I was first introduced to Kenneth Burke’s “Literature as Equipment for Living” at the suggestion of James Diedrick, as I was researching Malcolm Cowley at the Newberry Library.
Back at Grinnell a year later, Ellen Mease offered an independent study on rhetoric, which I took along with my friend Scott Samuelson. When we read Burke’s analysis of Coriolanus, I was hooked.
Parlor Press
This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism, including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke’s interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function.
Carefully annotated with helpful cross-references, Burke’s fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature of Shakespeare’s artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of scores of Burke’s other references to Shakespeare. My introduction provides a historical introduction and an account of Burke’s legacy.
This edition fulfills Burke’s own vision of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare’s imagery.
Praise
Scott Newstok’s well-edited collection of Kenneth Burke’s essays on Shakespeare is an authentic augmentation of the best modern criticism we have on Shakespeare. Burke, a superb rhetorician, confronts daringly the triple greatness of the greatest of all writers ever: cognitive power, linguistic richness, and a whole cosmos of persuasive women and men made up out of words.
— Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale
Kenneth Burke turns to Shakespearean drama to find some paradigm of true community. The relation of literature to politics, including modern political religions, from Puritan theocracies to totalitarianisms of Left or Right, is Burke’s burden even when he seems to be literary in the most technical sense.
— Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature Yale University
Burke’s marvelously inventive essays on Shakespeare’s plays are too valuable a national resource to languish in the world out of print.
— William H. Pritchard, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Amherst College
Of all the American “New Critics,” Kenneth Burke has been the most interesting to critics and scholars in recent years. In gathering his writings on Shakespeare, Scott Newstok has done an invaluable service, not least because some twenty-five percent of the material is published here for the first time. Burke’s central concern is with dramatic form, which is conceived both precisely, in respect to the workings of the plays, and generously, with wide-ranging rhetorical, social, and human awareness. Though Burke was far more than a literary critic, these essays bring out how important literary expression was to his ideas of human motives and possibilities. There is something for everyone here: even those most at home with Burke and Shakespeare will find surprises and fresh suggestions throughout.
— Paul Alpers, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley
As my guides in reading Shakespeare, I name first Kenneth Burke, an American regarded by various of his fellow citizens as the equal of the most formidable literary minds of the American twentieth century, who wrote repeatedly on Shakespeare as well and as consistently as anyone might be thought to have done.
— Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University
Age cannot wither Kenneth Burke’s reflections on Shakespeare, which are as fresh, vital, and quirky now as they were when they first appeared. This volume would be worth having for the celebrated essays on Othello and King Lear alone, but it is particularly gratifying to find so many other remarkable displays of Burke’s quicksilver mind.
— Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Harvard University
Kenneth Burke's insights into how Shakespeare's plays work — as poetry, drama, and theater — are as profound as Aristotle's insights on tragedy, Freud's on dreams, and Stanislavsky's on acting. What treasure, to have all this at last between two covers!
— Toni Dorfman, Yale Theater Studies
I have been inspired by the example of Kenneth Burke for his repeated emphasis on the inseparability of language, rhetoric, and discourse from political and social issues and for his failure to observe the decorum of a more restricted kind of literary criticism.
— Patricia Parker, Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature, Stanford University
Reviews
Anthropoetics, Appositions, Around the Globe, As We Like It, Cercles, College Literature, Comitatus, Comparative Drama, Discoveries, Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS), Early Theatre, e-Colloquia, English Studies, Essays in Criticism, Études Anglaises, Folio, A Groat′s Worth of Wit, Hudson Review, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS), Journal of the Northern Renaissance, KB Journal, Kritikon Litterarum, Liminalities, Multicultural Shakespeare, Notes and Queries, Parergon, PlayShakespeare.com, Raritan, Religion and Literature, Renaissance Studies, Review of Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rocky Mountain Review, Sewanee Review, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Geek, Shakespeare in Southern Africa Shakespeare Matters, Shakespeare Newsletter, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Scene, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Yearbook, SHAKSPER, Shenandoah, Sixteenth Century Journal, South Atlantic Review, Southern Humanities Review, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Studies in English Literature (SEL), Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART), Theater History Studies, Theatre Survey, Théâtres du monde, Times Higher Education (THE), Times Literary Supplement (TLS), The University of Toronto Quarterly, The Upstart Crow, The Use of English.