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The topic of character has had a long and complex history in the institutions of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. For a majority of writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare's distinctive achievement was his ability to create representations of human beings who displayed a remarkably convincing resemblance to individual persons of the sort that one might actually encounter in everyday life. This widespread admiration for Shakespeare's psychological realism gave rise to a body of commentary preoccupied with a detailed inventory of the attitudes, motives, and intentions of individual characters, as well as with scrupulous assessments of their personal worth and amiability. This tradition of interpretation reached an important culmination in A. C. Bradley's magisterial essays on Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth.
In more recent scholarship Bradley's treatment of literary characters as if they were real people has been dismissed as wrongheaded, although the philosophical concerns that motivated his criticism have largely been ignored. Most Shakespeare critics now active professionally have been powerfully influenced, whether directly or indirectly, by L. C. Knights's countervailing injunction that we must never forget that a play such as Macbeth is nothing more (and nothing less) than words on a page. For Knights a properly informed reading is one that ignores the seductive illusion of character and concentrates instead on "a consideration of
Shakespeare's
plays as poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex emotional response" (11). Following Knights, modern critics have supposedly learned to distinguish correctly between literary texts and real life, an intellectual achievement that was evidently beyond the capacity of Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley, and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics. The consequence has been that an extensive range of social and intellectual interests previously focused on character has now been definitively foreclosed.
Knights maintained that the dramatis personae of a Shakespeare play should never be confused with real people and insisted on a rigorous ontological distinction between the analysis of a poetic structure and the "easier" task of understanding actual people. But Knights confined his strictures to the genres of poetic drama and conceded not only that real people actually existed but that they might even be adequately represented in the realistic novel. Contemporary Shakespeare criticism has been constrained by the even more...