Two of O'Connor

...From an early terror of mobs, into a nausea toward sex, into eventual hatred of social values, Shakespeare moved, putting "the Almighty on trial for murder, and then faking the evidence...

...Thus, as drama, Othello is "not interesting," and Lear "a failure...

...Later on young Frank got his first taste of Shakespeare amid the mixed bag of books he found in the homes where she did day work...

...The political party he fell into was extremist, unhappy enough about the new Irish Free State's compromises with Britain to declare "war," and young O'Connor accordingly became a "war correspondent...

...O'Connor's early life centered in an extraordinary mother who, having spent her childhood in a Catholic orphanage, and having been placed out as a maid as soon as she was old enough to earn her living, somehow managed to read her first employer's copy of Shakespeare straight through...

...His long immersion in Shakespeare's words and world led h im to write Shakespeare's Progress, a study of Shakespeare's emotional development...

...Luckily for him this ended in his being taken prisoner, for his year in prison gave him a chance to think things out, and his effort to teach his fellow prisoners the Irish language was the first thing he ever did well...

...Does O'Connor wish to tell us that we can enjoy reading Othello for its poetry but not watching it on stage...

...I played at reading foreign languages and T e n t h Century Irish, . . . at singing from staff notation . . . when I didn't know one note from another...

...Such pointed recounting of how a literary boy can find what he needs anywhere makes it easier to imagine how Shakespeare grew in Avon...

...His father was an arbitrary, self-pitying bandsman whose drunken bouts periodically drove the mother to the pawn shop...

...He escaped as soon as possible by going to work, where he was no more of a success...

...Nor was there at the, end, in O'Connor's opinion, any of that "reconciliation" and peace with the world which is the common presentation of the Tempest period...

...He tells us how, growing up in Cork slums before World War I he seized and hung on to every bit of culture he could ferret out, almost from garbage pails, so to speak...

...When we remember Miranda's cry of happiness, it is hard to believe totally in the theory that the Tempest represents the exhaustion of horror...

...O'Connor's study is sure to flutter Shakespearean devotees...

...In both early and late periods, according to O'Connor, he smothers us in subjectivity, with only a brief period of "realism" (Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, the Falstaff series) in between...

...By noticing, for instance, various occasions when Shakespeare used such a simple word as "all," he infers a kind of passionate intensity which then becomes a biographic fact...

...But it was the time of the Gaelic revival, and throughout the boredom of his workdays, the memory of his one inspiring teacher held open a slim way into the world of poetry, music, and Irish politics...

...Could Shakespeare have made Othello more interesting as O'Connor suggests, if he had given Iago some personal motive such as revenge, rather than making him a pure agent of evil while giving Desdemona no power to fight back...

...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson NOT HAVING anyone to teach me," says Frank O'Connor in his autobiography, An Only Child, "I learned only by pretending to know...

...One of the subjects with which he "plays" is Shakespeare, and in a way the story of his own life provides certain credentials...

...Our pleasure in these plays today, of course, is not in wondering how the plot will turn out, but is rather partly ceremonial and partly aesthetic...

...O'Connor's schoolmasters, with a single exception, were brutal, ignorant, and usually utterly hopeless about the whole business of education...

...These are small examples of "correcting the experts...

...No more than other students can he name the Dark Lady, but he does manage to show previously unnoticed places where the dark lady experience affected Shakespeare's thought and expression...

...Since this boy, for all his day dreams of culture, did not care enough about what they taught to pass examinations, they shunted h im off to a trades school...

...It is not a form of education I would recommend to anyone, nor should I ever get a degree in French, German, Latin, music, or even Middle Irish, but I still catch myself at it, playing at scholarship and correcting the experts, and sometimes a little streak of lunatic vanity that runs through it all suggests that I may be right and everybody else wrong...

...Now he lectures at Harvard...

...So, when he was fired from a drapery shop, he joined the staff of a small nationalist journal...

...Again, he argues forcefully that at least two plays, Edward III and Two Noble Kinsmen, should be added to the usual canon, one at the beginning and the other at the end of Shakespeare's writing career...

...T o wonder about such points, however, is not to feel ungrateful to O'Connor for having the knowledge, and the sensitivity, to raise them...

...He agrees that Shakespeare was the greatest European writer of all time but calls him a failure as a dramatist because of his self-absorption and lack of interest in "character...

...An Only Child ends with his release in 1924, when he was twenty-one...

...but it does seem that one of the functions of great drama can be the statement of great themes, and that players can be allowed to represent "forces" as well as personalities...

...Where O'Connor makes a big break with tradition is in his picture of Shakespeare's progressive and unredeemed disillusionment with life...