The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In any case Brook, at the Brooklyn Marriott: looking a bit closer to his actual age—seventy-seven—than he had two years earlier, a little more frazzled and unsteady, watched over carefully by a French woman who installed us at a table in the lounge and announced that she would return in exactly forty-five minutes to wind things up.

  I introduced the subject of bottomlessness with Brook by asking him if he was familiar with the conjecture about the origin of Bottom’s name, the one I’d come upon in Peter Holland’s footnote (see chapter 1). The conjecture which depends upon the fact that the passage in Corinthians Shakespeare parodies in Bottom’s speech about his dream—“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen” what Bottom’s bottomless dream has shown him—is followed immediately by that haunting line in Corinthians about the way “the Spirit searcheth everything, yea even the bottom of God’s secrets.”

  What happened next I’ve come to think of as a high point of my experience writing this book. It’s there on the tape: after I speak of the “bottom of God’s secrets,” Peter Brook utters what sounds to me like a surprised “Ah!”

  Both the “Ah” and the surprise are what I treasure. I suppose he could have faked it, Zen master that he was. But at the moment it seemed real, as with Frank Kermode: the simultaneous surprise and appreciation of the significance of this allusion.

  In any case the transcript shows that after Brook’s “Ah!” I went on to ask him, “Do you feel that in Bottom’s Dream Shakespeare was touching on what you call ‘the invisible dimension’ or ‘the metaphysical dimension’?”

  “I think what made Shakespeare so extraordinary is that he’s a simple, straight, real man with an extraordinary metaphysical awareness. As Gordon Craig [the early twentieth-century influential stage designer and director] said, ‘If you take away the supernatural and you don’t believe in the supernatural, you might as well burn the entirety of Shakespeare’s works.’ It’s as simple as that. It goes through all his plays.”

  Burn Shakespeare’s works! Brook in his mild way becomes quite fierce on the point: “It’s not one person’s point of view, that you can argue with someone else. Shakespeare is metaphysical because in every line it shows that.

  “But what’s marvelous is that one of the most, most difficult things, I think, for any human being to do is to link all the levels of existence. And Shakespeare managed to link the highest levels of metaphysical thought with political thought, with a social sense of life, with a sense of human comedy, with a sense of human tragedy. A joy in human vulgarity, a likeness for human likeness and a joy in human grossness. And all of these put in their place, combined, make up the whole of his works.”

  Brook was on a roll, rhapsodizing over Shakespeare’s multifaceted whole, Shakespeare as a sphere, the one Nicholas of Cusa described in his “definition of infinitude,” the sphere with an infinite number of centers. He’s on a roll that takes him from the vulgar to the metaphysical:

  “There was nothing in life that was excluded [from Shakespeare]. If you want to be vulgar you could be vulgar, if you want a really crude sort of college-boy humor, you could find it in Shakespeare. If you want purely erotic, you can find it in Shakespeare. If you want lightness—that’s why the same metaphysical ideas that are there with a different weight in their expression in King Lear and in Hamlet are there in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  And then he takes it even further, or deeper: “I think you’ll find in all great spiritual, mystical writing that sense of that, awareness of the void, of emptiness.”

  Then he draws upon an unexpected source—neurology—to make a point about void and infinitude.

  “I spoke with a neurologist friend of mine yesterday, Nick Goldberg, we were speaking about Oliver Sacks [Brook made a stage play out of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat]. About the way, in all different branches of science, there is this recognition that the void is charged with potential.”

  He went on to talk about the way in some branches of cosmology there was emerging a belief that the universe was brought into being from a charged Void, one that was not pure nothingness but a void filled with (rather ill-defined) vibrant “quantum fluctuations.” The theory holds that these notional, random quantum fluctuations, more mathematical than substantial—a virtual mathematical language before there was anyone to speak or read or think it—gave rise to the Big Bang.

  “It turns out that Nothing is more vibrant than this mere … absence of any form,” Brook says.

  Reading over the transcript I thought his use of the word “vibrant” was particularly notable; it’s the word he used in Evoking Shakespeare when he spoke of the potential of “a single vibrant word” to create a world, a universe, to release “infinite energies.”

  “Shakespeare,” Brook continued, “I think felt vitally—through thought and intuition and feeling—he felt and discovered this sense.” This sense of the vibrancy within the infinite space of void.

  Interesting: in his De l’infinito, universo et mondi Giordano Bruno wrote, “There is a single general space, a single, vast immensity which we may freely call Void … this space we declare to be infinite.” A similar paradoxic identification of infinitude with Void, by a contemporary of Shakespeare. If this is beginning to seem a bit too mystical, Brook brings it all back down to bottom, or to Bottom.

  After talking about the way he felt Shakespeare had felt this intuition of the charged vibrancy of the Void, Brook says, “And it is through the bottom you reach the height and through the height you discover the bottom.”

  “This vertiginous sense of bottomlessness, Shakespeare seems to like to create?” I asked Brook. “The bottom falling out, dropping out. Horatio warning Hamlet not to go too near the—”

  “Precipice,” Brook supplied.

  “And also that scene in Lear where Edgar conjures up the depths from the top of the cliff for Gloucester. What is the relationship of this metaphysical, spiritual-slash-visionary sense you find in Shakespeare to orthodox theology?” I asked. “It’s not quite the same is it?”

  “You touch on something fundamental, which is whether when you talk about theology you’re talking about what the church has turned into doctrine. Or whether one comes to the fact that deep, deep down, at the real bottomless level, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are talking about the same thing. And on that level, on the bottomless level it’s the same experience being expressed through different cultures and different languages.”

  The same experience … “Do you have a feeling that Shakespeare had some initiating, mystical or visionary experience?” I asked Brook.

  “I would have thought it’s so,” he said. “I mean there were esoteric groups of course and Shakespeare could have been part of one of those groups. I think it’s more probable than improbable. He could have had many, many experiences. I don’t think anything suggests a St. Paul–like sudden mystical flare. But a long series of experiences. After all,” he concludes, “nothing comes from nothing.”

  “Nothing will come of nothing” is of course a line from the opening of King Lear. And it is of course—1,500 years earlier—the famous line from Lucretius, the Latin author of the epic creation poem De rerum natura, the great ode to the creative power of Venus—to the force of love expressed in the personified goddess Venus, which binds the universe together, Lucretius believes, from the lowliest atom to the most elevated souls in love.

  “Nothing Will Come of Nothing” is also the title of a lecture Peter Brook gave to a group of Freudian analysts. Clearly, he’s fond of the paradox, in Lear and Lucretius: if nothing comes from nothing, or if everything comes from Venus, who creates the creator? It is the mystery of creation “in a nutshell.” It is a mystery that brings us back to the heart of the Dream, to that strange and wonderful verse about poetic creation:

  The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

  And as imagination bodies forth


  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Here Shakespeare is writing about creation, about the way imagination in effect “bodies forth” something from nothing. He is also giving us a glimpse of his experience of creation: the way the poet’s pen “gives to aery nothing” a somethingness, a “local habitation and a name.”

  At the heart of the Dream then is this dual vision of creation, cosmological and poetical, both bringing forth being from nonbeing. We are close here, as Brook would say, to the “bottom of God’s secrets.” It’s a secret Peter Brook seems to suggest that Shakespeare may have in some visionary moment glimpsed himself.

  Is this the secret play beneath all the plays? The belief in, the search for some such secret play has obsessed Shakespeareans for centuries. The persistent feeling that there is something exceptional, that he is not just another playwright. That through him we get a glimpse of God’s secrets. It’s one possible secret play. Two subsequent developments—seeing Brook’s film of his Hamlet, and talking to Cic Berry, verse-speaking guru of Brook’s Dream—suggested further ways to envision what Brook’s “secret play” implied.

  WHO’S THERE?

  It took me a long time to be able to write about the Hamlet Peter Brook brought to Brooklyn. The one that was the occasion for my last two provocative encounters with him in Brooklyn.

  Because I found the version staged in Brooklyn so disappointing. Or because I was disappointed in myself for missing something. But at the time I thought there was a lot missing. It was played on a bare stage—well, a stage covered by a bright red carpet and almost nothing else. But that was not the problem, it was the bare minimum of text that was the problem for me. At full length Hamlet runs to about four hours. Most directors cut it to three or three and a half hours. (One of the most interesting and remarkably significant controversies in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship is how long most of his plays took on stage. Whether anything like the “full texts that have come down to us from the early printings were actually seen by his contemporary audiences,” as Andrew Gurr, the foremost contemporary historian of the Shakespearean stage, puts it. Or were Shakespeare’s audiences given cut versions, the “two hours’ traffic of our stage,” as the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet puts it?)

  It was not so much that Brook cut the play in half, it was rather that I couldn’t divine a unified conception, except for the fact that it both began and ended with someone calling out “Who’s there?”

  “Who’s there?” are in fact the words that open the two “good” texts of Hamlet, the Second Quarto and the First Folio. But not the words that close it. In the beginning they are the lines of the nervous sentinel reporting for duty, worrying that the sounds of the watchman on the battlements might be the ghost whose nightly visitation has terrified him.

  Who’s there? It’s a good question. It’s a question that one asks of the infinite void: Who—if anyone, or any One—is out there? It’s a good beginning. What does it mean if it’s the ending as well? That nothing has been learned? That the play has “merely” been a reminder that we don’t know the answer? That the play has given us the answer: we’ll never know. Or someone’s there (us) but we don’t know who we are or how we got here. I don’t know the answer, but I admit I liked Brook asking the question at the end, however untraditional it was.

  The standard texts of Hamlet end with Hamlet’s dying—“The rest is silence” (sometimes followed by the O-groans)—then with Horatio intoning, “Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”, followed by Fortinbras commanding, “Go bid the soldiers shoot”—as a final military salute to the dead prince.

  But Brook had Horatio step to the lip of the stage and peer out into the darkness, at the audience, at the cosmos, and say “Who’s there?”

  Still, between the beginning and ending question I didn’t find any answers to what Brook was up to. Adrian Lester, who played Hamlet, was energetic and delivered spirited readings of the soliloquies, but I left under-whelmed.

  It was not till nearly three years later that I encountered Brook’s Hamlet again. Or a version of Brook’s Hamlet, the version he filmed himself at his home theater, the Bouffes des Nordes, the theater in Paris that his company was based in.

  In the film it was the same bloodred rug as in Brook’s Hamlet at BAM but it was a different Hamlet. This time no bookended “Who’s there?” And deeper cuts. The entire two first scenes—Horatio seeing the ghost, Hamlet in the court of Claudius—had been cut. Instead it began with the first soliloquy:

  O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,

  Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!*

  This time, though it took a while to get used to the voids he’d introduced where text had once been, I saw Brook’s Hamlet in an entirely new way.

  The film was a response in part to Brook’s own critique of stage versus film productions. His belief that film has something theater can never offer: the close-up. The close-up which can fill a frame and allow an actor to speak as quietly as he wishes short of inaudibility. Not just quiet for its own sake, but because, as Brook has said, “the quieter [an actor] can be the closer he can be to himself,” or the character’s self.

  And this film he made was very close up. Hamlet in extreme close-up. So intimate one felt one had crossed the fourth wall and was in the same room as the characters. When they sit, we sit, we remain at eye level almost continuously.

  Especially Hamlet, the same actor: Adrian Lester, but a different Hamlet from the one he gave us in Brooklyn, where he had to fill the empty space with voice and movement. Now he was more often still, almost quiet. He was a whispering Hamlet, a Hamlet of whispered confidences to himself, as well as others.

  When Olivier played Hamlet on film he tried to solve the problem of bombast by giving us the soliloquies in voice-overs as if they were not being spoken at all but were just the unuttered thoughts in his head. Adrian Lester gave us spoken thoughts that sounded unuttered even as they were uttered.

  Of course there were some weird choices. Doing the Player King’s set-piece tale of Pyrrhus and the fall of Troy in ancient Greek was a curious decision. And the silenced—cut—characters and scenes of the play contributed to that sense of silence, stillness, contemplativeness. Made it clear that something unspoken was going on. I felt it might have something to do with the prominence Brook gave to the scene between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorder.

  A recorder is the flutelike instrument Hamlet says R&G want to use him as—to “play upon his stops,” the holes that the musician’s fingers open and stop up to generate tones. (Each hole a void charged with potential.)

  Then there is the way Brook radically shifts the “To be or not to be” soliloquy to make it the last one in the play.

  Also remarkable and deliberately so is the way Brook’s film ends. Instead of “Who’s there?” as in the production I saw, the last words in this film are Hamlet’s last words in the play (his last words in the Quarto version; no O-groans). An ecstasy comes over Hamlet’s face, a light breaks upon him as he says, “The rest is silence.”

  Strange the way Brook has changed the close of what will (alas) probably be his last Hamlet. He went back from “Who’s there?”, his own revision, and gave us at least something close to Shakespeare’s close: “The rest is silence.” Why? It seems an important reversal, the abandonment of “Who’s there?” and the return to rest on “silence.”

  Fortunately, the person who sent me a videotape of the BBC production included on the tape an interview with Brook about this production. I was somewhat disappointed with most of the interview because it largely consisted of the interviewer presenting his theories of Hamlet—and Brook politely declining to subscribe to them, until near the end when Brook began to discuss the line “The rest is silence.”

  He was talking about the question of the afterlife so prese
nt in Hamlet. The fear in “To be or not to be” of an infinity of bad dreams after death. Ophelia describing Hamlet looking like someone “loosed from hell to speak of horrors”; Hamlet’s father’s ghost loosed from his afterlife in Purgatory.

  “And so when Hamlet says ‘The rest is silence,’ ” Brook tells his interviewer, “one has a choice how to take it. Because entering into eternal silence is not into eternal bleakness, but something of a different order.

  “You can say ‘The rest is silence’ as in ‘That’s all life is about’ in a very Sartrean existential ‘Hell-is-other-people’ way.

  “Or the complete opposite. All this torment, ‘To be or not to be,’ he talks about—all that goes on until all falls into place and the rest is silence. A vibrant silence.”

  Peter Brook’s final word on what kind of spell Shakespeare’s most mysterious play casts upon us: “a vibrant silence.”

  There’s that word “vibrant” again. There’s that image: a void filled with vibrancy. Words are nothing but vibrations generated by chords, by vocal cords, by the strings of the vocal cords. A vibrant silence uttered by the silent strings of creation. It’s Peter Brook’s string theory of Shakespeare you might say.

  EPILOGUE: STRING THEORY IN PRACTICE,OR THE SECRET PLAY AT LAST?

  Of course this can begin to seem at times too abstractly metaphysical. What was refreshing in talking to Cic Berry, who was Peter Brook’s verse-speaking lieutenant in the making of the Dream, was the way she made physical such metaphysical notions, linked the metaphorical “string theory” to the strings—well, the vocal cords—of the actors actually uttering the words.

  I met Ms. Berry, eighty now and still with the RSC, when she’d come to New York to work with the American director Karen Coonrod on a Julius Caesar for the Theater for a New Audience. I was fortunate to get her to agree to have lunch with me during a break in rehearsals.