main critiques of character as interpretive construct. Scholars such as E. E. Stoll (Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method, 1927) and M. C. Bradbrook (Themes and Conventions in Elizabethan Tragedy, 1935) insisted on historical specificity. They objected that the plays were being treated as if they were Victorian novels or plays by Ibsen or Strindberg. Historical study showed that early modern performers had a declamatory style of acting; they talked to themselves in soliloquies and asides and adopted blatant disguises that were rarely penetrated; women's parts were played by boys; there was frequent and unapologetic use of convention and stereotype. Today we may call this an "old historicist" approach.
A second objection came from critics who held that the plays should be read as poems. This was because they were trying to connect Shakespeare to a contemporary idea of literature, in which the essential mode was the image. Ezra Pound wrote, "An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.... It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.
... It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." (1) Poetry doesn't need prosy, explanatory elaborations: just get the crucial image. Hence the title of L. C. Knights's essay, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" Knights deplored the putting to the play of questions that cannot be answered, and that, anyway, are (in his view) trivial and irrelevant to the text as inspired poetic utterance. Macbeth has affinity with The Waste Land, rather than A Doll's House: "The total response to a Shakespeare play can only be obtained by an exact and sensitive study of the quality of the verse, of the rhythm and imagery, of the controlled associations of the words and their emotional and intellectual force, in short by an exact and sensitive study of Shakespeare's handling of language." (2) In critical practice this generally meant pointing out layered and often ironic correspondences between phrases and lines in diverse parts of the text, and especially in the imagery. The idea was to posit a principle of coherence beyond workaday expectations of plot and character. Imagist criticism tended to discover notably vague themes, such as nature and nurture, good and evil, illusion and reality, order and disorder. Such themes, though they have some relevance to the world in which we live, cannot disguise the fact that an imagist Shakespeare supposes a kind of formalism, in precise contradiction to the stance of the historicists.
The play as poem was the theme also of the brilliant maverick...
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