Howard White, Copp’d Hills Towards Heaven: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978)

Excerpt:

“There are those, critics and literature professors, in particular, who regard the theater as a branch of literature. When they say so, there are those whose workaday world in is in the theater, who rise in scorn, undiluted with sadness, and speak of the theater as an art wholly its own, and bewail the poor professors who know nothing of costumes and lighting, and therefore cannot understand the many-sided art of theater. The Elizabethans, who wrote some of the best plays that our language has, and virtually the only old plays that are now presented, did not regard the theater as a branch of “literature.” They did not even use this word in its eighteenth to twentieth century meaning. Nor did they see the theater as a sui generis. Of lighting and costumes they knew little. They did not have the modern skills at deception. Of their speech we have no recordings. But each play had at least one logos, the logos of its own apparent and simple development.”

Table of Contents:

I. The Better School
II. The Decay of the Polity
III. The Foundation of the Polit
IV. “Statist though I am none”
V. The Blind Mole
VI. The Philosopher King
VII. Of Wonder
VIII. The Ascent of the Soul

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