The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “The first is the campaign for a criticism that looks hard at the esthetic nuts and bolts of great works, recognizes them as significant … without feeling obliged to say that such minutiae are significant in the literal sense of something carrying meaning. I stated, as I have long said, to deaf ears everywhere, we should be thinking about what the New Critics made vague, mysterious and dignified with the unusually inaccurate label ‘imagery’ as nonsignifying unifiers.”

  In the remaining nine minutes or so—which seemed like an exciting, pleasurable and demanding hour—Booth proceeded to talk about three of these “nonsignifying unifiers” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: moonshine, dogs and “parts” or “partitions,” including the “witty partition” who called himself Wall.

  Before getting to the witty partition itself I will dwell upon just one remarkable aside Booth made on the subject of dogs because it brings up a phrase, “strenuous impertinence,” that I think is at the heart of his way of looking at Shakespeare, and in fact, Booth argues, defines the Shakespearean. And, in my reading of Booth’s reading, does even more.

  In regard to dogs he tells us at one point about how he got to “worrying about the lengthy and unexpected arias on Theseus’s hounds and the hounds of Sparta that we hear when Theseus and Hippolyta reenter the play at the beginning of act 4. The idea of ‘musical discord’ (Theseus says he has never heard ‘so musical a discord’ … as that of his baying hounds)—is a splendidly accurate definition of literary art in general and of verse in particular. But the twenty lines of impassioned dog talk feel strenuously impertinent when we hear them in their play.”

  Musical discord as a “definition of literary art”? Booth’s whole critical focus, as we’ll see, is to “make concord out of discord” (a line from the Dream) in his readings. To seek out apparent holes and make them part of the whole.

  But to return to “strenuously impertinent”: the phrase reminded me of a very similar two-word verbal formula I’d first heard as an undergraduate at Yale, although for the life of me I’m not sure which of my professors first used it, the two leading suspects being Henry Schroeder the Chaucer scholar and Michael John Kenneth O’Loughlin the late specialist in Milton and the Metaphysical poets. Although it’s not even clear to me whether whoever it was might have been quoting someone else. (Harry Berger?)

  The phrase, which stayed with me, and which has proven to be an extraordinarily useful device in close reading, the phrase summoned up by “strenuous impertinence,” was “conspicuous irrelevance.”

  It’s slightly less judgmental than “strenuous impertinence,” but in both cases it’s really not meant as a condemnation: it’s a way of calling attention to lines, phrases, words, passages—like the “twenty lines of impassioned dog talk”—that don’t at first seem to belong, which seem somehow off the point, over-the-top, excessive and distracting, but which often, by indirection, reveal more about “the point” than their apparent pointlessness suggests at first. A kind of hole in the text that is key to a larger whole.

  Again we can glimpse, in Booth’s aside about the “twenty lines of impassioned dog talk,” his self-deprecating but deeply serious way of suggesting a “splendidly accurate definition of literary art.”

  The discussion of the musical voices of the hounds in the Dream manifests its “strenuously impertinent,” “conspicuous irrelevance” in the aftermath of the night of magic and confusion in the forest outside Athens where the two sets of lovers are first comically disjoined by Puck’s misapplied love potion, then finally brought into four-part harmony. They are thrown into discord, then brought into concord through a comedy of Puck’s errors.

  At dawn, to the sound of hunting horns and barking dogs, Theseus and Hippolyta enter and Theseus begins to boast:

  … since we have the vaward of the day,

  My love shall hear the music of my hounds.

  Uncouple in the western valley, let them go.…

  We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top,

  And mark the musical confusion

  Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

  Then Hippolyta, the Amazon warrior queen won, but not subdued, by Theseus, comes back at him by recalling (or one-upping) her soon-to-be husband with a memory of even more famous hounds, more mythic hunters:

  I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,

  When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the

  bear With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear

  Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,

  The skies, the fountains, every region near

  Seem all one mutual cry. I never heard

  So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

  And then, refusing to be topped by this gallant chiding about “gallant chiding,” Theseus returns to the subject of his hounds. At about this point the audience might be wondering, are we suddenly in a play about competitive hunting dogs? But Theseus’s language, like that of Hippolyta, is so musical and evocative itself: that line in which all of nature is united in “one mutual cry,” a kind of orgiastic communion of sound, is astonishing. Theseus’s counterdescription of his dogs brings us back to earth and then sweeps us into the sky again:

  My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind;

  So flew’d, so sanded; and their heads are hung

  With ears that sweep away the morning dew;

  Crook-knee’d and dewlapp’d like Thessalian bulls;

  Slow in pursuit; but match’d in mouth like bells,

  Each under each. A cry more tuneable

  Was never hollow’d to, nor cheer’d with horn,

  In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.

  Judge when you hear.…

  It was fascinating to me that Booth should focus on what he calls these “lengthy and unexpected arias on Theseus’s hounds and the hounds of Sparta.” Fascinating because three years earlier I recall sitting in the Oxford-Cambridge club listening to the erudite international man of mystery David Selbourne,* the author of the rehearsal diary of Peter Brook’s Dream, The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, speak about just those lines with just that kind of conspicuous reverence.

  It’s one of those passages in Shakespeare that inexplicably take flight, one of those passages where one gets the sense Shakespeare is cruising along, working up a rote passage, and then something lifts him to a level where he’s attempting to describe his own experience of creation: “a cry more tuneable.” It’s one of the passages in the Dream, Selbourne said, when he always felt words suddenly transcended themselves to become something beyond words, beyond music even. Not leaving verbal meaning behind: indeed one could say that in that passage about hounds, about animals’ voices becoming music, it might be a suggestion that this is what poetry itself is: music made by animals, by ourselves, when our voices rise above ourselves to some higher harmony. It raises us above other animals and yet unites us with them as well, all in “one mutual cry.”

  This is why I think Booth is on to something when he offhandedly calls the “impassioned dog talk” a “splendidly accurate definition of literary art in general and of verse in particular.” It’s a splendid example of the way “strenuous impertinence” or “conspicuous irrelevance” in its only seeming anomalousness reveals something more profound than the pentameter line expresses on the surface.

  A “splendidly accurate definition of literary art,” though? How so? After reading over Booth’s comments and thinking about them for several years, not constantly, needless to say, but rather frequently, I could suggest an explanation of Booth’s explication. I’d suggest the “dog talk” is a kind of allegory of the experience, the exhilaration, the pure pleasure of writing.

  Writing as riding—riding to the hounds with a pack of words, trying to keep them all “tun’d” in the mad rush of the hunt. Writers are those who hunt for words, for the meaning to be derived from assembling a pack of words. Where the goal is not the capture of prey—Theseus’s hounds are explicitly described as “slow in pursuit”—but
rather in the way they are “tun’d” into harmony, their voices conjoined with their echoes, all these vocalizations choreographed into art.

  And just as the exhilaration of the hunt is not about seeking the prey, the exhilaration of writing is not in the pursuit of a single prey—a single meaning—which of course would bring the hunt to an end, but in the pursuit of a higher state of being, the “mutual cry” of the hunt in full flight. It suggests Shakespeare giving a sense of what it’s like being in hot pursuit of this state, the words surging like the hounds in an echoing crowd—a cloud of sound—around him.

  But then Booth went beyond Shakespeare’s “splendidly accurate definition of literary art” or this “dog talk” to give a more complex definition of what makes Shakespeare’s literary art so unique. To define what it is, technically, that makes the magic possible. What “all the fuss is about.”

  Here is what Booth called “the second of the two projects I have been so unsuccessfully promoting for so long.” The first is to get critics to pay attention to “the esthetic nuts and bolts of great works,” in particular “nonsignifying unifiers,” by which he means things like dog, moon and partition imagery but more specifically “the experience of virtually muffled wordplay and of patterning that does not obtrude upon one’s consciousness.” Such subliminal consciousness of connection is “more valuable and [should be] more highly valued than the experience of witty connections that invite notice—notice of their wit and therefore of their arbitrary origin.” Instead, he argues, “incidental organizations undemanding of notice vouch for a sort of organic truth in the work as a whole that makes it feel as if it is as things in nature are.”

  “Organic truth”: them’s fightin’ words to most postmodern academic Theorists, and it’s certainly a concept, dating back to Coleridge’s Romantic notion of organic unity, that can be over-applied, over-imposed or imagined. But that doesn’t mean some semblance of it doesn’t exist or that all analogies from art to nature are invalid, in the sense of a higher coherence that gives “life” to a work of art. I felt that way about the shifting colorations of foliage that lined the Blue Ridge Parkway, an organic analogy, an organic metaphor for the effects the Sonnets’ shifting colorations of verbal foliage have in Booth’s exegesis. So sue me.

  I think that, by “organic truth,” when Booth says “as if it is as things in nature are” (note the perfect iambic pentameter in that last clause), he is referring to the subtle holographic unity of Shakespeare, the way every little thing seems in some way related to, reflective of, every other little thing. All the expressions of a single, infinitely almost self-aware unity. The unity undemanding of notice that makes Shakespeare seem even more exceptional: the closer one looks at what one does not, at first, consciously notice, the more one senses that there’s an unobtrusive necessity, connectedness to all of it.

  But that’s just part one of “the two projects” he says he’s been “so unsuccessfully promoting” for so long. When he came to “part two” I think I felt a shock of recognition when I heard him say it, heard him toss it off so casually on the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre replica, with the thunder sheet trembling threateningly behind him.

  THE DOUBLE-CHERRY SONATA

  Part two is to get critics “to pay attention as critics to things they would not reasonably pay attention to as consumers [i.e., as readers or playgoers] and could not reasonably recommend that consumers pay attention to in the future—that critics pay attention to the ideational static generated in Shakespeare’s plays, by substantively insignificant, substantively inadmissible, substantively accidental linguistic configurations—configurations in which lurk topics foreign to the sentences in which we hear them [the way “dog talk” turns into a definition, an exemplification of literary art], and 2) to see that such static is probably exciting to the minds it plays across and probably brings those listening minds a sense of possessing and casually, effortlessly exercising an athleticism beyond that imaginable in human beings—a sense of being mentally and spiritually sufficient to comprehend ‘More than cool reason ever comprehends.’ Or ever could.”

  As an example he cites “the incessant hum of ‘part’ references in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which “hum” is “not only elaborate in its range”—“part” as fraction, “part” as part of “depart,” “part” as in “partition,” “part” as in role in a play, “part” as in to separate, etc.—“not only elaborate in its range, but in the intricacy with which words and ideas relative to one kind of part or parting interweave with—entwine themselves with—words and ideas relative to other kinds of part or parting.”

  But before getting deeper into the thicket of entwined “part” references let me return to that remarkable formulation about “ideational static,” how the almost subliminal apprehension of connections, configurations brings to us, to our “listening minds a sense of possessing and casually, effortlessly exercising an athleticism beyond that imaginable in human beings.…”

  He’s putting into words in this “ideational static” formulation something I think I’ve felt occasionally, felt more often the more I read and see and listen to Shakespeare, more frequently in each new cycle of close reading—a kind of ecstatic state of being (ecstatic static?) one can experience in Shakespeare, a state that may define what makes Shakespearean language exceptional. A state that may define that which we call “Shakespearean.” Booth’s choice of that line “More than cool reason ever comprehends” and that addition “Or ever could” is no accident. It’s a reference to Shakespeare’s own attempt to define that state. It’s a reference to a line a little bit later in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the famous passage in which Theseus compares the ecstasy of the poet, the lover and the madman.

  After hearing the story of that night in the forest, the confusions, the love-potion-induced changes of heart, the concord finally brought out of discord, Hippolyta says,

  “ ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.”

  And Theseus replies:

  More strange than true. I never may believe

  These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact …

  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.…

  It is Shakespeare’s most powerful and beautiful description of the poetic imagination; it’s difficult not to see it as a portrait of the fine frenzy of his own imagination. Just as, in a way, riding (writing) with the hounds does. And what Booth is doing is describing the experience of reading Shakespeare as affording a similar “fine frenzy,” an ability to “apprehend/More than cool reason ever comprehends.” Booth is suggesting that in Booth’s notion of this “fine frenzy” he situates the reader reading (riding) with Shakespeare in the company of the lunatic, the lover and the poet—that pack of poetic hounds all of whom experience a fine frenzy cool reason can’t comprehend.

  It is this emphasis on the reader’s experience—that what makes Shakespeare different, exceptional, is the way he offers the mind that experience of “casually, effortlessly exercising an athleticism beyond that imaginable in human beings”—that sets Booth’s vision of the Shakespearean experience apart, even from other “reader reception” critics as they’re sometimes called, in this emphasis on the almost physical virtuosity. The joyful athleticism the mind feels in making concord out of discord.

  The secret of Stephen Booth’s secret play then is that to read Shakespeare, one must become a player of Shakespeare, a player in the sense that a violinist is a player of
Mozart. Just as there are levels of the apprehension of Mozart: one can read the score as silent notes on a page; one can hear them played in a concert hall over and over in ever-deepening states of awareness of the connectedness of every note. But the ultimate way of experiencing it is to play it.

  This is a question I raised with Booth in one of my talks with him: When he speaks of the experience of “athleticism,” of the beautiful “gymnastics” the mind becomes aware it’s capable of performing—is inspired to perform, taught to perform by Shakespeare—is this experience, this “fine frenzy” available to everyone? Or can it not be said that just as Isaac Stern probably experiences Mozart in a way you and I are not capable of imagining, perhaps Booth experiences Shakespeare in a way that may be inspiring to us, but represents an exegetical athleticism not available to everyone.

  He professed surprise at the question, a surprise that seemed to suggest “of course it’s accessible to everyone.” But reading Booth on the experience of reading Shakespeare may be like listening to Isaac Stern play Mozart, rather than playing it yourself, even after a lifetime of lessons: one is aware of one’s own experience of it, but one wonders what his experience of it is like.

  Consider what I’d call, in Mozartian terms, Booth’s “double-cherry sonata”: the final tossed-off tour de force reading he gave down in Staunton of another otherwise “strenuously impertinent,” “conspicuously irrelevant” passage in the Dream. The moment in that confused night in the forest when Helena upbraids her childhood friend Hermia, whom she mistakenly believes is conspiring against her. She reproves her by summoning up—at strenuous length—her “school-days friendship,” when

  We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

  Have with our needles created both one flower,

  Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

  Both warbling of one song, both in one key,