Charles Lamb Assumptions Regarding The Value Of Shakespeare example essay topic

Underlying Lamb's essay is his desire to reevaluate Shakespeare's tragedies with renewed support for Shakespeare and the category of the author. This desire, certainly shaped in part both by his romantic contemporaries and his consideration of contemporary theatre, exemplifies well the detailed arguments of M.H. Abrams for the romantic shift from audience-centered to author-centered poetics. It is with this idea that Lamb obviates the judgments which have identified actors such as Garrick with the authorial power of Shakespeare, and with the "great or heroic nature" (117) of Shakespeare's characters. In the first instance, Lamb argues that the human actor can never be seen to have a "mind congenial with the poet's", for in the "power of originating", the author exercises an "absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man" (112). Even "the very idea of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible" to "unlettered persons", such as stage-players and audiences, "without some pain and perplexity of mind" (113).

Secondly, Lamb's argument is extended to characters, where, inasmuch as an audience may come to associate, say, the character of Lear, with a particular human acting in his role; he "cannot be acted" or "be represented by a gesticulating actor", for he "is made another thing by being acted" (116) and, as McKenna notes, is "an ideal conception of the poet's imagination". Jonathan Arac has suggested that here Shakespeare is "the author par excellence, who plays the role in this argument that the deity does in theology". However, whereas in this argument the deification of Shakespeare separates the author from humankind, Lamb's next assertion polarizes humankind itself. Lamb distinguishes "from everyone else those few who could properly respond to Shakespeare"; between, essentially, a man who is a "reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer" (127). Enduring in this distinction is Lamb's demand for Shakespeare's category of authorship, only now, rather than with actors, Shakespeare's authorial sovereignty militates against the "common auditors", whose judgments, when "raised into an importance", are "injurious to the main interest of the play" (127), and, in turn, "vulgarly distort Shakespeare". This, however, is no longer exclusively "the fault of the actor" or due solely to "something in the nature of acting" (119), but rather, it is relative to the auditors' reception of Shakespeare's plays, which, if they are "natural", are "grounded so deep in nature that their depth lies out of the reach of most of us" (117).

Nevertheless, Lamb implied that the critical capabilities of any audience "called upon to judge" (127) were lacking, irrespective of the playwright, the play or its representation. This is because, unlike the critic, an audience fails to discern the especial value of Shakespeare's plays, for, although they are "in themselves essentially so different from all others" (119), "ninety-nine out of a hundred" of the auditors think that George Barnwell and Othello "are the same kind of thing" (117). Clearly Lamb's arguments for the category of authorship and his consequent turn against the theatre and its audience, underwrote his main assertion, which distinguished between the reading of the plays and the seeing of Shakespeare on stage. However, it is significant that two other things - namely his long-standing experience with the theatre, and his close association with Coleridge and Hazlitt - also influenced Lamb's assumptions regarding the value of Shakespeare.

In favour of reading over seeing, Lamb argues specifically that Shakespeare's tragedies are altogether the very least "calculated for performance on stage" (113) and it is alone in reading his plays, from the "vantage ground of abstraction", that we are "elevated" into a "state of sublime emotion" (115). Furthermore, reading Shakespeare "appeals... to the imagination" (125) and awakes in one an "intellectual activity" of "meditation" (122). Seeing a representation on stage, on the other hand, awakens merely an "interest or curiosity" in the "low and vulgar-natures" (122) of Shakespeare's characters. Moreover, stage representation drags "a fine vision down to the standard of flesh and blood" (113) wherein the audience, for whom "the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty" (124), is made to rely upon its "poor unassisted senses" (122). Some critics have dismissed Lamb's argument on stage representation as "mere whimsy and paradox". More common, however, are dismissals which assert that here Lamb "entertains a bias against actors and acting", or that his view is based merely on the "far from ideal conditions of the nineteenth century theatre".

Yet precluding these charges is Lamb's obvious "love of the theatre", which is evidenced best in the preponderance in his oeuvre of essays "devoted to the criticism of drama", in his exemplary attendance to stage performances, and finally, in his own playwriting. As for the second charge, the plain "impropriety of raising a normative argument on the basis of inferences drawn from contemporary theatrical conditions", as well as Lamb's own suggestion that the deficiencies in theatre are "inherent" and "essential" (117), has sufficed to compel most modern critics to establish that Lamb's views on stage-drama were indeed shaped, but far from determined, by the 'deficiencies' of his contemporary theatre. More so than his experience with theatre, it was Lamb's close association with the romantics which influenced his views on the value of Shakespeare. Lamb's essays on art shed light on his inherited romantic principles: he talks repeatedly of the sublime and of a 'dramatic morality'; the difference between "poetic" and "pictorial subjects"; the subjectivity of the creative process, the compositional "unity" of a piece of literature, and the idea of a 'contract' between writers and artists, readers and viewers. Furthermore, the words of Hazlitt may demonstrate that Lamb's ideas on reading were not entirely unique: "poetry and the stage do not agree together. The attempt to reconcile them fails not only of effect but of decorum.

The ideal has no place upon the stage; the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the impressions of the senses". Lamb's argument for reading, therefore, was shared by his fellow romantic initiates, though it was by them "never embodied in a single... essay". Lamb's essay is therefore unique in its exposition, and as was earlier argued, it was Lamb's strong conviction regarding the category of the author which above all induced him, laying emphasis on reading, to buttress the value of Shakespeare. In its argument for the category of the author, Lamb's essay foreshadowed the "high and serious calling of literary criticism" for Shakespeare to be approached in an intellectually demanding form, which ultimately "triumphed over the tyranny of the audience", with the restoration of the original plays.

As is now recurrently suggested, it is no coincidence that "the modern canonization of Shakespeare... went hand in hand with the institutionalization of reading". And as the modern discourse directs more focus on the reading of original texts, our present critics "begin sadly to agree with Charles Lamb that we ought to keep rereading King Lear and avoid its stage travesties". But whereas Lamb said nominally that "The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted" (124) theorists continue to suggest this is for cultural reasons: "Lear should be playable; if we cannot accomplish it, the flaw is in us, and in the authentic decline of our cognitive and literate culture". Yet, all in all, the strength of Lamb's argument for an intellectual deference to the category of the author and his imaginative preference for reading, has influenced pedagogical institutions against even his most compelling dissenters, for as Arac suggests, today "the terms through which our educational system teaches us to value literature are overwhelmingly more those of Lamb than those of Johnson". Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and The Critical Tradition, London Arac, J., 'The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear', Studies in Romanticism 26, Boston, 1987. Bloom, H., The Western Canon: The books and School of the ages, New York, 1994 Coldwell, J., Charles Lamb on Shakespeare, Colin Smythe, London, 1978.

Heller, J., Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt and the Reader of Drama, London, 1990. McKenna, W., Charles Lamb and the Theatre, Coins Smythe, London, 1978. Park, R., Lamb as Critic, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980. Ross, T., The making of the English literary canon: from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century, McGill's, Montreal, 1998.

Wimsatt, W.K., and Brooks, C., Literary Criticism: A Short History, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970.