The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  When I reached Bloom by phone back then he asked me not to refer to his own previously Falstaffian proportions since he’d recently undergone bypass surgery and had lost ninety pounds. He’d lost weight but not his anguished indignation. I read him O’Brien’s quote about Bloom being “a great mind, a wonderful writer,” but that his ecstatic embrace of Falstaff was “so over the top.”

  To which Bloom shot back, “You can do a hell of a lot worse than go over the top over Falstaff. I am very over the top over Falstaff.”

  Perhaps this is where I differ from Bloom, in that I’d say, “You could do a lot worse than go over the top over Shakespeare,” but that does not necessarily entail going over the top over Falstaff. Because it’s not clear the Shakespearean Falstaff (if I might subjectively characterize him) is identical with the Bloomian Falstaff. Falstaff is not the coequal of his creator but an element in his complex creation.

  And then when I read Bloom O’Brien’s quote about him getting “sort of gooey and giggly about it” Bloom replied, “I totally dissent from Mr. O’Brien, although I wish he and Mr. Kline, whom I admire, well with the play.”

  Publishing this exchange in the Sunday Times I’m sure may have put Kline in a more difficult position as first previews approached—spotlighted the fact that he would be choosing whose Falstaff he would embody.

  I had thought that Harold Bloom, in part because of O’Brien’s “You can’t have him, Harold” remarks in The Times, wasn’t going to see the production. That’s what he told me anyway, “I doubt I’ll see it.”

  But I think he’d been prevailed upon and at the final performance I noticed Nancy Becker, cofounder (with Adriana Mnuchin) of New York’s Shakespeare Society and friend of Bloom, sitting next to an empty seat before the performance began. “Harold was going to be here,” she said, but there was a sudden bout of illness.

  I don’t know how aware Mr. Kline was of Bloom’s presence or absence at that final performance. I suspect, since it was a last minute health-related decision, Kline might well have thought Bloom was going to be in the audience.

  And so I don’t know if it was a one-off performance for Bloom’s benefit, or whether it had evolved this way from the temptations to do a more crowd-pleasing Falstaff, the easy laughs that are readily available, the love that comes to a more lovable Falstaff.

  But this was definitely a more lovable, more Bloomian, less infirm, more twinkly, more mischievous and sprightly Falstaff than the one I’d seen in the third preview. Either that’s the way things felt most right for Kline in the evolution of the role—maybe it’s inevitable playing Falstaff on stage, knowing the audience wants to love him. Not wanting to deny them. Or it was a kind of loving gesture to his (unfortunately absent) mentor.

  Still, I couldn’t believe my eyes in the opening moment, the way Kline got to his feet without much difficulty. Not nimbly, no. But less tragically. So different from the preview I saw. Everything followed from that—the differences were subtle but I felt they were there. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but it felt almost as if, for Kline, the eyes of Bloom were upon him.

  Bloom may have won the battle that day, but I think O’Brien displayed exemplary courage in waging the war.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Stephen Booth: 777 Types of Ambiguity

  THE THRESHOLD OF COMPREHENSION

  Perhaps the best way of explaining who Stephen Booth is to me, and what place he occupies (or should occupy) in the pantheon of contemporary Shakespeareans, is to put it this way: Booth represents in the realm of close reading what Peter Brook represents to me in the realm of directing. Another way is to think of him as the un-Bloom, a critic undeservedly overshadowed by Bloom’s renown, whose fine-grained attention to language contrasts so dramatically with Bloom’s overblown abstractions.

  The experience of reading Booth on the Sonnets was for me, in its own way, almost as electrifying and transformative as seeing Brook’s Dream. Just as Brook is the director as scholar-exegete, Booth is the scholar-exegete as director, directing our attention to the hidden play of language in the ostensibly “nondramatic” works such as the Sonnets, the way Brook searched for the “secret play” in the dramatic works.

  And in the larger perspective, Booth is one of those great critics who have not been distracted by the dubious conjectures of biography, or seduced by the distancing and denigration of Theory, but who return us to a focus on the play within all the plays and poems: the play of words. The dizzying pleasures that are one defining element of Shakespearean language.

  An extremely close focus. And as we shall see it has cost him, at least in the short run, but as I write (or, actually, rewrite) this chapter I do so with the glad knowledge that the realm of Shakespeare studies is shaking off the spell of Theory and returning to the kind of close reading Booth represents, and to Booth’s achievement itself.

  Booth’s version of “close reading,” Extremely Close Reading, one might say, brings one almost unbearably close to Shakespeare’s language, to the abyss of destabilizing identity. Which I’d suggest may be responsible for the relative eclipse of his work, which blazed a brief path across the academic firmament in the early seventies and then fell victim to a change in critical fashion, in which Extremely Distant Reading (as Theory might be called) supplanted Extremely Close Reading.

  It’s my belief Booth should occupy the place (and does for many) that Greenblatt and Bloom do today—he does something far different from the celebrity savants of Shakespeare. Perhaps it’s because he is neither mystical nor political. He is dangerously, unfashionably, poetical.

  It’s my belief that Booth’s work on the Sonnets will last and stir argument long after the sophistry of Theory is forgotten, and my attempt to approach Booth, to read Booth—on the page and in person—is meant as an homage. And ultimately another way of defining what we mean by “Shakespearean.”

  What ensues is the story of my attempt to come to grips with Booth in his work, a story sometimes as tortured by my own awkwardness as my encounters with Peter Brook, a sign I believe of my deep appreciation for the gift they’ve both given me.

  Booth is best known for his Yale University Press edition of the Sonnets (which first appeared in 1977 and is still widely read and taught), an edition of the 154 poems accompanied by four hundred pages of footnotes and commentary.

  It was an edition I was familiar with, one I’d get lost in for hours at a time over the years. But it was something else Booth wrote half a decade before that edition, a hugely influential although (because of a sudden change in critical fashion) lamentably out-of-print book: Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. A book that had a profound transformative effect on the way the Sonnets were seen, the way Shakespearean poetry itself was read. If this seems like a large claim, consider Frank Kermode’s words in The New York Review of Books in 1970 about Booth’s Essay:

  There may be, there is, a moment when one intuits in the complex mesh of conflicting patterns an order; and Booth says that such moments are the happiest the human mind can know, moments when it is beautifully poised on the threshold of comprehension, like, perhaps, the mind of the poet. These large claims suggest that criticism is regaining its confidence as it acquires new techniques, which it movingly represents as able to increase our happiness or mitigate our pain. Criticism may thus be both difficult and humane.

  Booth’s analysis of the sonnets on these new principles seems to me of a high order of criticism and humanity.… Any way I can look at it his achievement seems to me extraordinarily impressive.

  “Such moments are the happiest the human mind can know …” That’s a strong statement, even as a description of Booth’s position, but Kermode’s elaboration upon it is even more thought-provoking. By such “happiest” moments he tells us he means “moments when [the mind] is beautifully poised on the threshold of comprehension, like, perhaps, the mind of the poet.”

  He’s suggesting that Stephen Booth has shown us something about the way the mind of Shakespeare wor
ks in the way Shakespearean language works—and that through Booth’s exegesis we get a glimpse of what it might be like to experience Shakespeare himself reading Shakespeare, perhaps even to experience Shakespeare writing Shakespeare—to look at Shakespeare through Shakespeare’s eyes.

  And that central to that experience is the sensation of being “beautifully poised on the threshold of comprehension.” As Hamlet says, “that would be scanned.” What is “the threshold of comprehension”? A moment of dawning awareness of coherence emerging from incoherence? The excitement of a certain kind of discovery. Not fully comprehending its magnitude but glimpsing it beginning to unfold, take shape, cohere.

  I feel myself only on the threshold of comprehension of what Kermode means by “threshold of comprehension” here, but I like the daring with which he conjectures that this threshold puts us in touch with the mind of the poet. The notion that Booth’s exegesis is not about “pinning down” or summarizing meaning, but discovering, experiencing it in the process of creation. Not the already-accomplished feeling of being across the threshold of comprehension, but being on the brink of it, the brink of amazement, experiencing the thrill of discovery.

  I can’t help thinking that was what Keats was conjuring up, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” when he described the moment of “wild surmise” experienced by the explorer Cortez’s men, who after trudging through the jungles of Central America in search of the Pacific Ocean, finally, “upon a peak in Darien,” first apprehended the ocean’s fathomless immensity.

  Keats (who notoriously mixed up Cortez and Balboa) is explicitly conjuring up that moment of being on “the threshold of comprehension” in that phrase “wild surmise.” The “wild surmise” he’s referring to is not the explorer’s amazed reaction when he first sees the Pacific. Rather it is Keats imagining the wild surmise of the sailors in his party, reading his (Cortez’s, Balboa’s) excitement. A wild surmise while reading eyes: a particularly Shakespearean threshold of comprehension.

  Reading Shakespeare through Booth is like making a wild surmise about the bottomless ocean in his eyes, in his vision. I think of him as our Cortez.

  The threshold of comprehension, the brink of amazement, is that cliff overlooking the sea in Lear, that parapet overlooking the ocean in Hamlet, about both of which we’re warned against staring too long from, lest it lead to madness.

  Stephen Booth would probably reject the notion that what he’s seeking to illuminate in Shakespeare is analogous to the kind of “secret play” Peter Brook was seeking. But Boothian close reading initiates one into a realm of undercurrents, cross currents, tidal flows and undertows beneath the surface of the lines even at their most placid and apparently transparent. Booth’s readings split open the ambiguities in the Sonnets and release infinite energies.

  It was in the process of attempting a close reading of Booth’s close reading, and a close reading of Booth himself, that I began to understand something of that strange experience I had at the blackboard at Yale while explicating a sonnet. A “threshold of comprehension” moment, exhilarating and a bit destabilizing if not frightening. A momentary but memorable—unforgettable—sense of dislocation or double location. When one is on a threshold, one is on both sides and neither.

  I referred to this episode briefly in the introduction; to me it goes to the heart of what makes the Sonnets so appealing and disturbing: the utterly excessive, unnecessary, maddening complexity that seems designed to do more, much more, than merely find complex ways of expressing conventional sentiments about love. The way each sonnet seems designed, not as a verbal icon but as a verbal engine, a virtual perpetual motion machine with the power to destabilize the reader with its dizzying shifts in perspective, its shimmering, pulsating wordplay—to induce the state of being on that brink-of-amazement threshold. A state not unlike the state of being in love, not merely reading about being in love.

  I thought at this point I should give the reader a sense of the kind of thing Booth does, and in doing so something surprising happened when I was copying out a few lines of his exegesis of two words—“present-absent”—in the sonnet I believe was responsible for my strange present-absent experience in New Haven.

  The words occur in the first four lines of Sonnet 45. In the previous sonnet the poet has described how the two heavier elements (earth and water) of the four (along with air and fire) that compose the self, the two bodily elements, can’t be with his lover when they are apart. But the other two elements,

  … slight air and purging fire,

  Are both with thee, where ever I abide;

  The first my thought, the other my desire,

  These present-absent with swift motion slide.

  Here is Booth’s footnote to “present-absent” in his Yale edition of the Sonnets:

  present-absent: 1) Simultaneously both present and absent. 2) now present–now absent, alternately here and away. The hyphen is a standard editorial addition [to the original hyphen-less “present absent” in the original]. These words [“present-absent”]—themselves an oxymoron, a capsule of contraries—act to harmonize a variety of logically incompatible conceits and thus, to facilitate the reader’s “swift slide” from one to another. Lines 1–3 have turned a commonplace hyperbole (“my thoughts and desires are always with you”; “half of myself is always with you”) into a paradox by equating thought and desire with air and fire; the equation invites consideration of the hyperbole as if with (line 2) were intended literally; but 50 percent of a human body cannot be anywhere but with the other 50 percent. In sense (1) “present-absent” capsules the paradox, “physically present, spiritually absent.” Sense (2) capsules the conceit introduced by “with swift motion slide”; this new conceit, which takes up the rest of the poem, is logically incompatible with sense (1) and with the assertion in lines 1–3 that thought/air and desire/fire are always with the beloved, always absent from the speaker.

  Note first—if we were to do an exegesis of Booth’s exegesis—the distinction he makes about the two ways of reading—experiencing—the state of being “present-absent.” It can be simultaneous or alternate. Or perhaps both? The mind begins to “swiftly slide” into an altered state in trying to “capsule” this.

  I feel this is important, but I’m barely on the threshold of comprehending why. Help me through it. “Present-absent” could imply self-division, however logically inconsistent that might be. Or it could imply alternate presence and absence as is suggested in “sliding” back and forth. By “alternately” present and absent does Booth mean alternating presence and absence? I think so, although I’m now on the brink of that cliff, that abyss, that threshold of comprehension of madness that the phrase conjures up. Almost the same state I was in at the blackboard at Yale. Alternate-alternating? The same, or alternately, different?

  The difference between “sliding” back and forth and instantaneously being alternately one place then the other is … the difference between being particle and wave?

  At this point I suddenly found myself in that very state I was trying to explain. Destabilized, disoriented, sliding swiftly from comprehension to incomprehension. Present-absent to my sense of self, to my sense of “making sense.”

  Booth’s exegesis was doing what the poem had once done. Perhaps an attempt at exegesis of both might help explain.

  THE THEORY OF THEORY AND THE DREAM OF THE CHOCOLATE PIE

  One of the surprising things I learned (when I eventually had an extended face-to-face interview with Booth) about the origin of his work is—for a man most well known for his exegesis of nondramatic texts—how much Booth is drawn to Shakespeare on stage. Indeed when I asked him about his early transformative experiences of Shakespeare they all took place in a theater.

  Beginning with a curious dramatic illusion—and an explosion of cornstarch.

  Before the cornstarch there were two early encounters, he told me. Booth grew up in a small Connecticut town, population four thousand, and recalls at age twelve taking
his mother, who loved Laurence Olivier, to see the film version of Olivier’s Henry V for her birthday.

  “What I remember was ‘the four captains’ talking,” he told me during our first formal interview. He’s speaking of the four soldiers in Henry V’s army at Agincourt, each of whom spoke in a dialect: Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Midlands English.

  “I knew they were saying something in my language,” Booth recalls with a hint of his long-ago adolescent plaintiveness, “but I couldn’t tell what, and I became interested in finding out.”

  The somewhat alienating duality of language that intrigued him (he loved the dialectic of the dialects: it’s English but it’s not English he could understand) can be found in much of Shakespeare: it’s English but it’s not English we really understand at first, not at its deepest levels. It’s one of the things that make Shakespeare exceptional. Nobody “gets it” all at once, few come close to the “threshold of comprehension” in a lifetime.

  Booth’s early fascination with language was supplemented by an early exposure to the double awareness of language when embodied by actors on stage, something peculiar about the language when it was embodied on the stage.

  “Later I got to see John Carradine playing Hamlet in Litchfield, Connecticut, and it wasn’t a very elaborate stage. There was a trapdoor on stage. The trapdoor that serves for the Ghost and for Ophelia’s grave. Ophelia was played in the first act by a lovely young woman who—well, at her funeral she was played by a nine-by-twelve rug. She couldn’t fit through the trapdoor so they doubled over the rug and shoved it in the trapdoor.