C.S. Lewis

<p>In the case of Lewis and Tolkien it would be frivolous to suggest a connection with the chemical industry; but some other links are worth noting. For Lewis, the Gollancz Memorial Prize was not his only connection with the British Academy. Six years after Tolkien’s Gollancz Memorial Lecture on ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, Lewis was invited to deliver the annual Shakespeare Lecture, and this resulted in ‘Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?’ Although Lewis and Tolkien were soul-mates in important respects and their life stories have been told in combination, these two lectures are unlikely to be mentioned together except in the present context. But now that the two titles command our attention together, their likenesses leaps to the eye. And it is a significant likeness. Lewis and Tolkien were arguing for very similar positions. Tolkien contended that modern critics are too often treating <i >Beowulf</i> as a mere source of historical information about the Dark Ages, regrettably neglecting the ‘monsters’, i.e. the poetical, and indeed the moral element. Lewis contended that modern readers too often treat Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a psychological case and so fail to appreciate the atmosphere of the mystery of death (not of dying, but of being dead) which pervades the play as a whole: as if the<i > </i>Prince, not the Poem, were the main thing about <i >Hamlet</i>. Mature criticism requires a childlike receptiveness for the obvious, Lewis maintained. And that is largely what Tolkien argued about the older poem. Noticing this likeness should enrich the experience of anyone interested in either or both of these authors.</p>