Scholarship & Reception — On Shakespeare and the Drama

Received view (summary)

The overwhelming consensus in English-language criticism treats Tolstoy’s essay as a brilliant failure — impressive in its energy, embarrassing in its conclusions. George Orwell’s 1947 reply set the terms that still dominate: Tolstoy’s logical case against Shakespeare is largely unanswerable on its own terms, but it cannot dislodge the enjoyment readers actually take from the plays, particularly from their verbal texture. Orwell’s counter-stroke is a survival argument (“the only criterion for the merit of a work of art is that it continues to be admired”) and an autobiographical one: the curious parallel between Tolstoy’s own life-arc and King Lear’s — renouncing property, expecting gratitude, receiving fury — explains, psychologically, why Lear attracted such disproportionate venom. Most scholars who followed (A. N. Wilson, Harold Bloom) leaned on one or both of these moves.

The minority tradition — G. Wilson Knight (1934), George Bernard Shaw (1906), Ludwig Wittgenstein (undated notebook remarks), and more recently Catherine Brown (2015) — grants Tolstoy something. Knight mounted a formal rebuttal but conceded Tolstoy had exposed real weaknesses in Shakespeare worship. Shaw agreed with Tolstoy’s social critique while defending what he called Shakespeare’s “word music.” Wittgenstein expressed sympathy for the anti-bardolatry impulse. Brown argues the essay deserves re-reading as a self-conscious exercise in morally motivated criticism rather than as failed aesthetics. The mainstream hostile verdict, however, is undeniable: as Orwell put it, “of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has read.”

George Gibian’s 1957 monograph remains the only book-length dedicated study in English, locating Tolstoy’s criteria within the French neoclassical tradition rather than pure eccentricity — a move that partially rehabilitates the essay’s intellectual coherence without endorsing its conclusions.

Key voices

• George Orwell (1947). “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.” Polemic No. 7 (March 1947). Full text at orwell.ru. Orwell concedes that Tolstoy’s structural complaints about Lear are partly fair (“Lear is not a very good play, as a play”) and that no argument can prove Shakespeare “good.” His counter has two prongs: (1) a survival argument — that enduring admiration is the only available test of merit; (2) the autobiographical parallel — Tolstoy’s own life resembled Lear’s so closely (renunciation, flight, death in a stranger’s cottage) that the hatred has the character of self-reproach. Orwell also argues Tolstoy is not seeking legal censorship but something more insidious: he “will do dirt on Shakespeare, if he can… kill his enjoyment by every trick he can think of.” The essay frames the dispute as a collision between Tolstoy’s ascetic religious worldview and Shakespeare’s exuberant humanism, not as a dispute about craft alone. Orwell’s irritable-child metaphor: “His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child… The child has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost.” Relation to dive findings: complicates findings 1 and 3 (grants the logical force while neutralising it biographically); extends finding 4 (the Lear-Tolstoy parallel Orwell develops was not in Tolstoy’s own account).

• G. Wilson Knight (1934). Shakespeare and Tolstoy. English Association Pamphlet No. 88. London: English Association. 27 pp. Bibliographic records at NLA and Internet Archive (text not freely extracted online). A formal rebuttal written 30 years before Orwell’s essay. Knight was a leading Shakespeare symbolist-critic; his pamphlet is described in library records as “a reply to the Essay ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’ written by Tolstoy.” The specific arguments are not accessible via open web sources and the pamphlet has not been digitised in readable form; content must be verified from the physical text. Relation to dive findings: contradicts (presumed, given Knight’s strong Shakespearean commitments) — but the precise terms are a needsReview item.

• George Bernard Shaw (1906). Letter accompanying Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare. Funk & Wagnalls, New York and London, 1906 / Free Age Press, Christchurch, 1907. The volume also contains Ernest Crosby’s “Shakespeare’s Attitude toward the Working Classes” and a section titled “The Press against Shakespeare.” Library record at Penn State. Shaw agreed with the social-class critique: he affirmed Tolstoy’s point about Shakespeare’s lack of social and political conscience, and he shared Tolstoy’s view that Shakespeare was “philosophically pedestrian.” However, Shaw defended Shakespeare’s dramatic language — what he called “word music” or verbal magic — on grounds Tolstoy’s criteria simply did not cover. Shaw coined the term “bardolatry” (in his 1901 Three Plays for Puritans preface) to describe the same uncritical reverence Tolstoy attacked, making him a partial sympathiser. The nuance: Shaw was not anti-Shakespeare but anti-bardolatry — he thought sober assessment of Shakespeare’s real weaknesses was healthier than idol-worship. Full letter text is in the 1906/1907 print edition (Appendix II, p. 166); no open-web transcript confirmed accessible. Relation to dive findings: Shaw’s letter confirms finding 2c (class/crowd critique) but contradicts the implicit suggestion that Shakespeare’s formal qualities can be cleanly separated from moral content — Shaw thought the music was irreducible.

• George Gibian (1957). Tolstoj and Shakespeare. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 47 pp. (Musagetes: Contributions to the History of Slavic Literature and Culture). Bibliographic note at Questia. The only book-length study in English devoted to this essay. Gibian argues Tolstoy’s critical principles in What Is Art? place him within the tradition of French neoclassicism — demanding absolute lucidity and moral-religious criteria — rather than in some idiosyncratic personal position. He examines Tolstoy’s treatment of Hamlet specifically alongside Lear. This framing extends finding 1 (the essay as practical sequel to What Is Art?) by giving it a longer intellectual genealogy, and complicates the received “crank” dismissal by showing Tolstoy’s position has a coherent tradition behind it. Full text not freely available online; Questia record confirms existence and structure.

• Harold Bloom (1994; 1998). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994); Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). New York: Harcourt Brace. Bloom places Shakespeare at the absolute centre of the canon and treats Tolstoy’s essay as a specimen of what strong writers do when they cannot assimilate a precursor: they repudiate him. The “anxiety of influence” framework reads Tolstoy’s attack not as sincere criticism but as a defence mechanism — the essay is itself evidence of how deeply Shakespeare matters. In The Western Canon, Bloom is explicit that Tolstoy “could not handle the influence of Shakespeare in his works so much so that he had to disavow him.” Bloom’s verdict is hostile but structurally interesting: it contradicts finding 2a (the “epidemic suggestion” explanation for Shakespeare’s fame) by substituting a psychology-of-strong-writers explanation, and extends finding 3 by framing the Lear demolition as unconscious rivalry. Note: Bloom’s position is itself a specimen of the “beg the question” move flagged in the task brief — he takes aesthetic pleasure in Shakespeare as self-evident and then diagnoses any dissent as psychopathology.

• Catherine Brown (2015, approx.). “Revisiting Tolstoy’s ‘On Shakespeare and on Drama’.” Essay at catherinebrown.org. The most substantial recent scholarly rehabilitation. Brown argues the essay deserves reading not as criticism that failed but as personally-motivated moral criticism that makes readers self-conscious about their own critical practices. She notes: (1) Soviet critics (M. P. Alekseev) valued it for its “anti-decadence and anti-formalism”; (2) Pasternak, whose father was Tolstoy’s friend, deliberately translated King Lear on Tolstoyan principles of simplicity; (3) Wittgenstein expressed sympathy for the anti-bardolatry stance; (4) the essay “courted, though didn’t quite meet, censorship” in Russia by attacking the author used to evade the censor. Brown also notes that Chertkov’s 1906 English translation differs from the Russian original (substituting Shakespeare’s verse for Tolstoy’s prose paraphrases), which makes the translation itself a partial misrepresentation. Relation to dive findings: extends findings 1 and 2 (sincerity-criterion and epidemic-suggestion) by grounding them in Tolstoy’s personal life circumstances and by tracing their broader cultural reception in Russia.

• A. N. Wilson (1988). Tolstoy. New York: Norton. Wilson calls the essay “notoriously unsuccessful and somehow embarrassing” and “fifteen thousand words of nonsense” and “almost Mephistophelian arrogance.” This is the harshest biographical verdict. It treats the essay as a symptom of old-age dogmatism rather than as a coherent critical act. Relation to dive findings: contradicts all four findings — the “crankish” frame dismisses the essay’s internal logic without engaging it. This is the clearest example of the question-begging move: Wilson’s disgust assumes the very aesthetic pleasure Tolstoy challenges.

• Harold Bloom / George Steiner (noted by Brown as triangulating the essay with Tolstoy’s personal trajectory). Steiner (1959) is mentioned by Brown in the same cluster as Bloom and Bartlett as scholars who connected the essay to Tolstoy’s life. Specific Steiner text not separately verified.

• Aylmer Maude (1908–10; biography 1908–10 / revised 1930). The Life of Tolstoy. Oxford University Press. Gutenberg text at Project Gutenberg. Maude was Tolstoy’s authorized English translator and biographer. Brown notes Maude “rightly stressed the Biblical context” in interpreting Tolstoy’s dramatic works. No specific passage about the Shakespeare essay found in freely accessible text; Maude is generally sympathetic to Tolstoy’s religious-ethical framework, which would place him in the minority that at least took the essay’s premises seriously. Relation: likely complicates rather than flatly contradicts, but this is a needsReview item.

• Rosamund Bartlett (2010). Tolstoy: A Russian Life. London: Profile Books. Brown cites Bartlett as among those connecting the essay to Tolstoy’s personal-life trajectory. Bartlett’s biography is known for focusing on biography over literary analysis; the precise framing of the Shakespeare essay is not extractable from open sources. NeedsReview item.

Contemporary reception 1906–07

Publication facts (confirmed): - The essay was first published as О Шекспире и о драме in the Russian press in 1906. The serialisation venue most often cited is Russkoe Slovo (a different daily from the 1859–66 St Petersburg weekly of the same name — this is the large-circulation Moscow daily founded 1895, associated with Sytin). The specific issue dates are not confirmed in accessible open sources; this is a thin-spot. - In English: first published in The Fortnightly Review, December 1906, Vol. 80, Issue 480, pp. 963–983 (confirmed by ProQuest record: ProQuest). This was the first English-language appearance. - Book form: Funk & Wagnalls, New York and London, November 1906. Translated by V. Chertkov and I. F. M. The volume also contained Crosby’s “Shakespeare’s Attitude toward the Working Classes” and Shaw’s letter. A separate Free Age Press (Christchurch, UK) edition appeared in 1907 with the same supplementary texts plus a section titled “The Press against Shakespeare” — a compilation of press opinion, contents not separately verified online.

The Funk & Wagnalls 1906 volume structure (confirmed from Penn State catalog): 1. Tolstoy, “Shakespeare and the Drama” (trans. Chertkov) 2. Ernest Crosby, “Shakespeare’s Attitude toward the Working Classes” 3. Shaw’s letter (“Mr. G. Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare”) 4. “The Press against Shakespeare” (contents unknown — likely press cuttings or notices)

Ernest Crosby’s role: Crosby (1856–1907) was an American Tolstoyan activist. His 1902 pamphlet Shakespeare’s Attitude toward the Working Classes (Mason Press, Syracuse) was the immediate trigger for Tolstoy’s essay — Tolstoy wrote the essay as a preface to Crosby’s work, which then outgrew its frame. The two appeared together in the 1906 edition, making them companion texts. Crosby’s argument — that Shakespeare was unsympathetic to the poor — was the social-class thread that connected him to both Tolstoy and Shaw.

English-language reception, 1906–07: The Fortnightly Review publication in December 1906 would have reached the educated English reading public immediately. Specific contemporary reviews are not recoverable via open web sources; this is the most significant thin-spot in this sweep. The Free Age Press volume title listing a “Press against Shakespeare” section suggests that at the time of the 1907 edition there was already a body of press opinion (both hostile and sympathetic) worth compiling — but its contents are not confirmed.

Russian reception: Thin documentation from open sources. Brown notes the essay “courted, though didn’t quite meet, censorship” in Russia, because attacking the author (Shakespeare) used to circumvent Russian censorship was itself a potentially subversive move. No specific Russian press reactions from 1906 confirmed.

Note on Chertkov’s translation: Brown flags that the 1906 English translation (by Chertkov and I. F. M.) substituted Shakespeare’s actual verse for Tolstoy’s prose paraphrases of it — changing the reader’s experience of the argument and arguably softening one of Tolstoy’s sharpest effects (showing Shakespeare’s language as it actually reads, not as it sounds in educated quotation). This means the contemporary English reception was responding to a partially transformed text.

Triangulation notes

The question-begging move flagged: Every major hostile respondent (Orwell on the survival test, Bloom on aesthetic self-evidence, Wilson on “nonsense”) takes the pleasure readers take in Shakespeare’s language as a brute fact that settles the argument. This is precisely the criterion Tolstoy’s essay contests — that cultivated aesthetic pleasure is a reliable guide to artistic worth rather than a product of social suggestion. None of the mainstream voices directly answer this; they reassert it. Brown (2015) is the only scholar who explicitly names this circularity.

Open questions / needsReview

1. G. Wilson Knight’s actual arguments — the pamphlet (English Association, 1934, 27 pp.) exists in library holdings and on Internet Archive but was not readable via open web fetch. What precisely does Knight concede and what does he defend? Does he engage the sincerity-criterion directly?

2. Shaw’s letter full text — confirmed to exist as Appendix II (p. 166) in both the Funk & Wagnalls and Free Age Press editions. The specific arguments about “word music” and how far his sympathy extends are not confirmed from open sources; secondary sources (Gibian, anti-bardolatry scholarship) give the outline but not the texture.

3. “The Press against Shakespeare” section in the 1907 Free Age Press edition — title confirmed in Penn State catalog. Contents (which newspapers, which critics, which positions) not verified.

4. Russian serialization details — the Russkoe Slovo venue and 1906 issue dates need verification against a Tolstoy bibliography or the PSS commentary (likely in the commentary apparatus for Tom 35). The Russian press reaction beyond Catherine Brown’s brief censorship note is undocumented here.

5. Maude’s specific framing — The Life of Tolstoy (1908–30) is the authorised biography by Tolstoy’s own translator; his treatment of the Shakespeare essay is likely more measured than Wilson’s. Specific passage not found via open sources.

6. Rosamund Bartlett’s framing — Tolstoy: A Russian Life (2010) is cited by Brown as connecting the essay to Tolstoy’s personal trajectory; the exact terms are not confirmed from open sources.

7. George Steiner’s mention — Brown cites Steiner (1959) alongside Bloom as triangulating the essay with Tolstoy’s personal trajectory. No specific Steiner text identified; likely in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) — this should be checked if the topic is pursued.

8. T. S. Eliot — no confirmed engagement with Tolstoy’s Shakespeare essay found. Eliot’s essay “Hamlet” (1919) defends Shakespeare indirectly but does not appear to address Tolstoy’s critique. Not pursued further; no false positive.

9. Gary Saul Morson / Caryl Emerson / Donna Orwin — none found to have written specifically on this essay. Their work is primarily on Tolstoy’s fiction and philosophy of time/history rather than on this specific text. Absence noted, not a gap that requires filling.