44. John Vyvyan, Shakespeare and the Rose of Love
This book ought to have been longer, for the author has given himself room only to expound, and not to defend, his thesis. He maintains that Shakespeare was deeply influenced, if not by the Romance of the Rose itself, at any rate by the medieval conception of love. This seems probable. But it is also his ‘aim to uncover a little of the meaning that the heroine, as a love-symbol, has in Shakespeare’ (p. 182). Symbol is not here used vaguely – Mr Vyvyan is too good a writer so to use it – as a synonym for ‘instance’ or ‘type’. The heroine ‘is in her second nature, the allegorical figure either of love itself or of the beauty by which love is awakened’ (p. 20); ‘Sylvia is a personification’ (p. 112); ‘the duality of Shakespearian heroines is a principle’ (p. 66). All this seems to me like putting a man on his trial before a prima facie case has been made out.
If we started by knowing that Shakespeare's plays were allegorical, we might well accept Mr Vyvyan's interpretation. But he really makes no attempt to convince us that there is any allegory. He assumes it, as Fulgentius assumed it in Virgil or St Augustine in Genesis. That he can make out an allegory is no sufficient proof. It is impossible for the wit of man to devise a story which the wit of some other man cannot allegorize. The author does not, to my mind, show that the plays will either read or act better if we accept his theory. He does not show how such a ‘duality’ could have helped Shakespeare. On the contrary, we are told that ‘when drama is allegory, compromise is inevitable’ (p. 131), so that the theory is as much an excuse for bad scenes as an explanation of good ones.
I do not conclude that the book has no value. The author's analyses of individual plays are always interesting and often draw our attention to neglected points. But we are left saying ‘This may be so, but there is still no evidence that it is’. Surely Mr Vyvyan must have foreseen, and ought to have rebutted one very obvious answer to his question (p. 188) ‘Why is Shakespearian allegory so elusive?’ We are promised another volume which will investigate Shakespeare's debt to Plato. I look forward to this with interest, but I hope the existence of the debt will be established before its character is investigated. No inquirer needs to use Occam's razor more vigorously than the literary critic.