SHAKESPEARE AND THE COMEDY OF FORGIVENESS.

By Prof. Robert GramsHunter (English). New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1965 . 272 pp. $7.50.

"In learning to read well," W. H. Auden observes, "scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct." Prof. Robert Hunter's Shakespeare and the Comedy ofForgiveness is a work of meticulous scholarship; even better, it is charged and animated by the instinct of a critic.

The book's thesis is strongly persuasive. Discovering in the miracle and morality plays of the 14th and 15th Centuries a recurrent plot pattern which involves the protagonist in a sequence of sin, remorse, and forgiveness, Professor Hunter identifies therein the beginnings of a comic tradition. He traces its development through such 16th Century plays as Garter's GodlyeSusanna, Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, and Greene's Orlando Furioso and James IV, plays in which the originally Christian materials are secularized, and establishes it finally as tributary to Shakespeare's comic achievement.

Professor Hunter then applies this discovery in a series of fresh readings of six of Shakespeare's plays, Much Ado AboutNothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Measure forMeasure, and The Tempest. These essays, which constitute the main body of his book, contain criticism of a very high order, showing us each play reilluminated, increasing our understanding, and newly charming us. In the case of two of the plays, All's Well and Cymbeline, Professor Hunter's discussions seem to me, quite simply, the best that modern criticism has to offer.

Certainly no one before him has seen Bertram and Posthumus, the dubious heroes of these two plays, so clearly. He identifies them for us as humanum genus figures, relatives of ours. One of his finest perceptions is that, in dealing with such men, the comedy of forgiveness involves its audience in the pattern of its denouement.

The forgiveness of the offenders by the offended is all that is needed. But if we in the audience are to participate in that felicity, we must also participate vicariously in the means to it. We must pardon the offenders. If we cannot, the play does not, for us, end happily, and we are denied the comic experience.

This is but one example of the way Professor Hunter redefines our relationship to the plays.

This book, a winner of Columbia's Ansley Award, comes, dark-clad and overpriced, from a university press. This is rather a pity, for probably some readers, assuming it to be another example of the strained and joyless pedantry they have come to expect from university presses, will at their cost avoid it. Let me clear it of any guilt by association. It is a graceful and witty book, written with relish, and feelingly. At times, in its passages of deepest insight, it is moving and eloquent. It is a pleasure to read because it was so obviously a pleasure to write.

Professor of English