Newstok, Scott L., ed. 2007. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. West Lafayette, Indiana: parlor press. $65.00 hc. $32.00 sc. Iv + 308 pp.

Newstok, Scott L., ed. 2007. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. West Lafayette, Indiana: parlor press. $65.00 hc. $32.00 sc. Iv + 308 pp. In Kenneth Burke Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5 1897 – November 19 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics. Early life on Shakespeare, Scott Newstok brings together allof the late Kenneth Burke's surprisingly voluminous Shakespeareancriticism, including an appendix of references to Shakespeare inBurke's major works and, perhaps most excitingly, Burke'spreviously unpublished, extensive notes on Macbeth and Troilus andCressida Troilus and Cressida(troi`ləs, krĕs`ĭdə), a medieval romance distantly related to characters in Greek legend. Troilus, a Trojan prince (son of Priam and Hecuba), fell in love with Cressida (Chryseis), daughter of Calchas. . Yet, as Newstock's clear and well-informed introductionsuggests, given Burke's critical strategies and temperament, thevolume and depth of Burke's lifetime of work on Shakespeare shouldnot surprise us. Newstok understands Burke rightly as Aristotelean athis critical core, as an analyst of a given text "seeking a deeperstructural rationale for its development" (xviii). And he offers alist with definitional commentary of "some crucial concepts thatplay a generative role in Burke's Shakespearean criticism"(xix). A cursory glance at these terms would show even a newcomer toBurke's work just how deeply Burke thought about texts, and howdeeply rhetorical were his unceasing engagements with them. As Newstokpoints out in no uncertain terms, Burke's grounding in Aristoteleanprinciples, especially the affect-based concept of catharsis catharsisPurging or purification of emotions through art. The term is derived from the Greek katharsis (“purgation,” “cleansing”), a medical term used by Aristotle as a metaphor to describe the effects of dramatic tragedy on the spectator: by , allows him"the latitude to posit formal principles without falling intoformal rigidity" (xxix).This latitude, moreover, theorized inBurke's concept of dramatism--the famous pentad of act, scene,agent, agency, and purpose--seems "an ambitious elaboration of thetheatrum mundi conceit," and may have taken shape in Burke'sthinking, Newstok provocatively suggests, as a result of his"enduring familiarity with Shakespeare;" indeed, Newstokcontends that Shakespeare may have been "the core motivation"(xxv). Ironically, Burke's characteristic latitude with formalprinciples, perhaps the most engaging feature of his critical work andthe one most consonant with contemporary ideas about the intersection oftexts and cultural contexts, has also marginalized him from the academiccritical mainstream, both within Shakespeare studies and without.Newstok's introduction tackles squarely the issue of Burke'splace in contemporary criticism. He acknowledges that Burke's"lack of scholarly engagement" with academic criticism, thoughclearly a "virtue," has been an "impediment to thecirculation of his work in academia" (xxx). But he alsoacknowledges the fundamental absurdity of lumping Burke in with NewCriticism because of his inventions with the concept of form,preoccupied as those inventions always are with speakers' motivesand a range of potential audience reactions; that is, not with staticform but with a rhetoric of emergent form (xxxi). Moreover, as Newstokrecognizes, Burke has shown, perhaps as a consequence of the grandheuristic A method of problem solving using exploration and trial and error methods. Heuristic program design provides a framework for solving the problem in contrast with a fixed set of rules (algorithmic) that cannot vary. 1. sweep of his dramatistic method, an ability to "have beenhere before us"--that is, to have already framed readings ofShakespeare later pursued, as Newstok shows, by such recentlyinfluential Shakespearean critics as Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman,Frank Whigham, and Michael McCanles (xxi-xxii). Newstok organizes Burke's Shakespearean criticismchronologically, and the introduction also reminds us that "we mustplace Burke's early Shakespeare essays ... in a fraught center:between activists politically to his left, and fellow critics who foundBurke's own politics too radical" (xxviii). Thus, Burke'sanalysis of Marc Anthony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen"speech in Julius Caesar in "Antony on Behalf of the Play"(originally published in The Southern Review in 1935) shows Burke movingfrom a formally mediated but "aesthetically isolated" conceptof audience, governed by strategies directed at a listener internal to atext, to a more expansive one including "anyone who should beconcerned about understanding demagoguery DemagogueryHague, Frank(1876–1956) corrupt mayor of Jersey City, N. J., for 30 years. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 1173]Long, Huey P.(1893–1935) infamous “Kingfish” of Louisiana politics. [Am. Hist. in demagogic dem��a��gog��ic? also dem��a��gog��i��caladj.Of, relating to, or characteristic of a demagogue.dem times"--whatBurke himself calls in the essay "the grim intentions of themob" (xxiv; 47). This move gives us the Burke most of us know, the"socio-anagogic" Burke, the irrepressible interpreter of atext's "implicit identifications" as they culminate inthe "mystifications" of "judgments of status" and of"social order." This Burke sees himself, in the discussion ofVenus and Adonis Venus and Adonis, a classical myth, was a common subject for art during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Some works which have been titled Venus and Adonis are: from A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), as working from"Marx's theory of 'mystification'" but"neutrally," without "Marx's rage" (63). Thus,in an excerpt from A Grammar of Motives included here, Burke makes aseemingly obvious, definitional point about the relation of scene andact in Macbeth--that the "witches were representative ofMacbeth's inner temptations" (236).This same observation isthen turned, in the "Notes on Macbeth," into a remark abouthow "the 'grotesque' dimensions of the drama, the scenesof the Witchery," point towards "our sense of the work'sdevelopment ... in a motivational realm beyond tragedy" that shows"the engrossing ways whereby, implicit in the beginning, there isan end" (205). Such are the pleasures of reading Kenneth Burke,where textual analysis suddenly turns to Aristotelian teleology teleology(tĕl'ēŏl`əjē, tē'lē–), in philosophy, term applied to any system attempting to explain a series of events in terms of ends, goals, or purposes. , andwith the suggestion of the kind of fully contextualized reading that ourown critical culture embraces, in the case of Macbeth implyinghistorical topics like regicide REGICIDE. The killing of a king, and, by extension, of a queen. Theorie des Lois Criminelles, vol. 1, p. 300. , and psychoanalytic ones likecastration-fueled, grandiose ambition. Newstok rightly sees Burke's marginalization mar��gin��al��ize?tr.v. mar��gin��al��ized, mar��gin��al��iz��ing, mar��gin��al��iz��esTo relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. in Shakespearestudies as well as in the culture of contemporary criticism as revealing"a complicated resistance among American intellectuals to come toterms with their native theoretical roots." This resistance, nodoubt, results in no small part from Burke's penchant forexpansively idiosyncratic id��i��o��syn��cra��sy?n. pl. id��i��o��syn��cra��sies1. A structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.2. A physiological or temperamental peculiarity.3. readings (xxi). However, this volume providesa decidedly friendly venue for overcoming that resistance, as Burkecould not be presented in more accessible form. The focus on Shakespearekeeps the reader grounded in familiar texts, as that reader eitherlearns or reviews how to follow Burke's improvisational dances withhis major (and sometimes neo-logical) critical terms. Moreover, Newstoknicely balances what he calls Burke's "ecstatic readings ofShakespeare" with an "Appendix" of shorter, moretheorizing excerpts on Shakespeare from Burke's major works(xxxiv).The excellent introduction outlines with care the issuesrelevant to placing Burke's Shakespearean criticism within bothShakespeare studies and within the historical reception of Burke stitanic, provocative, edifying, and at times maddening oeuvre. Theeditor's notes to Burke's essays and "Notes" arethorough and unfailingly helpful. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare is atimely and important book, both for Shakespeare studies and for thedeeply embedded rhetorical strivings and biases of American literary andcultural critique. Willis Salomon Trinity University