The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  It was almost too much pleasure, unbearable pleasure; the unrelenting beauty of the natural spectacle became oppressive, in almost the same way that reading the Sonnets with Booth’s commentary approached the border between ravishment and distaste or at least dismay.

  I was almost relieved when I finally arrived at the old antebellum-era town of Staunton. It was the home of the dilapidated Stonewall Jackson Hotel. And, in the middle of the grits joints downtown, the brand-spanking-new Blackfriars Playhouse, Ralph Alan Cohen’s field of dreams, its interior glowing with the beautiful sheen of new-hewn wooden planks.

  I should explain a bit more about the Shenandoah Scholars’ Conference, which was one of the most pleasurable of all the many scholarly conferences I’d been attending. Some of the smartest, wittiest and most engaging scholars in a setting of natural and manmade beauty. It was a fortunate coincidence or confluence of interests that brought me there.

  It was something I discovered at the last minute while attending a reception at the Folger Library during one of the Modern Language Association’s mass scholar convocations set in Washington, D.C. I was talking about textual matters with the Folger’s Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine and Ms. Mowat suggested I should meet this bow-tied fellow in tweeds, Ralph Alan Cohen, who had founded the Shenandoah Shakespeare acting troupe. Cohen was soon to open what sounded to me like a bizarre quixotic project, a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s “other” theater (other than the Globe), the Blackfriars Theatre. The original Blackfriars was a more intimate indoor torch-and-candle-lit venue, and plunking a replica down in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains two and a half hours southwest of Washington sounded admirably impractical to me, at least at first.

  I’d heard of the Shenandoah Shakespeare company, whose bare-bones, back-to-basics, natural-light productions had won favor with scholars at Shakespeare Association of America gatherings for capturing the spirit and the interactive informality and some of the original conditions of Shakespeare’s productions at the Globe—which of course were all staged in daylight in an uncovered open-air theater with actors and audience in close proximity.*

  When I heard about this mad Blackfriars project (without really believing in it a bit) at the Folger Shakespeare Library reception, what struck me was the enthusiasm with which textual specialists such as Mowat and Werstine—who seem rarely impressed by performances, hyperaware as they are of how the stage can corrupt the page—spoke of Ralph Cohen and his Shenandoah Shakespeare company. They urged me to see the production then running in the Folger Library Theater—a production of Twelfth Night which Ralph Alan Cohen had codirected with none other than Stephen Booth.

  Booth himself was no longer around. He’d flown back to Berkeley, where he taught, after the opening of the production, but he’d done a typically thought-provoking essay on “DOUBLING AND TWELFTH NIGHT” for the Folger program, and planned to return for the forthcoming conference celebrating the Blackfriars opening.

  I suppose, when I was introduced to Ralph Alan Cohen, I was more interested at the time in finding out about the legendary Professor Booth than this fantasy Blackfriars project Cohen kept wanting to talk about. So I focused on something memorable Ralph Alan Cohen said about Stephen Booth: that Booth believes Twelfth Night is Shakespeare’s supreme creation. Surpassing even the Sonnets. A former student of Booth’s, Eric Griffin, told me Booth liked to say Twelfth Night was not merely Shakespeare’s greatest creation, but “the greatest creation of the human mind.”

  I must admit that at the time this piece of information about Booth’s preference for Twelfth Night obscured my interest in Cohen’s quixotic Blackfriars project. Quixotic because, after all, why would Cohen, who seemed so intelligent, who had accomplished so much with his Shakespeare company, one of whose virtues was its transportability (they hardly needed a stage, they could transform any bare space to a Globe), become involved in the whole dubious “restoration” business in the first place? It would at the very least anchor him to a single piece of land, secondly it sounded like a theme-park-type idea, a Shakespearean version of Dollywood (down at the other end of the Blue Ridge range). And finally I was dubious about the whole restoration craze—including London’s Globe—since it seemed to place too much attention on the material conditions of the theater (the baked potato), and not enough on the language (the chocolate pie). It’s a fine line between enlightened “Originalism” and pointless antiquarianism, a false Originalism. A lot depends on whether a return to “original conditions” genuinely takes us deeper into the Shakespearean or merely mimics the shell of what has been lost.

  I had just spent some time talking to Sir Peter Hall, whose heartfelt and (he felt) historically based insistences about the way Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter line should be spoken made such matters seem far more important to me than what kind of wood the theater was made from.

  The reconstructed Globe in London was already causing a heated scholarly debate about how much imagined “historicity” was replacing verse-speaking and stage movement as a focus of the best energies for playing Shakespeare.

  The Blackfriars replica seemed all the more strange a dream, since it was to be set down in the rural Blue Ridge foothills and the original Blackfriars was, if anything, a much more urban, literary, theatrical venue than the Globe.

  Almost everybody knows about the Globe but fewer know, and less is known about, the original Blackfriars Theatre, except that it was a covered indoor venue in which performances could be held at night. A place smaller than the Globe, reputedly more intimate, it was constructed out of the refectory of an abandoned friary and Shakespeare’s company the King’s Men began using it around 1608—in addition to continuing to play at the Globe.

  Still, setting aside the reconstruction/authenticity issue about the Blackfriars, there are those scholars, Frank Kermode among them, who believe that the acquisition of the original Blackfriars Theatre property in 1608 by Shakespeare’s company marks a moment of significant change in Shakespeare’s dramatic language—and the direction of his art.

  There is a school of thought that the candle- or torch-lit, acoustically more intimate setting allowed Shakespeare a freedom to explore a kind of language in his later dramas that became increasingly knotty and complex, in part because it could be better heard in a Blackfriars setting, in part because the Blackfriars audience tended to be more sophisticated and literate. There was no open yard for the hubbub of the groundlings to drown the subtleties of language. Some go even further and argue that the magical transformative quality of Shakespeare’s Late Romances from Pericles to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest played better there in the more magical candle-lit darkness than in the cruel broad daylight of the Globe.

  Whether or not one believes in a “Blackfriars Shakespeare” as opposed to a “Globe Shakespeare,” Ralph Alan Cohen felt strongly enough about the project to enlist some of the best theater historians—including Andrew Gurr, who was instrumental in the design of the reconstructed London Globe—to sift through the fragmentary historical evidence about what the Blackfriars Theatre looked like. Meanwhile Cohen, a debonair, charming fellow with remarkable fund-raising charisma among the wealthier sort of literary and theater patrons, combined with the ability to sweet-talk the aldermen of a small Virginia town, managed to raise the money, get the permits and, on the best scholarly advice, build a remarkable Zen-teahouse-like theater in the Blue Ridge foothills. The glowing bamboo-colored hardwood plank walls gave the interior an almost Oriental serenity. Little did I know when I was first captivated by that interior, that a mighty behind-the-scenes debate had been brewing over whether to paint the beautiful bare boards in the gaudy colors more likely to have been slapped on the Elizabethan original. It was a kind of test of Originalism: Should one adhere to the original gaudiness which may easily, for all we know, have looked radiantly beautiful to the seventeenth-century Londoners? Or should one keep to the spirit rather than the letter of “radiance” in the light of changing ideals of beauty: for
us, today, radiance is more naturally associated with glowing polished bare wood than with bright painted colors. Which was the more “Shakespearean” paint job?

  The scholars’ conference I was driving down to that October was timed to celebrate the opening of the reconstructed Blackfriars Theatre, and show off the Shenandoah Shakespeare company in its new venue. And to showcase some brilliant scholars speaking on topics related to Shakespeare and the theater.

  One of the extremely astute innovations Ralph Alan Cohen introduced into this particular scholarly conclave was to institute a rule that limited each scholar’s talk to ten minutes. Ten minutes! It allowed him to schedule more scholars for the five-day conference, but it was an almost unheard of haiku-like length for the kind of talk this caliber of scholar was used to delivering, papers usually running to forty minutes minimum.

  With a born dramatist’s sense, Cohen demonstrated at the outset of the conference how he would enforce the ten-minute limit. Standing on the luminous stage of the Blackfriars replica, he called forth a “thunder sheet,” a twelve-foot-high, four-foot-wide sheet of thick rusty metallic alloy that when shaken produces effects ranging from deep menacing premonitory thunder to mentally deranging Lear-on-the-heath torrents of thunderous sound.

  He had his assistant shake it, producing an increasingly loud, threatening, deafening rolling-thunder sound: that was the eight-minute warning for the ten-minute time limit. Then from behind the curtain a long ear-splitting blast from what sounded like a ram’s horn from hell announcing the apocalypse. That would signal the ten-minute termination time.

  I have a feeling that one reason Stephen Booth said so much in his dazzling disquisition on “The Witty Partition” that weekend was that he was forced to compress his natural expansiveness into that ten-minute time period. And that he was able to articulate something about Shakespearean verse that he had, to my knowledge, not articulated in such a compressed and expressive way before. He actually told us “what all the fuss is about.”

  That phrase was at the heart of Booth’s recurrent response whenever I asked him why he seems to care so little about “theme” in Shakespeare as opposed to a searching exploration of the way the language works. Other great writers can be read for profound themes—as can Shakespeare—he suggests. But that’s not what “the fuss is all about” when it comes to Shakespeare, he avers. The fuss is about our feeling that what Shakespeare does with language, what Shakespearean language does to the minds of those who read and hear it.

  I first encountered Stephen Booth in person at the opening night cocktail party of the conference. Not at the Blackfriars Playhouse—we were not to see that until we saw the first play on its boards—but in the extraordinary natural theater of the Blue Ridge foothills, which formed a kind of backdrop to the home Ralph Alan Cohen had built for himself and his family.

  The sunset was particularly spectacular, some of the sparkling wine being served loosened my tongue and I found I’d fallen in with a particularly congenial group of textual scholars whose work I knew and admired from researching Hamlet textual questions. Among them were Thomas Berger, A. R. Braunmuller and George Walton Williams. And one scholar I thought of as one of the most admirably “Boothian,” you might say, of current literary scholars: Russ McDonald. His slim Oxford book with the deceptively simple and general title Shakespeare and the Arts of Language had proven one of those works where I found myself underlining so much of it that underlining had lost the point of underlining.

  I’d met Booth first that evening on the bus that was taking us over rugged mountain roads from the Blackfriars in “downtown” Staunton to Ralph Alan Cohen’s mountain aerie. I’d told him of my admiration for his Sonnets edition, and apparently by the time the party had reached its height, I must have been gushing about my enthusiasm for Booth’s work to others who knew him, since I heard back from one of their girlfriends, “Booth was gesturing over toward you saying, ‘I like that fellow: he thinks I’m smart.’ ”

  It was the perfect Boothian remark, implicating and subverting both his own vanity and my own gushiness simultaneously. Did he really “like that fellow,” or was it self-deprecating humility: “I like that fellow” only because “he thinks I’m smart.” And is “he thinks I’m smart” really a compliment coming from someone either 1) too gushy or 2) too deceived about Booth’s smartness to be trusted? In a funny way, a paradigm for the way he looked at the way the contraries in the Sonnets worked.

  In any case one of the things that developed that evening confirmed my sense of Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a kind of transformative icon, almost like forbidden esoteric text. A kind of Kama Sutra of Shakespeare, or one of those banned books like Ulysses that travelers would smuggle through customs in the barebacked Shakespeare and Company of Paris edition.

  It was an impression I got from the textual scholars that evening and over the next four days. I would mention that I had tried every online, used-book, rare-book search engine and hadn’t been able to acquire a copy of Booth’s out-of-print Essay. All in the hope—hint, hint—that one of them might let me borrow his. I had no takers. They all had the book but none of them was going to let it out of their sight.

  Not until several months later did Russ McDonald have mercy on my desperate plea and ask one of his assistants to make a photocopy of his copy, which gave me the added benefit of having the two textual exegetes I’d most admired in a kind of dialogue. In the sense that, not only was I interested in what Booth wrote, I was interested in what McDonald had underlined of what Booth wrote—and the occasional, all-too-occasional, marginal comment. One of my favorites of which is, “Not only do we learn about mutability [from the Sonnets], we participate in mutability” (my italics). In other words we read about changeableness and find ourselves changeable, changed, changing, exchanging ourselves. Yes—that moment at Yale, that’s what was happening: I was “participating in mutability”! It sounds much more dignified than it felt.

  In any case, that unique doubling commentary was something I would only get to experience later. But forms of doubling seemed to be the subtext to the Blackfriars conference. The Blackfriars Playhouse was a kind of Shakespearean duplicate. Twelfth Night, a play about doubling, was the first play of the conference.

  My admiration for Booth only grew the following day after witnessing his extraordinary ten-minute disquisition on “the Wall” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In some ways it offered the lit-crit equivalent of the excitement I felt first seeing Peter Brook’s Dream.

  The Wall is a character in the Pyramus and Thisby play put on by the “rude mechanicals.” The Wall has a hole in it, a hole that in Booth’s vision becomes a trapdoor, somehow a source of greater wholeness.

  It’s typical of Booth to choose such an apparently low comic device, such as the Wall, and find a way to turn it into a vehicle for some astonishing offhand observations about what makes Shakespeare Shakespearean.

  The very existence of the Wall as a speaking part is one of the most lovely, comic, yet complex meta-theatrical devices in the Dream. The play of Pyramus and Thisby is not hard to see as a parody of Romeo and Juliet in many ways: the two doomed young lovers of the title are separated by feuding families and here can only speak to each other through a hole or chink in the wall that separates their estates.

  The amateur actors in the Dream, the Mechanicals who are called upon to put on a play at the wedding feast of Theseus and Hippolyta at the climax of the play, decide that—for “realism”—since they lack an actual portable wall-prop they must have one of the actors play the Wall (they also have another fellow play “Moonshine”—not the moon, but moonshine—so that the audience will know the indoor play is set outdoors in the moonlight). Peter Brook considers this one of the great moments of theatrical self-awareness in Shakespeare, so perhaps it’s no accident that Stephen Booth happens to focus on it as well.

  In any case the Wall, played by Snout the tinker (no accident a tinker—fixer-upper—plays a wall), comes on
stage in the midst of the royal wedding pomp and announces

  In this same enterlude it doth befall

  That I, one Snout by name, present a wall;

  And such a wall, as I would have you think,

  That had in it a crannied hole or chink …

  At this point most productions have Snout/Wall hold up two fingers spread apart to form a “chink.” Or for actors more inclined to play the obscene low comedy implicit in the “crannied hole,” the fingers form a circle with thumb and forefinger. Done with the right oblivious flourish—oblivious on the part of Snout who plays the Wall—the gesture almost never fails to bring down the house. Anyway, Wall presents himself and his hole

  Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby,

  Did whisper often, very secretly.

  Hearing this, one of the Athenian nobles in the audience, Demetrius, says, “It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord.”

  “IMPASSIONED DOG TALK”

  Stephen Booth began his discourse, his ten-minute talk at Blackfriars which he entitled “The Wittiest Partition,” with a description of what he called, with typical self-deprecation, the “two largely unsuccessful projects” with which he’s occupied his career: