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Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1 by Harold C…
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Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1 (edition 1960)

by Harold C Goddard Harold Clarke Goddard (Author)

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Shakespeare Downheartedness:"The Meaning of Shakespeare" by Harold C. Goddard (1st volume) “Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach–whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, make us over into something more nearly in its own image”
 
Read on on the usual place because I can't add the frigging link on this FRIGGING SITE!!!!. ( )
  antao | Dec 10, 2016 |
Showing 2 of 2
Hmmm. An odd one, this. Goddard's critical style is now supremely outdated (A.D. Nuttall makes but one, dismissive reference to him in his recent "Shakespeare the Thinker"). What's more, with Goddard dying before the text was published, some of this reads as if it is still in draft format. Ideas go on for pages, astoundingly poetic, but often amounting to very little. No doubt Goddard was a sublime intelligence, and his words are beautiful. His insight into the characters is fascinating, even if I find much of it dubious. (Any critic can - and should - defend Shylock OR Katherina OR Joan of Arc, but all three? Methinks the critic doth protest too much.)

Goddard is outright bonkers, which leads to wild variations in quality. Some of his opinions come off as psychadelic counter-culture ramblings; others tap into a vein of brilliance that is well-worth exploring. But it's fairly uneven. Oddly, for a posthumously published work, Goddard's work resounds more in the second volume, where he tackles the mature plays with deftness and accuracy. He is at his weakest in the early chapters here, betraying that attitude of his generation (carried over somewhat from the 19th century Romantics) that Shakespeare knew he was "too good" for something as plebeian as the theatre. Indeed, the most dispiriting moments of the book are when Goddard falls into that old academic trap of writing off sections of the plays with the note "well, the groundlings must have their comedy". Any fellow traveler on our Bardolatrous Way is a worthy reading companion, but there are times when the Lost Generation's psychologically telling desire to separate Shakespeare the poet from Shakespeare the man is nauseating.

In Goddard's defense, perhaps I am simply of too distant a generation to truly appreciate him. Often, he will quote one or two lines from a character as definitive proof of what the character or Shakespeare himself was thinking. Yet, even though I consider myself a part-time Shakespeare academic myself, I can barely even grasp how he has reached that point. Not always - there is undoubtedly much true brilliance in these books - and anyone with this much reverence for William Shakespeare deserves to be read for many years to come but, with the passing of the years, and a revised view of Shakespearean (not to mention literary) criticism, the bloom is often, in this case, off the rose. ( )
  therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Shakespeare Downheartedness:"The Meaning of Shakespeare" by Harold C. Goddard (1st volume) “Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach–whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, make us over into something more nearly in its own image”
 
Read on on the usual place because I can't add the frigging link on this FRIGGING SITE!!!!. ( )
  antao | Dec 10, 2016 |
Showing 2 of 2

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