You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Professor Barroll explores a subject that has of late received a good deal of attention, in itself as a theoretical issue and in reference to Shakespeare's practical application of dramatic technique: “It is the purpose of this book to remind us of art, to honor Shakespeare's identity with the most important Attic sense of the poet as ‘maker.' We are interested in how Shakespeare may have made his dazzling persons” (p. 4). To accomplish this end Barrol investigates not only the “logical” and “epistemological” issues bound up with the creation of dramatic “entities,” but also the psychological and philosophical assumptions of the Renaissance which, as Barrol sees it, influenced the playwright. As for “modern” psychology, Barrol's attitude towards it is most interesting. Despite the obligation he feels to “historical method,” Barrol realizes that “elements” in the “science” of modern psychology, “however different in nomenclature or even conceptual description, must necessarily be taken as applicable retroactively” (p. 11). He goes on: “By the same token, if some of the tendencies in human personality have indeed been isolated and defined by post-Freudian theory and experiments, then presumably these tendencies were not only extant in Shakespeare's day but may even have been recognized in some way” (p. 11). He then asks a remarkable question: “Is it not possible, merely for the sake of argument, to suggest that Shakespeare became interested in the curious relationship between sons and mothers even though he had no Freudian organization of concepts with which to analyze and enunciate what his mind grasped?” (p. 1). Who could doubt this? The psychological criticism of Shakespeare has proceeded upon this obvious assumption for decades. We see in Barroll an orthodox Shakespeare scholar, steeped in the rigidities of an historical method that continually turns Shakespeare into a parochial promulgator of Renaissance moral platitudes, diffidently