Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare

by Kenneth Burke, Scott L. Newstok (Editor)

This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism, including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke's interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor, Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the landmark Motivorum A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit. Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

Genres: Literary Criticism

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn't read anything by this important American critic since I read "The Philosophy of Literary Form" in 2020. There's still a lot more I want to read by him, and I became aware of the basic point that he is relevant to my continuing intellectual development in reading his observation that there is a similar psychology at work in both the character of Anthony and in the historical figure that was Adolf Hitler. (!) Considering I just finished a novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer who is fixated on the history of the Third Reich, I found this to be a stunning synchronicity, if I may say so. It's hard to remember that, prior to the postmodern age inaugurated by Jacques Derrida in 1966, only Burke and the Canadian Northrop Frye had the courage to celebrate Shakespeare's plays for the tragic lyricism which transformed the 'thick-lipped' Othello who was seen as a born slave into a Richard Wright-style figure whose tragic fate was anathematized into a story of a religious conversion with homosexual features. Burke set no limits to the range of interpretations available, even seeing the visceral moral shocks of the Vietnam War era as being symbolically represented in Shakespeare's plays. Three stars.