110
PARTISAN REVIEW
cannot find concrete expression in the order and unity to which he
reduces his experience.
To raise these questions is not to guarantee their answers. But
it may be pointed out that the most recent and hard-working school
of Shakespearean criticism, with their concentration on themes and
symbols rather than on ideas in the plays, may be helpful in
enabling us to understand much that is difficult and forbidding in
the literature of our time. The conclusion of this school is that in
the later Shakespearean plays the world represented is no longer
the world of contemporary Elizabethan actuality charted out by the
Renaissance mind.
Othello, Hamlet,
and
Antony
and
Cleopatra
end
up by taking us to a realm of human passion and feeling that can
only be described as "transcendental". For this is a realm in which
th~
images of human grandeur and suffering take on quasi-divine
dimensions and significance. Piety to it is the act ·of commemora–
tion: Hamlet's injunctions to Horatio that his story be told, Cleo–
patra's confidence that her love for Antony will live in the memory
forever. By such an act of piety the imaginative artist in a period
of cultural confusion still managed to preserve the forms and senti–
ments of a religious society without any of the theological
obligations.
What is being suggested is that Joyce in this new work, like
Yeats and Mann, seeks his salvation not in any escape from the
present but in a transcendence of the present through the past. And
the question of his seriousness, which has bothered some people,
will be solved if we consider the piety that is involved in the ener–
getic and still uncorrupted affirmation of life that is implicit
in
every movement of his writing. This is the seriousness of the great–
est comedy, which always keeps in recollection the tragic knowl·
edge that is at its base.
