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(1975). Time for comedy: The late Novels of Henry James. English Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 114-128.

T has been observed that many of Shakespeare's plays have short scenes not indispensable to dramatic plot but significant, nevertheless, in a variety of ways. Hereward T. Price, in "Mirror Scenes in Shakespeare", describes them when he says, "Apparently loose detachable scenes, so-called episodes, are frequent in Shakespeare. They vary in function as well as in techniques, but certain features tend to recur. Many of them are ... mirror scenes, reflecting in one picture either the main theme or some important aspect of the drama. Other offer some kind of contrast to the general run of the action.... Others again affect the plot by keying up or keying down the suspense."' Creizenach called these "Szenen des Stillstands."2 They are, in fact, setpieces; and in most instances, they represent a marked change in tone. They are quiet scenes in minor key, serving all the ends described by Price-and more. Three of these scenes do much more than to mirror a major theme: they provide an emotional experience for the audience which defines a major character who might, without the scene, be wrongly interpreted. These scenes are the Garden Scene in Richard II, the Mad Scenes of Ophelia in Hamlet, and the Music-under-the-ground scene in Antony and Cleopatra. In each, the action, not really essential for plot-advancement, is pivotal in the sense that it shows the audience, first and last, how it is supposed to feel about a character and about the play as a whole. It is commonplace to point out that the Garden Scene in Richard II develops the symbolism of the nation-gone-to-waste under a ruler whose sentimental love of country and of kingship are equalled only by his utter neglect of both.3 England, the sea-walled garden, "this other Eden", has suffered "a second fall of cursed man."4 And the gardener, "old Adam's likeness" and "little better thing than earth", unwittingly reports it to the weeping Queen. The irony is, of course, that this natural man is tending his garden as the King is not. The elaborate metaphor of the garden is, indeed, a mirroring of the play's subsidiary theme: the necessity of order in the state. However, this mirrorfunction is by no means the principal purpose of the episode. Actually we have no need for a reaffirmation of this theme. It has been clear from Act I that

From the eighteenth century to the present, editors, critics, and directors have recognized special problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Every major play has been extensively debated, to be sure, but discussions of this play have been marked by an unusual perplexity. There is little agreement about the most elementary questions. Is Caesar an egocentric, dangerous dictator—a genuine threat to Rome; or is he the “noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times,” as Antony says he is? Is Brutus the mistaken idealist, strong in abstract principle but weak in human perceptiveness; or is he, as Swinburne thought, the “very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world”? Is he the Aristotelian hero, noble but flawed, recognizing at last that he has erred? Or is he the willful egoist, embodying the very traits of Caesarism which he professes to hate? Is Cassius the dedicated republican that Brutus, Titinius, and many of his own speeches make him appear to be? Or is he the “lean and hungry” envious one who hates Caesar for merely personal reasons? These are only a few of the questions the play poses. Everywhere one turns, contradictions loom.

is an "escape" poet: a poet of elegance and attractive sensuousness but decidedly not in the main stream of twentieth centur y thought and feeling. R. P. Black111ur, Northrup Frye, and Robert Pack have shown the superficiality of this view.' A second barrier has becn the difficulty inherent in the poetry itself. This difficulty, however, is, in the best of Stevens, no greater and no less than that found in any poet whose work is a carefully wrought union of thought and feeling expressed by the valid means of poetry: imagery, symbol, and a perfect economy of structure. Full response to the poetry of Stevens must surely involve an understanding of recurrent images and symbols; and comment upon them has already been made by William Van O'Connor, Blackmur, Frye, Pack, and others." All have classified certain basic symbols used by Stevens. The purpose of this paper is to extend their study by offering a more inearly complete explicatio of the recurrent iniagery and its relationship to the poet's beliefs. For Stevens, the real is a felt dichotomy: (1) the inner world of the mind and the poetic imagination; (2) the external world to whose beauty he responds but to whose impersonality his consciousness makes him feel alien.3 The