Word: doren
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...history of English literature affords numerous examples of this happy marriage of creative faculties; unfortunately, we have comparatively few men today who have given sufficient evidence of their abilities in both capacities to warrant their being accepted as inheritors of that tradition. None, however, would question Mark Van Doren's right to be so described...
...difficult to define precisely the unique excellence of this book. It is primarily a collection of brief essays about the plays and poems, essays which never exceed fifteen pages in length. Mr. Van Doren deliberately excludes considerations of Shakespeare biography, Elizabethan drama and the like; the center of his preoccupation is always the peculiar interest of each play...
...Mark Van Doren* has done this job and maybe more. His qualifications would be hard to better. As a critic, Van Doren began his career in 1916 with a study of Thoreau, followed by an acute book on Dryden in 1920. An instructor at Columbia, he collaborated with his brother Carl on a textbook in 1925 (American & British Literature Since 1890). A poet of steadily finer weave and frosty skill, he published his Collected Poems this year. From 1935 to 1938 he studied cinema as The Nation's movie critic. And for the last ten years he has taught...
...plays of Shakespeare had not been easy to write," says Mark Van Doren, "they would have been impossible. . . . The great and central virtue of Shakespeare was not achieved by taking thought, for thought cannot create a world." Having thus dismissed the academic worry about "problems" he goes on to dismiss the word "Elizabethan," never uses either word again. In 34 brief chapters (average length: 10 pages) he describes with citations, line by telling line, the world of imagination created in each of the plays...
...rattle like bleached bones." But The Merchant of Venice, in which money and love go hand in hand and uncorrupted, is a "gentlemen's world," inhabited by "creatures whose only function is to sound in their lives the clear depths of human grace." In Henry IV, however, Van Doren considers that Shakespeare came to mastery by discovering that poetry can be better than beautiful; Hotspur, who hates poetry, is a fine poet "out of a hot love far nothing except reality and hard sense...