EXPLORATIONS ESSAYS IN CRITICISM MAINLY ON THE LITERATURE OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by L. C. KNIGHTS GEORGE W. STEWART, PUBLISHER,
INC. New York To MY WIFE CONTENTS Preface 9 1. How Many Children
Had Lady Macbeth 15 An Essay in the Theory and Practice of
Shakespeare Criticism 1933 2. Shakespeares Sonnets 1934 55 3.
Prince Hamlet 1940 82 4. Shakespeare and Shakespeareans i 1934 ii
1935 94 5. Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of
Sensibility 1943 108 6. George Herbert 1944 129 7. Restoration
Comedy The Reality and the Myth 1937 149 8. Notes on a Marxian View
of the Seventeenth Cen tury 1940 169 9. Henry James and the Trapped
Spectator 1938 174 10. Poetry and Social Criticism The Work of W.
B. Yeats 1941 190 11. The University Teaching of English and
History A Plea for Correlation 1939 206 PREFACE THE ONLY UNITY that
can be claimed for this small collection of essays all of which
have already appeared in print during the last ten years or so is
the unity of a point of view. The idea that informs them is that
good reading is the beginning even if it is not, as one critic has
said, the whole secret of good judg ment that literary criticism is
a form of disciplined exploration exploration, in the first place,
of words in a certain arrangement and that the main function of
criticism is to prompt other readers to fresh insights, based on
fresh disciplined explorations of their own. This idea is so simple
that one would hesitate to pronounce it so pontifically were it not
for the fact that it is one of those ideas that need constantly to
be retrieved from the status of platitude and realized afresh, in
all their implications, as living truths. At the present time
especially it seemsnecessary to re mind ourselves that works of
literature, once they have left their authors hands, are only kept
alive by being possessed by indivi duals as intimate parts of their
own living experience and that they are only so possessed when they
are re-created by each reader from the action and interaction of
the minute particulars of which they are composed. 1 The only merit
I should care to claim for these essays is that they do attempt to
keep in the forefront of attention the primary impact of the works
they discuss, so that if the reader disagrees with any particular
judgment he is at least invited to formulate his disagreement in
terms of the primary im pact on him not in terms of general notions
and abstract ideas. Which is far from denying that I hope some of
my conclusions i In a recent essay by I. A. Richards I find an
admirable definition of the creative activity that reading a good
poem or play or novel is. Commenting on some lines from Donnes An
Anatomy of the World, he writes In the Donne, I suggest, there is a
prodigious activity between the words as we read them. Following,
exploring, realizing, becoming that activity is, I suggest, the
essential thing in read ing the poem. Understanding it is not a
preparation for reading the poem. It is itself the poem. And it is
a constructive, hazardous, free creative process, a process of
conception through which a new being is growing in the mind. The
Inter action of Words, in The Language of Poetry, edited by Allen
Tate. Dr. Richards is also the critic referred to in the second
sentence above Practical Criticism, p. 805. PREFACE will be found
apt by others. Butand this applies to all forms of criticism it is
the redirection ofattention to the works them selves that matters.
There is another aspect of the present book on which I should like
to comment briefly here. In a book published some years ago called
Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson I suggested that the
relations of literature and society a topic then, as now, much in
the air could only be profitably discussed in relation to
particular works written in a particular place and period...
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