SHAKESPEARE UNDER FIRE

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 23

SHAKESPEARE UNDER FIRE

A vigorous attack upon the popular conception of Shakespeare as an incomparable dramatist and observer of human affairs was made by Professor E. H. C. Oliphant, lecturer in Elizabethan literature at the University of Melbourne, in a lecture at the Adelaide University, says the "Christian Science Monitor." Professor Oliphant, whoso outspoken, original ideas are widely recognised, spent several years in America where he held positions with many universities. Adelaide educationists, in commenting upon Professor Oliphant 's stand against the general idolatory accorded Shakespeare, welcomed the attack as timely and refreshing. "If there is over a slump in Shakespeare stock, it will be the result of tho extravagant eulogies of some of the most esteemed critics," Professor Oliphant said in his lecture. "Tho only hope for betterment is to give younger scholars a freedom from the prejudice which older'mon lack, "The tendency to credit Shakespeare with the mastery of every field of knowledge is ridiculously common. In poiut of fact, there are few subjects upon which Jonson had not a much wider and deeper knowledge. Shakespeare was an imaginative writer—not an observer. Had we to rely upon him for a knowledge of the life of his times, we should know very little of it."

Professor Oliphant said that fulsome praise was bestowed upon Shakespeare even for those qualities in which he was most lamentably lacking. If the back chat? of Benedick and Beatrice, which was acclaimed as the most brilliant thing of its sort in the language, were the work of anyone but Shakespeare, it would be perceived to be nothing more than a sorry interchange of verbal infelicities. In commenting on the lecture, Principal Kick of Parkin College said that Professor Oliphant had done a good service by calling attention to the need for independent criticism of traditional 'views. Most people had a tendency to reproduce accepted views and estimates without any veal, independent consideration of them. What Professor Oliphant had said applied also to such classic writers as Milton and Dickens. "I agree with Professor Oliphant that wo arc afraid to criticise Shakespeare," Mr. W. H. Langham, a former vicepresident of tho Shakespeare Society, said. Mr. Talbot Smith, president of the Eepertory Theatre, said that it was a pity a debate did not follow the lecture, because in criticising Shakespeare's weaknesses, Professor Oliphant assumed, ho supposed, that all the audience knew the other side.