The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I found both versions unbearable because I find Othello unbearable. Who can enjoy the sight of a great spirit being cruelly tortured in front of one’s eyes? Tortured, driven mad, driven to horrible murder and self-annihilation.

  The Welles version was more Welles than Shakespeare, a spirit-rather-than-letter affair, but in a mad disordered way, not dissimilar from the mad disorder of the Moor. The deranged architecture of light and shadow, stone and bars, that is a feature of the film becomes an objective correlative, cause and reflection, of Othello’s derangement.

  The puzzle to me was that the Olivier version, as intense and disturbing as it was, did not seem to me to possess the visceral power that Steven Berkoff raved about. It led me to wonder if he was magnifying it in retrospect.

  But then somebody told me about the cast recording of the Olivier Othello. And after searching for months, a chance conversation led me to the discovery that a rare copy of this 33 1/3 rpm vinyl disc was in the possession of a friend of mine, the writer Alfred Gingold.

  Apparently in order to make an LP of the production the cast had gone into a recording studio, almost directly from the stage, and had produced an album.

  It took me one hearing of the last side, actually one moment, to make me understand, make me give more credit to Berkoff’s account. Give more credit to Olivier, who offers on this vinyl version one of the most heartbreaking moments in all Shakespeare.

  The moment came late in the final act, when Othello is finally convinced he’s been duped by Iago, and that he has murdered his beloved wife Desdemona out of a delusion.

  After lashing himself rhetorically—“roast me in sulphur!/Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!”—he finds such words inadequate, and gives way to wailing:

  O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon!

  dead! O, O!

  O-groans again! But here the fulcrum, the focal point of all the tragic grief comes not from the O’s but from the o, the moan within “Desdemon.”

  In saying “Desdemon! dead!” Olivier’s voice cracks on the syllable “mon” in Desdemon, in a way that splits your heart open. The crack in the voice—who knows how it was achieved, by acting process or naturalistically, it was almost like a jeweler’s tap in its subtlety and profundity. I will never forget “Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead!” as long as I live.

  When I heard that I suddenly felt I could credit Steven Berkoff’s memory of the devastating effect of Olivier’s Othello. Finding exactly the—unmarked—crack in the voice. Finding the final focal point of Othello’s unbearability is what great actors do.

  Of course I am making a case here against film, aren’t I? Not necessarily: I’d say I was making a case for voice, whether it be on a film soundtrack, stage, a vinyl platter, a tape or digital file.

  And I suppose I am returning to my argument, my personal discovery that voice recordings can sometimes be the best way of experiencing Shakespeare.

  And so I want to plead with you that you pick up John Gielgud’s audio version of Lear. Gielgud’s voice here—toward the end of his and Lear’s life—becomes a kind of riveting extended vocal aria.

  And Paul Scofield’s audio version of Hamlet. Yes, you miss the visual dimension of watching the actors on stage, but often as not that can distract from the language. You get so much, much more than watching the full theatrical panoply of mediocre productions of Shakespeare. Audiotape Shakespeare, especially with headphones, turns the mind into a virtual stage.

  I could go on but perhaps I should not leave the subject of film without a word about Shakespeare in Love, a film that’s probably been seen by more people than all the film versions of Shakespeare’s actual plays combined, and has, for better or worse, created the reigning popular culture image of Shakespeare.

  Look, I liked Shakespeare in Love in a spirit-rather-than-letter way. But what is less widely noted and perhaps more troublesome is that it has created an image of Shakespeare as an artist—an image that takes sides in one of the most crucial controversies in all Shakespeare studies: the question of revision.

  The Shakespeare of Shakespeare in Love dashes off playscripts in the midst of drinking and wenching, sends them off to the theater and never has another care about what he writes.

  Taken the wrong way it can seem to be a disparaging vision of the artistic process, or Shakespeare’s. He didn’t take his plays very seriously, why should we? Perhaps we’re making too much of a “fuss” about it.

  On the other hand it can be a tribute to his offhand genius, but in either case it clearly suggests that he never has second thoughts, not even a second look, much less undertakes a careful revision of his first draft, as a large and influential faction of scholars have argued for the past three decades. (Unless you count his revision of “Bertha and the Pirates” into Twelfth Night.)

  I’m enormously fond of Tom Stoppard’s work (especially Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of the very best non-Shakespearean Shakespearean films ever made, with many great moments of Hamlet as well). And there are some truly dazzling sequences in Shakespeare in Love (the Romeo and Juliet interchangeable parts duet, for instance). Again it’s not a polemic, it’s a spirited conjecture. Again we’re not told what to think—but what to think about.

  * Olivier experimented with the technique in one soliloquy in his earlier film of Henry V.

  Chapter Eleven

  Peter Brook: The Search for the Secret Play

  In which an attempt to plumb the depths of bottomlessness in Shakespeare leads to an embarrassing public incident involving Peter Brook, whose disclosure of the notion of a “Secret Play” beneath each of Shakespeare’s plays leads to an intimation of a “Secret Play” beneath all the plays.

  There are three kinds of audiences [for Shakespeare]: a normal audience, an audience with Peter Brook in it, and you lot.

  —Patrick Stewart (former Royal Shakespeare Company member)

  speaking to the 18th International Conference of

  Shakespeare Scholars at Stratford-on-Avon

  I feel i have to begin this inquiry with my apology to Peter Brook. It was Brook’s Dream that changed my life by initiating me into a realm I might otherwise never have known. It’s possible to go through life, through literature, even as a compulsive reader (as I was) and not to have had that kind of experience. Until Brook’s Dream, with the exception of that strange moment with the sonnet at the blackboard at Yale, I had found literary intensities not in Shakespeare but rather from the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets, from Milton and Keats and to a certain extent Hart Crane among the moderns.

  But Peter Brook’s Dream introduced me to something I had not imagined, nor been prepared for by other literary experiences. Looking back it reminds me of the curious opening to The Taming of the Shrew—the so-called Induction—in which a Stratford-area lowlife, Christopher Sly, awakened from a drunken stupor, is duped into believing he is a highborn nobleman and that his lowlife past is but a dream from which he’s been awakened, just in time to witness a performance of a play (“The Taming of the Shrew”). It evokes what may have been Shakespeare’s own sense of “induction,” his elevation from Stratford yokel to royal poet and playwright. It evokes, that induction, my own sense of induction that night in Stratford: from waking life to Shakespearean dream state. I can’t help identifying with Christopher Sly, drunken tinker; it was Peter Brook who tricked me into thinking I’d awakened into a dream.

  What that experience was, what gave the Dream the power to cast that kind of spell—one I feel that I’m still under at this very moment three decades later—is a mystery that deserved further investigation, particularly as I began to learn I was not alone in having had this sort of experience with that Dream.

  It was Brook as well who said something that crystallized my desire to write this book and helped define what it is I was seeking to discover in the process of doing it. This was back in September 1998 when I first met him face-to-face and he gave me a remarkable response to what might be called “the exce
ptionalist question” on Shakespeare.

  And then after I’d begun writing this book there were two further encounters with Peter Brook in which I sought desperately to get deeper into the question of bottomlessness: another one-on-one interview that was followed, shortly thereafter, by what can only be called an Embarrassing Public Incident. The kind that calls for an apology.

  Although, in my defense, I felt driven to it by the urgency I felt about understanding Peter Brook’s vision. He was, it could be argued, one of the greatest if not the greatest and most influential Shakespeareans of the past century. He’d brought Shakespeare to life in a life-changing way not just for me but for countless other Shakespeareans. He had a vision of Shakespeare which was powerful and suggestive but also elusive. He was seventy years old and inevitably there was a feeling that if I did not press him further upon it then, when I had a chance, I might never get such an opportunity again.

  And then, on the evening of the Embarrassing Public Incident, Brook made what to me was a novel and sensational disclosure: the notion of a “secret play” to be found beneath each of Shakespeare’s plays.

  It was this, more than anything, that precipitated the Embarrassing Incident.

  Perhaps without much further ado I should reproduce the letter of apology I sent to Peter Brook the morning after the incident. It’s still a bit painful to me, but the reader might find it amusing evidence of the urgency I felt.

  Dear Peter Brook,

  I feel I owe you an apology for something that happened at your “BAM* Dialogue” last Thursday. Please understand that I am such a self-conscious person that I rarely venture even to ask a question at a public forum such as that. But I must confess: I was the person who—to my own astonishment—could not stop myself from calling out to interrupt a long-winded questioner that night. The questioner who seemed intent on telling us everything he knew about your work, thus devouring the time left to hear you tell us about your work.

  In what I thought was a well-meaning attempt to move things along and cut short his Polonian rambling, I made a caustic remark out loud (“Thank you for the lecture”) that I probably should have muttered under my breath.

  I don’t think I was being intolerant so much as impatient; impatient in the way that everyone in Hamlet is impatient with Polonius. But impatience is not necessarily a virtue, and even though others assured me afterward they felt the same way, I probably should have suffered in silence. To say that I spoke out because I was dying to hear more from you rather than from the questioner does not exonerate me from the charge of unkindness to him—and of taxing you by raising the drama level in the hall in a way that may not have been of your choosing.

  Happily you were able to be more gracious than I was to the questioner. You made amends, you made concord of my discord, and went on to say many more exciting things in the time left. I’m not sure what to make of my unaccustomed outspokenness (unaccustomed anyway in myself, although not uncommon in New York forums where I’ve witnessed numerous “Question, please!” outcries in similar circumstances). I think it was the excitement of your ideas. I think I was responding to the thrilling notion you introduced in your pre-question-period remarks, the notion of finding “the secret play” beneath the surface of the text in the experience of performance. So much of what you say matters to me, so much of what you’ve done has mattered to me in a life-changing way, it felt unendurable to put up with the questioner’s pontification in preference to hearing from you. Although, in fairness to him, I guess we were both, in our own ways expressing an urgency about your work.

  Still I feel terrible if I offended or disturbed you. I apologize for that and hope you may find it possible to “assault mercy” and grant me pardon.

  Yours truly,

  [signed]

  Ron Rosenbaum

  The letter speaks for itself, alas, and I want to say that my deferential tone to Brook, my apologetic fervor, was utterly sincere if (as Brook gently pointed out in the generous letter he wrote in reply) a bit long-windedly Polonian itself. The one thing my letter does play down, I’ll admit, is my still-seething irritation at the long-winded questioner.

  I’m sure you know the type, the ones who love to seize the opportunity to preen (at the expense of the speaker and his audience), with a self-congratulatory expansiveness, their profound understanding of the artist in question. To let everyone know how conversant they are with the theoretical ramifications of everything.

  In this case it was particularly irritating because the questioner focused his discourse almost entirely and obtusely on the least interesting, most misleading aspect of Peter Brook’s career: his flirtation with the alleged breakthroughs of sixties experimental theater and meta-theater, including Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and Jerzy Grotowski’s Theater Workshop. These may have been experiments Brook learned from, and the sterile, stunted, minimalist meta-theatrical dogmas still appeal to antiquated academic avant-gardistes who can’t get over the stunning revelation that a play isn’t real (“It’s, like, artificial, man!”). Those who believe that the entire function of theater is to expose theater, with an immature Holden Caulfield–like equation of artifice with “phoniness.”

  But while it is part of Brook’s past and he may have incorporated an aspect of it into his Shakespeare, it doesn’t speak at all to Brook’s uniqueness. Everybody was doing that kind of stuff in the sixties and seventies. But from the forties through the seventies, nobody in the world was doing what Peter Brook was doing. Nobody in the world, no scholar, no individual actor, was reinventing Shakespeare, bringing electrifying new life to one play after another. And he was talking about that, that night at BAM, he was revealing an aspect of that process, the method to making it new: the search for “the secret play.” To me it was unbearably exciting to hear Brook speak about it and unbearable to have to listen to someone else drone on about “meta-theatricality,” eating up Brook’s time.

  So I don’t repudiate the emotion behind my outburst, I just regret the outburst. Believe me I tried to suppress and stifle it, but after it seemed that the talk given by the questioner would never, ever get round to terminating in a question, I lost it. And so I called out:

  Thank you for the lecture!

  Well, it did stop him; it stopped everything. There were muted gasps, the well-behaved audience craned its neck in my direction, seeking the transgressor. And then looked back to Peter Brook to take a cue from his reaction.

  It was then that Brook ever-so-smoothly turned this small bit of drama into a Theater of Cruelty Moment. Turned it on me.

  He could have treated my interruption good-naturedly (“Well, yes, this is New York, isn’t it?”—something like that) and really it was pretty mild for a New York forum on anything. But instead Brook focused a serenely steely gaze up in my direction. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me in the darkened recesses of the hall as the person who’d interviewed him about the “metaphysical dimension” of Shakespeare’s bottomlessness a few days before. (I’ll get to that.) But it was some gaze: a gaze one felt had stared down some of the most powerful and irritable theatrical egos of the century—Welles, Gielgud, Olivier, Scofield—and made them do his bidding. A gaze that had surveyed the world from the heights of ancient Persepolis and the bottomless depths of disciplined meditation. I was no match for it, nor for what he was about to say.

  It was one of those moments when you could sense the sentiment in the audience wavering. One of those recurrent moments beloved by Shakespeare when the outcome of a battle, a combat, a test of wills is poised at a moment of irresolution, wavering “like a vagabond flag on a stream” (in Antony and Cleopatra).

  I felt I might have had some support, that I wasn’t alone in feeling impatient. I thought Brook himself might have secretly welcomed an interruption of the time-devouring questioner. But that was not the way he made it sound. In the most mellifluous voice imaginable he turned first to the questioner and said, “I’d like to apologize for the fact that some here tonig
ht”—and here he flicked a dismissive glance in my direction—“cannot be more patient.”

  And in that one instant I could feel the sentiment in the room shift abruptly against me. The force of the sudden shift—prompted as if by the flick of Prospero’s wand—was like a palpable blow. And in that instant I learned a lesson: that’s what great directors do. They direct: turn language into palpable, focused physical vectors of powerful emotion.

  I suppose I should have been grateful as well to have a momentary glimpse of what Peter Brook’s directorial style might be—the iron hand in the velvet glove—even as its object.

  David Selbourne, who had attended the rehearsals of the Dream at Brook’s invitation and had published a fascinating rehearsal diary called The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, told me about several cast members who found Brook’s rehearsal process for the Dream almost too unbearably intense and—as a consequence—suffered breakdowns.

  By all accounts putting together the Dream was no dreamy affair. Trevor Nunn told me of the initial dismay with which he had watched the evolution of Brook’s production from the very beginning at Stratford back in 1970.

  Nunn had been the one who had called on Peter Brook to do the Dream at a point when Brook had already left Stratford and the Royal Shakespeare Company to launch an experimental “International Center for Theater Research” in Paris. Nunn told me he’d begged Brook to come back and do the Dream, and Brook had balked “and then said he’d only do it if we could recruit a hundred schoolchildren from the neighborhood to play the fairies. He was worried about the fairy problem—how do you depict them without looking silly. And I said, “Yes of course, of course, Peter, one hundred children, whatever you want.’ ” Nunn ended up doing most of the casting for the Dream from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s fairly extraordinary stock company and then Brook came over to re-audition everyone and finally begin the rehearsal process (by that time he’d dropped the kinder-fairy-battalion idea). I remember Nunn’s still mystified look as he told me how everything he saw Brook doing with his actors during the rehearsal process—the staring exercises, the touchy-feely interaction, the nonsense sounds he had actors chant to the pentameter beat, all this Brookian psychodrama—was impressive in its way. But, Nunn says, using a phrase I’d never heard before, but one which I instantly came to love: “I didn’t see anything you might call theater-filling.”