The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “If you don’t like ‘close reading,’ what would you call Boothian reading, or is it sui generis?”

  “Apparently, yeah,” he said laughing, implying the literal meaning of “sui generis”—that he alone did it.

  “But it’s very influential, isn’t it, among smart people?” (Okay: I wince at the question, preserve it only because it evoked a very funny Boothian response.)

  “Well, that brings the number of smart people to around three, and I’m married to one,” he said, typically self-deprecating and yet simultaneously (both/and) twitting me for including myself in the circle of smart people.

  “Well,” I said, “there are many others. I just had dinner with Kenneth Gross”—one of the most consistently thoughtful and provocative of a younger generation of scholars—“he’d been down in Staunton and spoke in the same tones as me at how dazzling he thought ‘The Witty Partition’ talk was. He spoke of the way Booth had the deep focus of one of the great scholars of our age.”

  “Well,” Booth said, “I’ve got more than my share of admiration and applause but that’s different from being influential. You take Jesus,” he said dryly. So dryly I broke into laughter, which I think was the intent. “He was widely praised and admired. But influential? No.” (Great line, no?)

  We proceeded to the question of his latest work, his focus on “strenuous impertinence.” I asked him if he’d heard the term I’d been using, “conspicuous irrelevance,” or who coined it and whether it seemed analogous in some way to his “strenuous impertinence.” Booth told me it must have been the coinage of one of my professors; he was unfamiliar with it but “I certainly like it, my recent work has often been about what gives displeasure in Shakespeare and how that somehow makes for, if not greater pleasure, then greater wholeness.”

  Again, as he puts it in the “Abstract” of his Winter’s Tale piece:

  I’ve spent a lot of time and ink in the last few years on particular elements in Shakespeare plays that displease us, and on arguing that, although whatever element it is I fix on is undeniably unpleasant, it increases its play’s power, and power to please. The present paper is much more of the same. Most of it is taken up with a catalogue of the various “wrongnesses” with which The Winter’s Tale is crammed, elements so numerous as to seem calculated, as inviting challenges to audience credulity.…

  Specifically he speaks of the bear (as in the famously silly stage direction in The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear”), he speaks of the wrongheaded geography of The Winter’s Tale’s famous “sea-coast of Bohemia,” and the fact that the name of a real sculptor, Julio Romano, is used in the play; he’s said to have created the statue that comes to life (the use of the real name and the fact that Julio Romano was purportedly better known for his pornographic drawings than his sculptures is the “strenuous impertinence” here).* “The fact that Bohemia has no seacoast except in The Winter’s Tale is not a mistake or inattention on Shakespeare’s part but a deliberate reversal of the geography in the source material,” Booth points out. (The source tale opens in Bohemia and the little baby is set down on the seacoast of Sicily, of which there actually is one.)

  Booth characteristically sees this and other dramatic improbabilities in the play as challenges to the audience’s faith. Challenges that, surmounted, lead to greater faith in the dramatic illusion of the play.

  Again he insists, in conclusion, that Shakespeare gives us a “muddle” that is “muted but aesthetically thrilling to minds that never bring its existence to consciousness.”

  This is one of those paradoxical contentions where one doubt about Boothian reading again arises in my mind: the insistence that the effects he writes about are never brought to consciousness.

  But then by bringing them to consciousness (in writing about them), isn’t he in effect doing something transgressive, making it impossible for experiences that are thrilling because not quite conscious ever to thrill again because he’s brought them to consciousness? Turning Shakespeare into Brecht, as he said of my Yale experience? Or is the potential for thrills in Shakespeare limitless, bottomless?

  In any case I’d asked him whether his emphasis on non (thematic) significance, on “ideational static” over ideological clarity, has some relationship to “conspicuous irrelevance.”

  “In The Winter’s Tale you’re looking for holes that make a greater whole, right?”

  “Well,” he said, “that certainly is an elegant way of putting it, but the word ‘looking’ is bothersome.” In the sense that he believes it should emerge from reading. “But now I see where you were applying the idea of ‘conspicuous irrelevance.’ I guess the business of my career has been with the things in great works that people complain about. And how does it happen there are such things in great works, when in high school all they’d ever tell us about was the things you were supposed to admire, and they spent all the time pointing out what that was.”

  Suddenly in a way the penny dropped and the relationship between “Love (3)” and his latest criticism became apparent:

  “Love (3)” is about the ability for Love, God (Jesus to Herbert)—although he doesn’t say the name Jesus, he just says “Love”—to embrace the unworthy speaker almost for his unworthiness. It’s about someone who is theologically a hole being made whole, redeemed, even holy.

  I thought it was interesting to think of Booth’s preoccupation with what’s “wrong” in Shakespeare in comparison with Frank Kermode’s less redemptive vision of “wrongness.” Kermode asks us to accept the fact of bad, apparently incoherent Shakespeare; he singles out late Shakespeare, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale. There are passages in these plays, Kermode says, that are often just bad or sloppy, irredeemably bad (not the kind of bad Booth makes whole) because Shakespeare’s thoughts were racing too fast for his pen and the poetic embodiment of his thoughts to catch up, or because he didn’t take the time to clarify some of his more knotted formulations.

  Kermode believes it important that we allow ourselves the liberty of letting Shakespeare be bad at times because it gives credibility when we praise him for his being good: we are not then “bardolaters” who believe he is perfect in every way.

  Booth’s focus is on the way the things that seem bad are redemptively good, thrilling, create the pole-vault lift from hole to whole. I tried to get at the question behind this important distinction about types of badness when I asked Booth if he thought this was a conscious strategy on Shakespeare’s part. Creating displeasures, disjunction.

  “You call it a ‘conscious strategy of genuine but constructive perversity.’ Conscious on the part of Shakespeare?”

  “Well,” he says, “in this place, yes.” He’s speaking of the way, in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare reverses Sicily and Bohemia to give us the famous impossible “seacoast of Bohemia” line.

  “Because otherwise he’s following the previous [source] play so closely,” Booth said.

  “You call it ‘superhumanly perverse’ … because it draws attention to the larger greatness?”

  “No, because it enhances its greatness,” Booth says. “Like the geography problem in The Winter’s Tale all of these things are sort of irritants to understanding the play.”

  When he said that about “irritants” it made me think of the phrase “enraged affection” in Much Ado.

  Booth’s affection is anything but enraged, it’s true. There is a serenity to it expressed in that pole-vaulting metaphor which he returns to once more by saying of those “irritants” and “displeasures,” “I think they do contribute to the greatness of the play in the way that makes pole-vaulting more of a pleasure, more of a value to the pole vaulter, than taking a ladder, climbing over the bar, then climbing down the other side.”

  Booth then proceeds to pole-vault to a higher, more energized level of praise for this hole/whole, pole-vaulting quality:

  “The fact that Shakespeare can hold the stuff in there and cause audiences to like it is astounding! The ability to feel
the wholeness of a play like The Winter’s Tale that is so busy cracking apart in so many ways.…”

  “Are these ‘irritants’ you speak of like those in oysters that cause pearls to grow around them?” I asked, consciously linking to the line in The Tempest from the “Full Fathom Five” song: “Those are pearls that were his eyes:/Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.”

  “No,” he said flatly at first.

  For some reason I refused to accept his no.

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “I’m not,” he said, more generously than seriously at first. “I’m close to sure, in the sense the greater attention the irritant endows the point with … the trouble is the irritation is felt by the audience and is real and part of the experience.… I’m feeling the lure of this pearl metaphor,” he finally said, laughing, “but I feel there’s a hook in there somewhere. The audience’s achievement is essentially in being able to feel mastery over an object in which their mastery is so aggressively challenged. By having to think about the seacoast of Bohemia, or a bear, or having the first character in King Lear you feel any sympathy for [Edmund] turning out to be a little Iago.…”

  “DEATH ARROW” AND SHAKE-SPEARE

  I returned to the question of intentionality which goes in and out of fashion in literary studies. When I was at Yale it was one of the three “Forbidden Fallacies,” whose fallaciousness was not as self-evident as it was meant to sound: “The Intentional Fallacy,” “The Affective Fallacy” and “The Fallacy of Imitative Form.”* Under the rule of the Intentional Fallacy one is not to inquire about authorial intention. The poem is to be taken as a “verbal icon” that might as well be inscribed on a meteor that crashed from some distant galaxy whose author or intentions cannot be known. Only the isolated verbal icon itself counts. The Affective Fallacy, which Booth has made his métier, says that one must not pay attention to the effect the poem has on the reader, since we are neither able to recover the author’s intended effects, nor will the effects be the same on every reader. The Fallacy of Imitative Form argues against a lesser Boothian sin which is that certain formal configurations should not be given thematic significance. As when Booth, in an offhand way, related the instability produced by the Sonnets about Love to the instability produced by Love itself. (I tend to think the Fallacy of Imitative Form is not a fallacy in that, while “imitative form” can be abused—as it is in those who argue that their disordered art is an inevitable product and portrait of a disordered universe—nonetheless it is a technique that is used to great effect by almost all great literature.)

  Booth has forged a critical realm of his own that goes beyond New Critical Close Reading, but only to get closer, not to distance himself from the experience of Shakespeare the way the Theorists who supplanted the Close Readers do.

  “I’m really indifferent to the whole issue of intent,” Booth told me.

  “It’s effect you’re concerned with?”

  “One can certainly guess what an author intends but in the end it doesn’t matter.”

  He draws on his decidedly arcane knowledge of popular culture history to give me an example.

  “There was the rumor that the silent-film actress Theda Bara chose her name because it was a close anagram of ‘death arrow.’ That had nothing to do with it, it was simply that she was Theodosia Goodman and needed a new name and chose Theda Bara. But even if she didn’t have the slightest intention for it, the ‘death arrow’ rumor affected the way audiences saw her.” (I couldn’t help wondering if there was an intentional or inadvertent linkage between “death arrow” and “Shake-speare.”)

  To bring things full circle I asked Booth a question about infinitude, I quoted to him, actually, from Peter Brook’s Berlin lecture, that line about splitting open a word, a phrase, a line from Shakespeare and how it was like splitting the atom, it releases infinite energies.

  “Oh,” Booth said, “one has to believe in the feel of something like infinity but presumably you would come to the last one.”

  Typically Boothian in that the question of Shakespeare’s bottomlessness is answered in a commonsense way that doesn’t deny its essence. The feeling, the affect, the glimpse, the imagined brush with infinitude is more important than any actual number. And one doesn’t feel that Booth feels he has “come to the last one.”

  To return to Edgar’s description of the endless plummet from the illusory lip of the Cliffs of Dover in King Lear, which conjures up endless depths for his blind father: what’s important is not whether the fathomless cliff drop is there, but whether the blind father believes it is. When it comes to infinitude we’re all blind fathers (which makes more sense to me than that we’re all Michael Jordans).

  “There’s a big difference between what feels infinite and what is,” Booth says, “but that feeling is there, even if it’s pretty clear the valuable readings don’t go on forever. The feeling is real and invaluable.” An important remark for Booth’s critics: “the valuable readings don’t go on forever.” They just feel like they do, and given our limited lifespans they are rarely exhausted.

  He shifts into a discussion of the kind of “ideational static” that has been occupying his mind recently. With a kind of self-deprecating precision he says, “I have known for almost two weeks that hair is a theme in The Tempest. You know Shakespeare likes to take body parts and build plays around them.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. Arms in Troilus, ears in Hamlet, feet in Lear, hands in Twelfth Night, trunks in Cymbeline.”

  “Hair,” he goes on, “that is pronounced ‘air’ in The Tempest is an ‘air’ in the musical sense, you’ve got the air that things vanish into, the air that Ariel is, you’ve got heirs to things that people will be, and then there are a couple of perfectly unnecessary references to ‘hair’ in the play. Now, did I mention the difference between ‘theme’ and ‘meaning’? Hair’s a theme, not a meaning. Just not ideationally interesting or dignified. While ‘father and children’ in Lear and The Winter’s Tale—that’s a topic of meaning.”

  Our conversation ended on a somewhat dramatic note. Just two days before my phone call with Booth, Donald Foster had dropped a bombshell on SHAKSPER, the electronic discussion list. Foster conceded that he’d been wrong all this time in believing the “Funeral Elegy” to be by Shakespeare. One scholar on another list said, “This is seismic!”

  I knew that Booth had gone on record with qualified belief in the Elegy. On a panel at UCLA shortly after Foster’s initial claim made headlines and in a paper based on his talk there that later became incorporated into a Shakespeare Quarterly forum on the question, Booth had called the Elegy “A long boring poem, probably by William Shakespeare.” His imprimatur, however qualified, had done much for Foster’s credibility.

  It turned out I was the first to tell him of Foster’s retraction.

  Booth’s first reaction was “No kidding!” Then he put his finger on the real question: “Can you define what is ‘Shakespearean’ with a computer? Presumably if Foster took Merry Wives of Windsor through the computer he would find it to be by Shakespeare, but that would not make it ‘Shakespearean.’ Not very, not the bulk of it.”

  I was about to disagree with him a bit on Merry Wives, which I see as self-conscious Shakespearean self-parody. But Booth seemed a bit shaken by the disclosure of Foster’s retraction. And he had put the focus on the essence of the great Elegy fiasco: the search for a way to define what is or isn’t “Shakespearean.”

  “So he took it back …” he said, almost disbelievingly.

  I don’t want to end abruptly on this note of booth’s fallibility, although perhaps it’s useful to balance the genuine awe I feel at his engagement with Shakespeare with at least a suggestion that even for Booth, someone so finely attuned to Shakespearean complexity, the question of how to define what is “Shakespearean” can still be elusive.

  It’s true that I have a temperamental preference f
or the fine-textured attentiveness to the play of language in Booth over the overblown thematic invocations of Bloom. Booth’s work doesn’t reduce Shakespeare to “themes” and I have sought to offer an appreciation, however inadequate, of Booth’s complexity as a corrective to the imbalance that exalts Bloom as our High Priest of Shakespeare, and marginalizes Booth because he doesn’t just bat around Big Themes. Because his Shakespeare is difficult, demanding, subtle, however—ultimately—pleasurable. Bloom’s Shakespeare is so much easier and undemanding, certainly of subtlety. It’s Shakespeare Made Simple on a Grand Scale.

  But this does not mean that Booth’s approach is and Bloom’s isn’t an aspect of Shakespeare. Bloom and Booth—all-theme and anti-theme—might indeed be said to be the “double cherry” of Shakespearean exegesis.

  One half of that double has nonetheless suffered from neglect. Booth’s Shakespeare requires a lifetime of closer and closer and closer attention, the virtual dissolution or at least humble submission of the self to the language; Bloom’s vaunting oracular pronouncements require not close reading but virtually no reading at all.

  As I was revising this chapter I came across an essay I’d saved from the Summer 1998 issue of the quarterly Raritan in which Frank Kermode first published in essay form his “Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language” with its tour de force close reading of the phrase “prone and speechless language” in Measure for Meaure. A line which Kermode, as Peter Brook put it, split open to release infinite energies.

  He starts off with a reading of William Empson’s reading of that phrase (an example of Empson’s “seventh type” of ambiguity, one in which the mind is divided against itself, a “compaction” to be observed, Kermode says, reading Empson, only in “the deepest poetry, what Empson called, with only a little irony, ‘the secret places of the Muses’ ”). Empson, Kermode quotes Jonathan Bate saying, was “the first man to see the literature of the past through quantum’s altered notion of reality.” He is “modernism’s Einstein.”