Keys to Shakespeare

Anne Barton

• Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice by Bertrand Evans
  Oxford, 327 pp, £12.50, December 1979, ISBN 0 19 812094 X
• The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy by André Green, translated by Alan Sheridan
  Cambridge, 264 pp, £10.50, October 1979, ISBN 0 521 21377 0
• Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence by Kenneth Muir
  Liverpool, 207 pp, £9.50, November 1979, ISBN 0 85323 184 2
• Shakespeare’s Comic Sequence by Kenneth Muir
  Liverpool, 207 pp, £9.50, November 1979, ISBN 0 85323 064 1

Twenty years ago, Bertrand Evans published Shakespeare’s Comedies, a book with one idea. Shakespeare, he argued, habitually gives his audience an awareness of the true nature of any dramatic situation greater than that of the characters on the stage. Evans analysed the 13 comedies and the four last plays scene by scene, and concluded that a technique of ‘discrepant awareness’ or ‘exploitable gaps’ between characters and theatre audience lay at the heart of Shakespeare’s dramatic method. ‘It is a fact,’ he announced, ‘that the comedies which approach perfection in their dramatic construction regularly exhibit a high proportion of scenes in which we hold advantage, and that those which are most deficient exhibit a low proportion of such scenes – thus, at the one extreme, Twelfth Night, and, at the other, Troilus and Cressida.’