ABSTRACT
“Gain Shakespeare’s effects by Shakespeare’s means when a person can.” Such was the sound advice of Granville-Barker for the modern interpretation of Shakespeare. However, there are times when the theatrical interpreter cannot use Shakespearean means, even though the academic interpreter may know how a certain Shakespearean effect was accomplished. Recent dramatic theory would stress this latter stage, which Bertolt Brecht terms estrangement, as the most important aspect of the emotional process. But long ago Lucretius evoked the intellectual pleasure of looking out on troubled waters when one was safe ashore, of looking down on the violent conflicts of men from the heights of philosophy. Tragedy presents such knowledge, not in philosophic abstraction but in concrete exemplification. Filial ingratitude is an obsessive theme with Proust, just as parricide is with Dostoevsky. Like the sons of old Karamazov, Edgar and Edmund incarnate the good and evil of their father’s character.
