SOURCE: 'The Phoenix Renewed," Ball State Teachers College Forum, Vol. V, No. 3, Autumn, 1964, pp. 72-76.

In the following essay, Bonaventure considers the diverse interpretive approaches to the poem and defends a metaphysical reading.

There is a suggestion of poetic justice in some of the phenomena which prefaced the fourth centenary of Shakespeare's birth. Witness his Phoenix attesting its immortality by rising with new life and brilliance from the ashes of dry discussions on authenticity and sources to wave in its plumes, in Robert Ellrodt's borrowed image, "various light in different eyes."¹

In view of such renewal, special interest attaches to surveys such as those of R. Ellrodt and of J. W. Lever,² from which we can deduce how long a road separates the modern reader of Shakespeare from the eighteenth-century scholar. The latter, in his search for "beauty, truth andrarity" in Shakespeare, ignored without apology the brief "poeticall...