Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 11

SHAKESPEARE, CERVANTES, AND THE ROMANCE OF THE REAL

things no longer resemble each other. Between them, Don Quixote wanders randomly."4
Much the same has occurred with Shakespeare. In the preface
to his landmark edition of Shakespeare (1765), Samuel Johnson,
whose neoclassical predilections were tempered by his common
sense, praised Shakespeare for devising a unique moral realism:
Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers,
the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful
mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by
customs of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world;
by the peculiarities of studies or professions which can operate
but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions
or temporary opinions; they are the genuine progeny of common
humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation
will always find.5

Postmodern criticism, however, problematizes the dramatic
integrity of Shakespeare's characters. Discussing The Tempest, for
instance, Lorrie Jerrell Leininger avers, "Caliban is make to concur
in the accusation [of rape, because] Prospero needs Miranda as
sexual bait, and then needs to protect her from the threat which
is inescapable given his hierarchical world-slavery being the
ultimate extension of the concept of hierarchy."6 Shakespeare's
characters not only do not fit the proper tragic mold; they seem
to have an independent existence outside the play in which the
playwright has somehow misrepresented them. Literature is thus
consumed by the ideological preoccupations of the critic's perceptions of current reality.
But while the postmodern proposition that Cervantes and
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
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