Theology Today - Vol 18, No. 2 - July 1961 - BOOK REVIEW - The Sense Of History In Greek and Shakespearean Drama

255 - The Sense Of History In Greek and Shakespearean Drama

The Sense Of History In Greek and Shakespearean Drama
By Tom F. Driver
231 pp. New York, Columbia University Press, 1960. $5.50.

Any truly scholarly book requires meticulous care and attention to detail, but a deeply significant scholarly book requires not only these qualities but in addition imagination tempered with judicious aware-

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ness. Professor Driver of Union Theological Seminary in New York has achieved that kind of significance in his analyses of characteristically Hellenic and characteristically Biblical conceptions of time as these may account for crucial differences between Greek and Shakespearean drama. In presenting the distinctions between these two views, Driver relies on the best modern scholarship, but he goes beyond that scholarship to achieve so rare a clarity and concision that his comparison of Judaeo-Christian and Hellenic understandings of history in his first section alone would make his study a notable one, even if it were without other virtues.

Having cogently established the distinctions in terms of which he will work, Driver then proceeds through a skillful excursus on the problems of dramatic form and into the major task of his book-a comparison of four Greek with four Shakespearean plays (The Persians with Richard III, Oresteia with Hamlet, Oedipus Tyrannus with Macbeth, Alcestis with The Winter's Tale). For Driver, the obvious never becomes a platitude and the novel never becomes a tour de force. It is precisely at this point that he stands most clearly above many of those who have attempted to read Shakespeare in Christian terms, for too often these attempts have seemed to reduce the greatest English dramas to platitudes or, by a tour de force, to convert them into obscure theological treatises (and often the theology is not only obscure but also naive). The understanding of the theology of history which underlies Driver's study is complex, but it is neither obscure nor naive, and although the book must be read and reread with meticulous care, there are few students, either theological or literary, who will not be wiser for the effort. Driver does not attempt to lay upon Shakespeare's plays any template of dogma, but demonstrates the manner in which these plays repeatedly and pervasively embody the Judaeo-Christian understanding of man in historical time, and shows that it is in terms of such an understanding that the plays are built. In contrast, the Greek dramas convey and concern a "timelessness" and a preoccupation with the general or ideal, rather than the individual and the particular. In these terms, the Christian view of time in Shakespeare is shown to be so pervasive (an "unspoken understanding of time") as to be virtually imperceptible, until it is analyzed. The result of Driver's analysis is an exciting understanding of Shakespeare, of the Greek dramatists, of the radical differences between classical and (in Baillie's sense) Christian civilization, and of man both as thinker about his existence and as an existing creature within the ambiguities of history.

I, for one, wish that Driver had rounded out his study with an analysis of comedy, in addition to his treatment of history plays, tragedies, and

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tragi-comedies. Otherwise, the study is remarkably well balanced and is characterized by a semantic dexterity in the treatment of difficult terms which is a joy to observe. There are, perhaps inevitably, a very few instances of apparent oversimplification, and one of overlooking a pertinent article which might have strengthened Driver's interpretation of Hamlet (with which, incidentally, I strongly disagree). Generally, however, my fear is not for the book but for its readers, in that literary students may have too little theological background to enjoy fully its theological erudition, and theological students too little literary background to appreciate fully its critical acumen. Members of both groups will nonetheless find the study immensely rewarding and heuristic.

Although summary is impossible for a book so packed as this one, it is safe to say that from this time forward no serious student should feel comfortable in describing Shakespeare as essentially Greek in spirit. The importance of history, the assertion of a particular type of freedom, the peculiar significance of individuals in the temporal order, all mark Shakespeare as essentially a product of the Christian tradition. "When, in that tradition," Driver writes, "the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ was declared to be the very center of history, the story of mankind was turned into an historical drama. This is the tradition which bequeaths to Shakespeare his basic understanding of man. He seldom expresses it in overt religious language. His plays are not to be read as models of Christian doctrine. Yet it is true that the form of his plays is consistent with the Biblical interpretation of man and the universe. Shakespearean man is imbedded in the ambiguities and moral demands of history, while the Shakespearean dramatic action seeks its resolution in the fulfilling events of time."

Roland Mushat Frye
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia