The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Here is Sonnet 94, the issue over which Booth attacked Empson (and everybody else). It has long been one of the most elusive and enigmatic of all the 154 and that’s saying something. Particularly hard to discover is the speaker’s attitude toward the subject of the sonnet, the enigmatic, elusive sort “that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none.”

  They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none,

  That do not do the thing they most do show,

  Who moving others, are themselves as stone,

  Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,

  They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,

  And husband nature’s riches from expense;

  They are the lords and owners of their faces,

  Others but stewards of their excellence.

  The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet,

  Though to itself it only live and die,

  But if that flow’r with base infection meet,

  The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

  Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  “Recent interest in 94,” Booth wrote, “got its start from a lengthy account of the sonnet by William Empson in 1933. All of Empson’s comments on the poem are instructed by his assumption of not only the justice but the comprehensiveness of the following précis:

  “ ‘The best people are indifferent to temptation and detached from the world; nor is this state selfish, because they do good by unconscious influence, like the flower. You must be like them; you are quite like them already. But even the best people must be continually on their guard, because they become the worst, just as the pure and detached lily smells worst, once they fall from their perfection.’ ”

  Booth proceeds to describe and dismiss this and all the other major critics of Sonnet 94 for the past fifty years in his characteristic waspish style.

  “These are remarkable paragraphs,” he says of one critic (not Empson), “first for introducing the obvious relevance of the Sermon on the Mount into criticism of this sonnet, and secondly for being incoherent.”

  What he objects to in each reading, including Empson’s, is its tendency to be reductive: to reduce the contradictory characterization of the subject of the sonnet—“They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none”—to either/or, to a single synopsis or paraphrase. To decide whether to see the poem as either praising or damning the person in question.

  Speaking of whom I thought it interesting that Booth should choose this particular sonnet, this particular enigmatic personality for the centerpiece of his analysis of how to read the Sonnets, considering how much like Booth the figure in Sonnet 94 is. Cool, detached, the figure in Sonnet 94 is one of the most enigmatic characters in all Shakespeare. If Booth is Empson minus the certainty, the figure in 94 is uncertainty personified. Uncertain as well is Shakespeare’s attitude toward the character. He or she is beautiful enough to harm those vulnerable to physical beauty. And yet is praised at first for his or her unwillingness to use that beauty to its full dangerous effect. He or she withholds his or her self not out of altruism but out of coldness. Is this person cruel to be kind or just (inadvertently) kind because cold?

  Biographers have focused on this contradictory treatment of the person in Sonnet 94—the way the Sonnet ranges from the serene compliment to the desperate warning about its object—as the closest thing we have to a portrait of the man or woman who comes closest to driving Shakespeare mad in “real life.”

  It is something we will probably never know, although it was fascinating to me to think of how much Booth resembled the figure in Sonnet 94. He had a certain serene aloofness to him that was intellectually appealing but he did have the power to hurt: he could have ridiculed my as yet untutored appreciation of his intellectual worth, and yet gracefully did not, except in the sense of a kind of wry irony: “I like that fellow: he thinks I’m smart.” But such biographical speculations about Booth and Shakespeare and “They that have pow’r to hurt” are beyond proof or disproof and not the focus of Booth’s concern in Sonnet 94. Booth doesn’t even accept the need to believe it’s about a lover:

  “On no internal evidence whatever … Empson paraphrases the poem as a direct statement to and about the beloved. The assumption is unwarranted but it’s entirely understandable.”

  To challenge Empson—and most previous readers of the poem—on such a basic point was daring for a Ph.D. student, and to bring such confidence to the assertion is surprising.

  But when Booth looks at Sonnet 94 he sees something more fundamental going on than the question of Shakespeare’s love life. Again it’s not Shakespeare’s heart, it is his art he’s after, the “esthetic nuts and bolts” of these fourteen-line engines that produce dizzying pleasure and disorientation. The mechanics of Shakespeare’s spell.

  Here is how he describes the state the sonnet seeks to create and how it creates it:

  “ ‘They that have pow’r to hurt’ should not endear themselves to a reader first coming upon them,” Booth begins. But ‘They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none’ sounds like the stuff of heroes. Having the power to hurt makes them sound bad or at least dangerous; not using it sounds good.

  “This first line describes a dichotomy in the nature of its subject. The only two qualities it presents for ‘they’ are irrevocably connected and also antipathetic [italics mine]. The line also begins a process of creating a state of mind in the reader in which contrary but inseparable reactions uneasily coexist.”

  This is worth repeating because I believe it may contain the skeleton key to Booth’s vision of what the Sonnets are about and how they work:

  “The line also begins a process of creating a state of mind in the reader in which contrary but inseparable reactions uneasily coexist.”

  Contrary but inseparable. The double cherry of discourse.

  Here in a Shakespearean nutshell is the effect that Booth focuses on in the Sonnets. Particularly in his hard-to-find Essay. And I’m going to digress from my series of gaffes down in Staunton to the moment a couple of months later when I finally got my hands on a copy of Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I found within it, at last, not just the heart of Booth’s vision of the secret play within the Sonnets; I found what finally seemed to explain what happened to me in that long-ago moment at Yale when I found myself temporarily destabilized by one sonnet in particular.

  What Booth is suggesting about Sonnet 94 is that it is not so much about love, although it may be about love, as it is about creating in the reader that state of “contrary but inseparable” feelings, the uncertainty of stance in the reader, the flickering forth and back, the destabilization that is characteristic of the state of being in love, while being uncertain about whether one is loved, one of the most exquisitely tortured, divided, ecstatic and maddening states known to man or woman. Or so I hear.

  Again it’s something he almost tosses off offhandedly: “the effect of this byplay on a series of poems [the Sonnets] concerned with unsteady relationships is worth some consideration.” I love the offhand characterization of all love as “unsteady relationships.”

  Some consideration indeed: to read the Sonnets attentively is to feel implicated in the process of experiencing the dizzying instability of being in love, the particular delirious instability of the ground shifting under one’s feet (the earth moving?). The ground of meaning, the ground of being, the ground of being oneself, the ground of being one self. Booth repeatedly argued to me that that’s not what “all the fuss is about,” the thematic connection between what effects reading the Sonnets have on you and what effect love has on you; he thinks the former—the state of being in the Sonnets, not the state of being in love—is what “all the fuss is about,” but he doesn’t dismiss the latter, merely characterizes love dismissively as an “unsteady relationship.”

  When I finally got hold of Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets I slowly began to get the sense of j
ust how infinitely resonant, on a microcrystalline level one might say, the Sonnets appear through his shifting lenses.

  Even in the sound, in the “subliminal alliterations” he finds “the smallest scale in which the Sonnets exhibit the principle of simultaneous likeness and difference,” the Wordsworthian sexual pleasure “in the apprehension of unity and division is phonetic [in the] pulsating alliteration as well.… Time after time in the Sonnets a pair of sounds will come together and pull apart.”

  “Coming together and pulling apart”: yes, there is an obvious analogy, but on another level what’s interesting is his invocation of “pulsation”: the way the microcosm of each sonnet somehow partakes of some universal vision of cosmic pulsation that animates the universe of language—and the universe of love.

  Pulsation: it’s that sense of flickering from one-ness to two-ness, from being to nonbeing. From “to be” to “not to be.” It partakes of something the director John Barton calls fundamental to Shakespearean language: antithesis. But a pulsation; not a static opposition but a mutually subversive ever-shifting pulsation between thesis and antithesis.

  It crops up again a few pages later in his Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets when Booth speaks of one of his favorite obscure Greek figures of speech, one he finds repeatedly in Shakespeare, particularly the Sonnets—antanaclasis (the rebound), a figure in which as Booth puts it “a repeated word shifts from one to another of its meanings as in ‘to England will I steal and there I’ll steal.’ ”

  The use of antanaclasis in the Sonnets “is remarkable,” says Booth, because Shakespeare uses it constantly. Antanaclasis, “like pulsating alliteration, evokes a sense of insecurity, of flux, of motion.…” There’s that pulsing alliteration again.

  Here’s another line I found in the Essay that led me to an eye-opening revelation about what Booth was getting at:

  “Like so many of his predecessors, Shakespeare compares the condition of a lover to that of a state in civil war. Unlike his predecessors Shakespeare evokes in his reader something very like the condition he talks about.”

  But a different kind of civil war: not the usual one in which one is constantly changing sides, not shifting loyalties but shifting identities. To extend the civil war metaphor one goes from blue to gray, say, without changing uniforms. Or as Russ McDonald’s annotation on that page had it: “Not only do we learn about mutability, we participate in mutability.” (It also makes one think of the whole sweep of Shakespeare’s history plays, especially the ones about the internal civil war as being, if not a love story exactly, then having more in common with the Sonnets’ internal dividedness than one imagined.)

  Here are two final Boothian remarks from the Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets which at last made me realize that what Booth was talking about was the cumulative effects of subtle disorientation and displacement or double-placement I felt at the blackboard at Yale:

  “The style of the Sonnets recreates the experience of paradox, of coping with things in more than one frame of reference, not for, but in the reader.”

  In the reader. A name at last for what happened to me at the blackboard at Yale as the chalk rebounded from “absent” to “present.” Antanaclasis! Antanaclasis in a classroom, no less. Somehow I felt a pulsing, shifting sensation as I was present-absent, absent-present, here-there, here and there simultaneously.

  It was one of the first things I asked of Booth when I finally spoke to him: Was this strange experience of mine what the Sonnets were about in some way? That was the impression one got from reading the Essay, that it was the purpose, the design of the shifting subliminal pulsations, shifts of frameworks, of readings and of ambiguities, the harmonics and dissonances of sound patterns, the way the couplets were reframed by the quatrains, the quatrains by the sestets, the sestets by the octaves—each part by the remaining whole in a never-ending dance of possible (nonrandom) significations—that it was the purpose of all this to create the sudden surprising moment of ec-stasis, the experience I felt at the blackboard at Yale. It’s wordplay beyond wordplay, it’s something more complex, meta-wordplay, the play of wordplay, echoing intricately through the fourteen lines and the other 153 sonnets for that matter.

  Samuel Johnson famously decreed Shakespearean wordplay and puns as Shakespeare’s “fatal Cleopatra”—the love affair for which he abandons reason for rapture as Antony did for Cleopatra.

  Booth doesn’t see Shakespearean wordplay as a failing, a whoring after a linguistic temptress, but as being at the heart of the experience the Sonnets re-create within the reader. Even if he doesn’t want to come out and call it love, I do.

  The wordplay is designed to manipulate the mind of the reader, whip-saw it back and forth, “keep the mind in a constant motion” as Booth puts it, in a state of “rebound,” antanaclasis. The way I felt when the chalk was rebounding off the blackboard at Yale and I found myself rebounding between two separate selves in effect, feeling an almost physical shift in state, in identity between self and the absent lover. A kind of exchange of being with another being that is at the heart of the experience of love. And sex. Or so I hear.

  Booth remarks that “Sonnet 36 rests on the Neoplatonic commonplaces that the lover and the beloved are one, and that the lover becomes the beloved.…” (italics mine). It seemed to me he was being a bit too casually dismissive in calling them “commonplaces.” I found it immensely uncommon to experience, through the reading of a fourteen-line poem, the kind of communion and separation the poem was purportedly about.

  Booth says the sonnet “rests” on “Neoplatonic commonplaces,” but in Booth’s vision the Sonnets are never at rest; each sonnet is always pulsating in and out of phase with a haze of possible or rather multiple meanings. Something pulsating, pleasurable, sensual and sexual in a way—way beyond Wordsworth’s polite metaphor of sexuality: “the pleasure the mind takes in similitude and dissimilitude.”

  Booth’s “esthetic nuts and bolts” of the Sonnets are finely tuned to manipulate us with ever-so-subtle jolts into a state of exalted “athleticism,” if not a state of grace, indeed often a state of disgrace (“When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes …,” Sonnet 29) in the reader, something pulsating, vacillating, pleasurable and frightening, something like love, something like sex. The Sonnets are meant to manipulate us like poetic geishas.

  PLEASURE FROM DISPLEASURE

  Or so I thought when I finally got to ask Booth whether what happened to me at Yale was what he was describing in the Essay. In order to get to that moment I had to read the Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets thoroughly and then I read three other essays Booth sent me in addition to “The Witty Partition” paper, the better he said to represent the latest direction in his critical thinking.

  But finally several months after the Shenandoah conference there we were on the phone—him in Berkeley, me in my New York apartment recording with his permission the conversation that I had prepared for for months since I met him in Virginia. I would also have lunch with him later that summer in New York. At first he had seemed as reluctant to talk as I had felt unprepared, but he mentioned reading my piece on Hamlet texts in The New Yorker and it may have convinced him my intentions were serious, that it was no shame necessarily that “that fellow thinks I’m smart.” Still I felt the same trepidation and humility talking to him I’d felt with Peter Brook.

  In any case at some point I described my experience at Yale to Booth.

  “I think I understand what you mean,” he said a bit gingerly. “But the thing that you need to remember is that this has only happened once, it happened with something that you presumably knew well just before you did this, and the big difference between what you experienced and what I’m talking about is that you became conscious of it and that in Shakespeare one is unconscious of it.”

  Unconscious? “And yet it has at least some kind of subconscious effect, no?” I asked him.

  “What you had at the chalkboard and what the Sonnets would be like if one experiences them a
s I describe them in the notes, is the difference between a Shakespearean play and a Brecht play. In Brecht you become consciously aware of stuff in a way that you never will be again.”

  I’m not sure I agree the experience is unrepeatable, but the distinction Booth is making is an important one. He is, I believe, saying that all the super-subtle effects he elucidates from the shifting correspondences, echoes and resonances within the Sonnets primarily affect the mind at a kind of subliminal if not subconscious level. These wicked little engines of pleasure don’t even disclose their effect to our conscious minds; it is in the cumulative unconscious tickling of the brain that we feel ourselves elevated to some new level of extremely refined and subtle pleasure, although we’re not quite aware (or conscious) of why or how. What happened to me at Yale, Booth was saying, was that I became suddenly aware of the mechanics of flight in the midst of being transported. The way a cartoon character who dashes mistakenly off a cliff keeps rotating his legs until he realizes he’s “running” on thin air.

  Again I’m not sure if I entirely agree here with this “unheard melodies are the sweetest” argument. I’m not sure either that it has only happened once to me; it is my suspicion that these things break through into the conscious realm more often than not, the more one reads Shakespeare, and that it is these moments of apprehension—moments on the threshold of comprehension—that define what makes Shakespeare exceptional.

  But is it a purely gymnastic, athletic exercise of the mind as Booth argues?

  For want of a better metaphor, I’d say that Booth’s is a balletomane’s appreciation for Shakespeare. For the balletomane, the story, the theme, are of less significance than the balletic leaps, the pas de deux of words and phrases, the lightning-like leaps and shifts and relationships not just in the realm of the stage, but on the stage of the spectator’s mind—the extent to which reading Shakespeare lifts the mind into a balletic realm.

  He doesn’t dismiss the importance of theme in Shakespeare, it’s just not for Booth an explanation of what “all the fuss is about.”