Harold C. Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. I. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951. Kindle e-book.

Goddard, head of the English Department at Swarthmore who died before he gave a title to this work, has some fun with Shakespeare critics. Anyone who has read Shakespeare criticism knows what he means:

The lawyer believes he must have been a lawyer, the musician a musician, the Catholic a Catholic, the Protestant a Protestant

Goddard tells us that Shakespeare above all was a humanist. That tells us more about Goddard than about Shakespeare, really. I had to laugh when I read that. Hopefully, Goddard saw the irony in his own assertion about the Bard.

Goddard notes, rightly, that Shakespeare plays acted out “discloses things hidden to the reader. Read, they reveal what no actor or theater can convey.” True enough. Shakespeare was both a playwright and a poet at the same time. Goddard’s approach proves this. Goddard—English professor that he is—is a reader.

Goddard deals with the plays chronologically. Volume I covers 21 plays from The Comedy of Errors to Hamlet. Goddard’s strength is his ability to see patterns among the plays. He is intimately familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, even ones like King John and Henry VIII which few people read and even fewer acting companies perform. His ability to see patterns are especially notable in his character analyses.

For example, Romeo, Jaques, Brutus, and Hamlet all are or become melancholy. Goddard argues that in Shakespeare melancholia is not an inborn temperament as the classics might suggest, but it is a result of being driven to act against one’s own nature. Romeo is a lover who has to maintain the family honor. Jaques is a traveler who has denied his birthright. Brutus is a philosopher who is persuaded to join a plot to murder. Hamlet is an artist who has to play realpolitik.

Another recurring theme is that of the tension between father and son—and the son usually gives in to the pressure of the father’s expectations to his own detriment. Romeo prolongs the family feud when announcing his marriage could end it. Henry V pleads with God before Agincourt to accept his penance for his father’s sins. Cassius persuades Brutus with his famous appeal to Brutus’ ancestry: “There was a Brutus once who would have brooked the eternal devil…” Hamlet ends up obeying his father’s ghost. Still, Goddard is no Freudian. While not completely dismissing Freudian analysis of Shakespeare, he points out that such interpretations are far too narrow, and, in some cases, even silly.

If Goddard reminds this reader of any Shakespeare critic, it is Coleridge. Though Emerson mocked Coleridge’s talk of “omject and sumject,” and Goddard frequently quotes Emerson, it is really Coleridge whom Goddard echoes. To understand the characters we must understand both the subjective motivations of the characters (such as Hamlet’s love of drama and music) and the objective forces surrounding them (like the “rottenness” in the court of Denmark).

Perhaps Goddard’s most pointed—and likely most controversial—analysis is that of Henry V in the three plays in which he is featured. Goddard says, as a “reader,” that Shakespeare presents Henry V as a calculating, cold-blooded tyrant. Yet every production of Henry V I have seen¹ and, I suspect, every production that has been mounted show him as a heroic and inspiring leader. One could make a case that Chimes at Midnight is different, but that is from Falstaff’s point of view. Still, in virtually all productions he has the common touch because of his times with the Gadshill gang, but he is a noble leader at heart. To Goddard, Hal-Henry is disloyal, lets others do his dirty work, and is greedy for power. Several times Goddard mentions two world wars in the last three decades (note the publication date). Goddard sees King Henry V as another Bismarck or Hitler trying to prove a point by conquering France.

Like many critics, Goddard saves his most interesting stuff for Hamlet. Like many modern critics (in the literary sense), he dismisses the ghost as a kind of psychological aberration—very differently from the way he treats the ghost in Julius Caesar, though he does draw parallels in the plot elements. The focus of his Hamlet observations is on “The Mousetrap.” The play within a play is common motif in Shakespeare as he points out: A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a literal one, but also the masquerade in Romeo and Juliet, both “setups” in Much Ado about Nothing, Hal and Falstaff’s playing the king in Henry IV Part I, and others noted by Goddard. As an artist, Hamlet enjoys the play. But he does not follow his own advice that he gave to the actors and starts to overdo his commentary in order to get an audience response. In “out-Heroding Herod,” Hamlet shows us how, if not why, he goes in a tragic direction.

There is a lot more to this book. Goddard does a great job with a number plays. In emphasizing the people and what motivates them, and looking at them from the scope of Shakespeare’s body of work, the reader cannot help but love or at least sympathize with so many of his characters. That is certainly one thing that makes Shakespeare great. Few writers get into the heart of human nature the way Shakespeare does (Goddard concedes only Dostoyevsky and maybe Tolstoy on a good day). The Meaning of Shakespeare helps us to see that.

Thanks to the colleague who gave this to me. Perhaps some day I will get to Volume II.

¹ I recall two theatrical productions I have seen plus the two well-known film versions, one with Olivier, the other with Branagh.