The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Small changes can make large differences in meaning, and numerous differences can mean …? Two versions of the same play? Two differing works of art? The question of whether we have two Lears and three Hamlets has provoked a veritable civil war among Shakespeare scholars over the past three decades, the resolution—or irresolution—of which can mean all the difference in the world to how we view two of the foundational works of Western culture.

  In some ways both sides of the celebrated “culture wars” over literature in academia have, for different reasons, spent little time dwelling on the genuine scholarship that persists and survives in the academy. For the bearers of the New Truths of Theory (in which, for instance, the author has been replaced by an “author function”) the idea of “genuine scholarship” is suspect if not illusory (as is everything else) in a determinist, power-inflected value system. While for those who believe the academy has been invaded by a clone army of Theorists, the persistence of genuine scholarship amid all the cloning around, so to speak, is not generally played up because it tends to contradict sweeping condemnations.

  And so what I believe are absolutely absorbing and consequential developments in Shakespearean scholarship have not been made well known to the general public. This is one modest aim of this book.

  For instance, most well-educated people I’ve spoken to outside the academy were unaware that there may be two Lears, much less three Hamlets. And that the differing versions raise serious questions for all who care about those plays. This is only one of a number of genuinely important, even urgent questions, debates, arguments, century-long wars, that have been going on that deserve your attention if you feel Shakespeare is worth caring about. Even the question of why you think Shakespeare’s work is worth caring about is the subject of an interesting debate. For his “themes”? For the beauty and pleasure of his language—or are beauty and pleasure no longer legitimate categories of value? And what makes “Shakespearean” beauty and pleasure different—if it is?

  Another realization I made in the course of writing this book is that great directors are, in their own way, great scholars of Shakespeare. Often able to discover, to open up, thrilling abysses of possibility on the page that one could not imagine, or had not imagined, before directors “put them on their feet,” onstage.

  So what I’ve been doing for the past seven years has been, more than anything, reporting on such matters. In a way this book is a tribute not just to the scholars and directors I’ve singled out, but to so many more so well deserving of a greater hearing for the excitement of their engagement with Shakespeare. Listening to great directors’ and scholars’ impassioned arguments has been thrilling and I hope to communicate some of that thrill to you. Hearing Sir Peter Hall pound his fists in fury over the vital importance of a pause at the close of a pentameter line, for instance—wonderful! Whatever side one comes down on in these often bitter clashes, the process of thinking through the arguments takes you deeper into the Shakespearean experience. The point, as the fine Shakespearean actor Henry Goodman has said, “is not to decide what to think, but what to think about.”

  And I suppose if there’s a unifying thread to the contentions I report on, and invite you to think about herein, it may have to do with how we decide what we mean when we say something is “Shakespearean.” How does one define—if one can—what is the most truly “Shakespearean” way of speaking the iambic pentameter line, say? How do we choose which of the two versions of the last words of King Lear is more “Shakespearean”? How do we decide whether a clunkily written “Funeral Elegy” is Shakespearean? (Is there a Shakespearean way of writing badly?)

  Recent biographical studies have declared their intention to tell us “what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.” I have focused on what makes Shakespeare “Shakespearean.”

  It’s the kind of question in its various guises that I still find myself caring about deeply in an intellectual and visceral way. It’s the kind of question I don’t find answered by the biographers or by Harold Bloom’s thematic globalizations. It’s the kind of question I want you to care about.

  I want you to care as much as I care about the way the superb director Peter Brook changed the way Shakespeare has been played in the past half-century with a single transformative production.

  I want to make you care about Peter Hall’s obsession with the pause (or as he now calls it, the “slight sensory break”) at the end of the pentameter line. Hall was, after all, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. There must be a pause—a certain kind of pause, Hall insists—or all is lost. Why the obsession with the pause?

  I want you to care as much as Shakespeare scholar John Andrews cares about what is lost from the spell of Shakespeare’s language when we “modernize” Shakespeare’s spelling. Whether you spell “Tomorrow and tomorrow …” as originally printed, “To morrow and to morrow …”

  I want you to care as much as I care about the bitter dispute over the variations in Hamlet and Lear and whether Shakespeare may have changed his mind in subtle ways about his greatest works. If we can know for sure they were his changes.

  I want to convince you that some of the greatest Shakespeare you will ever see is close at hand, on film, at your video store now. That film in certain, yes, anachronistic ways can sometimes offer more intense “Shakespearean” experiences than the stage. And if you won’t go that far, I want to convince you not to miss or dismiss the four greatest works of Shakespearean cinema because of misplaced snobbery about film versus stage’s superiority.

  I want you to care about questions of “attribution,” not just the “Funeral Elegy” fiasco, which saw much of the Shakespeare profession in the United States, or certainly its publishing arm, accept a terminally tedious, and interminably pious six-hundred-line poem as “Shakespearean” for some seven years, before it was discredited as a misattribution. But I want you to care as well about the lesser known “Hand D” controversy, and what they both tell us about the debate over how we define “Shakespearean.”

  I want you to care as much as I care about the controversy over Shakespeare’s “late language” and all the fascinating attendant controversies. Must what some refer to as Shakespeare’s lapses be accounted failures, bad poetry, bad prose, as Frank Kermode believes? Or are they rather “holes” in the text that lead to larger wholes, as Stephen Booth believes? Or is the baroque complexity of the late language a reflection of Shakespeare’s growing “preoccupation with the feminine,” as Russ McDonald suggests in one of the single most illuminating scholarly essays I’ve come upon? I don’t want to compel you to accept any given position but, rather, to understand why they’re worth caring about.

  Finally, I want you to care about the argument over pleasure in Shakespeare and my conjecture about the way the unbearable pleasures of Shakespeare have shaped and distorted the way we read and see him.

  Why do I care that you care? I want you to share in the pleasures I had in talking and arguing with some of the best scholars and directors about what may be the greatest achievement of the human imagination.

  Why do I care that you care? Let me begin by describing why I care.

  Chapter One

  The Dream Induction

  On the last evening of the summer of 1970 in the village of Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of Shakespeare, I had an experience that changed my life and has haunted me ever since. One that left me, ever after, with a question I’ve been trying to answer: What was that about?

  An improbable chain of circumstances had resulted in my witnessing one of the first performances of a now-legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one that I subsequently learned changed more lives than mine: it changed the lives of an entire generation of Shakespearean players and directors, changed the way Shakespeare has been played ever since.

  But for me, that Dream—a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Peter Brook—was a kind of initiation into a new realm, a realm I’ve sought with mixed success to return to ever after. It was
the experience that, for me, gave a lifelong urgency to the conflicts over Shakespearean questions examined in the ensuing chapters.

  Perhaps I should introduce the conflicted, divided person I was back then when I piloted my rented Austin Mini into Stratford by introducing the forbidden question that led me to flee graduate school, and indirectly set me on the path to that life-changing experience at Stratford.

  Just two years before that I had begun what seemed like a promising academic career at Yale Graduate School’s Department of English Literature. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had studied primarily pre-seventeenth-century literature and had been granted a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship to Yale Graduate School, a fellowship designed to spur those undecided about an academic career to spend a year tasting the supposed fruits of such a career without many onerous responsibilities. I was only required to take one graduate seminar and teach one undergraduate class per semester, in return for which I was given an official-sounding appointment to the Yale faculty and named a Junior Fellow of Jonathan Edwards (residential) College.

  The latter made me briefly a colleague of Stephen Greenblatt, also a Junior Fellow there that year. Greenblatt would go on to found the most influential new school of Shakespeare scholarship in America—New Historicism—and like many original thinkers develop a cultlike following. He would of course end up as star of the Harvard English department and the author of a best-selling Shakespeare biography. I’ll never forget an argument Greenblatt and I had that year about the Black Panthers and historical truth, which oddly foreshadowed, in transposed form, our subsequent positions on New Historicism and Shakespeare. (I discuss it further in chapter 4.)

  At first things went swimmingly: I was thrilled to find I’d been admitted to a select seminar with Richard Ellmann, the acclaimed biographer of Yeats and Joyce, masterminds of modernism, and felt quite vain when Ellmann singled out a paper I’d read at the seminar, a critique of the determinism of Yeats’s muddleheaded mystical cosmology.

  But sometime in the second semester, although enjoying a Shakespeare seminar with Howard Felperin, I lost heart, or maybe it was more that my heart was broken. In point of fact, my heart was broken by a question I asked—and an answer I got—about love.

  The occasion was a special, ad hoc, invitation-only seminar I’d been asked to, a presentation by one of the English department’s favorite wunderkind scholars. A paper on Chaucer’s lesser-known love-vision poems, including the Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowles.

  Unlike the wild digressive fabliaux of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s love-vision poems are exquisite and mysterious shorter works, and I was looking forward to the occasion, although by this time my disillusion with graduate school life had already begun to undermine the pleasure I felt from the study of literature. The faculty sherry parties had a lot to do with it: watching my fellow graduate students assiduously sucking up to Harold Bloom and other stars of the department, their sherry-flushed faces perspiring from the damp mothball-mildew warmth of their tweeds. While the world outside—it was 1968!—was exploding with fearful, thrilling events.

  I’d gotten a taste of the adrenaline-fueled rush of reporting when I’d gotten press credentials to cover the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention for a local daily newspaper. And to return from that history-changing riot to the shallow cynicism of graduate school culture was intensely dismaying. What was wrong with these people? I asked at first. Then: What was wrong with me? Why was I staying there?

  The love-vision seminar moment crystallized my doubts. It wasn’t Chaucer who was the problem. Nor was it the wunderkind scholar himself, whose paper I recall to be an intelligent if somewhat overwrought examination of the way in which the narrators of Chaucer’s dream visions consciously re-envision their visions as poetry. Something like that.

  No, it was his response to a question about love. It was a question I asked in the discussion period after his presentation. A question about the vision of love in the love-vision poems. I forget exactly what the offending question I asked was, something along the lines of whether love was more than human delusion in Chaucer’s work.

  A shocked silence ensued among the other grad students and faculty, and I realized I had committed a terrible solecism, a faux pas of Richter-scale proportions, in asking such a naïve question. I had expressed interest in the ostensible subject matter of the poem!

  With a wan, disdainful smile and dismissive wave of his nicotine-stained fingers, the wunderkind scholar informed me that “Love is such an uninteresting question.” The truly interesting questions raised by the love-vision poems, he said, were not about love but about “the making of poetry.” This meta-poetical question, newly fashionable at the time, was far more significant than something as trivial as the nature of love.

  All the other acolytes nodded and chuckled. Of course! How naïve! The making of poetry, yes!

  “Sez who?” I muttered to myself—one of my father’s favorite Brooklyn-isms—as I slunk off.

  What am I doing here, I thought to myself as I drove back out to the house on the Sound I’d rented with some friends. That night I stayed up late, desperately searching the classified job sections of the papers for something, anything, even a traveling salesman job that would get me out of the sherry parties and on the road.

  Two years later, through a couple of lucky breaks, which began with reading the classified ads that night, I was on the road, heading for Stratford-on-Avon. I’d become not a traveling salesman but something analogous: a journalist. A journalist who wanted to write about cops and criminals, underworld and undercover types. I wanted to live life among Falstaffian rogues rather than read about them. But I was still under the spell of literature, a spell graduate school had not broken. So in September 1970 I found myself driving through the English Midlands having decided to undertake a reverse pilgrimage, a pilgrimage from Chaucer’s Canterbury to some of the icons of my academic literary past, my abandoned academic self.

  I headed north toward my first stop, Winchester, where I went to some effort to locate the ridge in the rolling countryside where Keats stood on September 19, 1819, and gazed at the sunset vista on the penultimate day of summer, a vista that gave rise to the haunting and lovely ode “To Autumn.”

  I arrived there that same day, September 19, and found the landscape had not been altered: that one could still see exactly what Keats saw. I could understand for the first time the line “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,/And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” I saw those stubble fields! I felt the “soft-dying” end-of-summer melancholy Keats evoked with its intimation of mortality, of the autumnal harvest and the more final harvest of death to come.

  AN ORDINARY ECSTASY IN NEW HAVEN

  And with that cheerful iconic vista under my belt, I headed farther north to Stratford, to the birthplace of William Shakespeare. I should say I was not a Shakespearean obsessive at that point. I had taken a graduate seminar on Shakespeare at Yale with Howard Felperin, a seminar that focused on the relationship between Shakespeare’s Tragedies and his Late Romances. Felperin would later become an avatar of stringent Derrida deconstructionism, although he still made sense to me at the time (and later renounced his deconstructionist perspective). But I hadn’t even read all the plays, I can’t recall whether I’d seen more than a few productions, I didn’t carry around copies of the plays the way I did the works of Keats and Donne, say. I’m not even sure if, when heading up the motorway toward Stratford, I knew that one of the most influential productions of the twentieth century, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, had just opened. Frankly, I’m not even sure if I knew they put on plays there. The only thing that I was sure of was that it was the birthplace of Shakespeare, and I felt a pilgrimage might in some way help me connect with what I’d been missing.

  It’s true I had had one extraordinary, puzzling, almost mystical experience of Shakespeare before then. It happened during the seminar on literature I was teaching at Yale. I had assigned
my class Shakespeare’s Sonnets. They were not particular favorites of mine at the time; when it came to love poems, I preferred the more knotty and overtly intellectual lyrics of John Donne and the other seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets to the Sonnets.

  But there had been a moment when … Well, I recall standing at the blackboard in the seminar room. I had written out one of the Sonnets on the blackboard and was leading the class through its flickering ambiguities. I think it could have been either Sonnet 44 or 45, both of which play upon the themes of absence and presence: how two united as one in love can both be, and not be, apart (can both “two be” and not “two” be). In Sonnet 45 the speaker tells an absent loved one how his thought and desire are “present-absent.”

  How he’s there, one with the distant lover and thus absent from himself; but to be absent from himself is to be two selves, one there and one not there, although the one not there actually is there—one with the absent lover—so really it’s one self at two different places. Is that all clear?

  He’s not split into two so much as flickering in and out of being one and two selves. Not just back and forth from being at one with—to being—the loved one, but “with swift motion sliding,” shifting back to being himself. He’s not just being in two places at once, he’s two beings in alternation. Two be and not two be.

  In any case, I recall standing at the blackboard in that seminar room on Prospect Street in New Haven attempting to unfold for my students this shifting, this flickering-back-and-forth effect, this dual prospect, conjured up not just by this Sonnet but by so many others. In which embracing one aspect of a verbal ambiguity and then shifting back to its counterpart involves something more than a shift in meaning in the poem, but a shift in the reader’s being. In effect you are not merely reading alternative meanings into the poem, the poem is reading alternative meanings, alternative identities, into you.