Comparative Drama

REVIEWS Edmund Creeth. Mankynde in Shakespeare. Athens. Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Pp. 192. $8.50. Professor Creeth ventures anew into territory previously and pro­ fitably explored by such scholars as Willard Farnham, Hardin Craig, Bernard Spivack, and David Bevington: the relationship between the medieval moral plays and Elizabethean secular theater. Creeth, however, argues for a more intimate bond between Shakespearean tragedy and the moral plays than his predecessors have suggested— or, presumably, would allow. Rejecting the evolutionist argument that Shakespeare’s medieval heritage is filtered through the secularized Tudor permutations of the moral plays, he argues rather for a unique Shakespearean “atavism,” a decisive return in mid-career to the primitive moral dramas themselves. Crucial to his argument is his view that the essence of the moral plays lies not in their allegorical technique but rather in the design of the hero’s experience, which assumes either of two familiar forms: the temptation play and the Coming of Death. In order to establish Shake­ speare’s indebtedness to his theological prototypes, Creeth calls for a new “calculus,” a critical method which is attuned to the subtle inter­ change between metaphor and literal fact: what is allegorical in the moral plays (e.g., the Devil-Tempter) may become literal in Shake­ speare (e.g., Iago); what is literal in the moral plays (e.g., the redemp­ tion of Mankynde) may become metaphorical in Shakespeare, as in Lear’s “vision of hell and his salvation through ‘a soule in blisse’ ” (p. 7). The distinctive element in Professor Creeth’s argument is its ex­ clusiveness. He argues that Shakespeare alone of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights had recourse to the medieval tradition in any real sense and that, even in his case, this direct influence can be found in only three plays, each of which is related to a specific prototype (p. 9). Thus Macbeth aligns itself with The Castell of Perseverance, Othello with Wisdom Who is Christ, and King Lear with The Pride of Life. Curiously, Mankind alone of the Macro Plays is excluded, because Creeth finds it less deeply theological than the others and because it is tainted by com­ mercial purposes and traces of parodic intent, as manifested in its vul­ garity and earthy humor. Everyman, the most famous of the moralities, though not—as Creeth correctly states—the most typical, is given short shrift, because of its suspect genealogy and because it was, though widely read, seldom or never performed in Tudor England. Creeth devotes a chapter each to Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, tracing affinities between the plays and the religious dramas with which they are associated. The affinities between Macbeth and Castell, we are 345 346 Comparative Drama told, consist of the shared plight of the heroes, both of whom are kings and who fall into sin through deliberate will rather than through decep­ tion; the clothing imagery which symbolizes their moral transformations; and the Boy figures (cf. Garcio in Castell) used to highlight the final anguish of both heroes. Othello shares with Wisdom the fact that both heroes are deceived by slandering Devil-figures into breaches of faith which jeopardize their souls, the prominent use of symbolic images of black and white, central conflicts between reason and passion, and above all a singularly full development of the moral pattern which traces the careers of the sinners from temptation to final restoration: “Othello is the first and only English temptation play to fuse the restorative recogni­ tion and contrition with unrelieved tragedy” (p. 109). King Lear, Creeth concedes, is more troublesome because its analogue, The Pride of Life, has survived only in fragmentary form. Nonetheless, he closely links King Lear, as a late version of the Coming of Death plot, with Pride. Like his prototype Rex Vivus, Lear is plunged into his ordeal of suffering by “an act of desperate folly,” but is finally restored by Cordelia, who corresponds to “Our Lady Milde” of Pride: “Within the confines of the romantic, secular, and realistic drama Shakespeare could hardly come closer to duplicating the scene of the redemption of the King of Life” (p. 149). Creeth finds further echoes of Pride in the insistent social concerns of...