Renewing Kenneth Burke’s “Plea for the Shakespearean Drama”

Abstract

This article surveys the criticism of the American writer Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), who composed several landmark essays on Shakespeare’s plays and poems throughout his lengthy career. His early writings examined the structures of scenes and the rhetorical appeals of characters, whereas his later pieces ambitiously articulated a ‘recipe’ for Shakespearean drama itself, in the spirit of Aristotle’s Poetics. Burke’s interpretations of Shakespeare anticipated many contemporary academic approaches, as he blended formalist, historical, materialist, psychoanalytic, and sociological critiques of literature. His interpretations continue to be influential, particularly in the United States (although his precedent is typically acknowledged through indirection). As a maverick intellectual, Burke remains difficult to place within the genealogy of literary criticism, as much for his stylistic voice as for ideological reasons.