The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “We need new terms to praise the early Empson,” Kermode says, distancing himself from quantum theory and modernism, but asserting with great conviction, “it is a return to that body of work [the early Empson], to the spirit of that work, wherever he got it from that offers us our best hope of restoring and invigorating the process of critical analysis.”

  I feel something similar could be said about Stephen Booth’s work on Shakespeare, and indeed it was one of the great pleasures to find (as I shall relate in the following chapter), in the beauty of Bermuda, even in the rain, a Shakespeare scholarly convention that may be remembered as having marked the return to that spirit.

  * In a 1992 Shakespeare Quarterly review, Booth had written: “I first saw the Shenandoah Shakespeare [company] perform in Washington, D.C., in July 1991. I haven’t thought the same since about Shakespeare or the theater.”

  * Selbourne, playwright, polemicist author of influential Blairite manifestos, was at the time I met him involved in a controversy over a manuscript he’d claimed to have discovered that described a Jewish merchant’s pre–Marco Polo voyage to China—one whose authenticity had been challenged.

  * Subsequent to our conversation a fascinating controversy broke out over whether Shakespeare’s Julio Romano was in fact infamous for pornography. A scholar on the SHAKSPER listserv had discovered the existence of another Julio Romano, contemporary with Shakespeare and evidently not known for pornographic images, a fact that if established would invalidate much published speculation about the repression/emergence of the sexual in The Winter’s Tale. Although that might depend on which Julio Romano was in the mind of the playgoer.

  * All decreed, or named, by Prof. W. K. Wimsatt.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Looking for Love in As You Like It; Looking for an Orgasm in Romeo and Juliet

  THE FIRE THIS TIME

  I wanted to write about love, but somehow I found myself sidetracked by pleasure.

  I wanted to write about love in Shakespeare after I had another theater-fire experience. You’ll recall (I hope) the one I had when the theater caught fire during a performance of Peter Brook’s Dream on Broadway. The fire I came to think of as a kind of metaphor for the incandescence of the production.

  Well, it happened again. Not quite the same thing. But that won’t stop me from making a metaphor out of it. It was not clear whether an actual fire broke out, or it was a false alarm triggered by smoke and an oversensitive alarm system. In any case there were notable similarities: a Shakespearean production on stage, a fire alarm, a halt in the proceedings that left one wondering whether to flee the theater or sit and reflect on the incandescent performance we were seeing: an incandescent incarnation of Shakespearean love.

  The fire alarm began clanging shortly after the intermission in Sir Peter Hall’s 2005 production of As You Like It starring his daughter, Rebecca Hall.

  Yes, the ultra-demanding Peter Hall had cast his twenty-two-year-old daughter in one of the most notoriously difficult roles in all Shakespeare—and she was a revelation in the part!

  Incandescent does not begin to capture it. Rapturous begins at least. She changed my mind, not only about the play, As You Like It, but about love in Shakespeare.

  Perhaps I had been spending a bit too much time with textual scholars on the variant endings of devastating tragedies, and so I was particularly vulnerable to an experience like this. Not Shakespeare in Love, but Love in Shakespeare. But I don’t think it was just that. I think she was just that good. Her Rosalind would have set off fire alarms of some sort no matter what I’d been doing.

  Fascinating: this was the second Peter Hall progeny production I’d seen within a year that had that unexpected effect on me. His son Edward Hall, artistic director of the Propeller Theater, had put on a remarkable all-male production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream the previous year. It was part of an Originalist trend in performances initiated by the London Globe, a return to the all-male casts that had originally performed Shakespeare’s plays (although not quite Originalist: the female parts in Shakespeare’s theater had been played by young boys; here it was grown men). I’m not sure what I feel about the trend itself, but I found this Dream one of the best since Peter Brook’s (James Lapine’s Central Park production in the early eighties its only rival in my experience). Maybe there was something to Peter Hall’s pause, after all. Some gentle generational translation of its delicacy and insisture.

  The Halls’ As You Like It had opened first in the United Kingdom and I was fortunate to catch it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I almost didn’t go because—I know this is heresy—As You Like It is the one Shakespeare play I’ve never really liked.

  I know it’s said by many to be among Shakespeare’s greatest works, many scholars and theater people rhapsodize about it. But it is the one play of Shakespeare’s major phase that had always—certainly on stage—left me cold.

  It is possible, I believe, to love Shakespeare and not love As You Like It. When I uttered these sentiments to a scholar I admired, Russ McDonald, he asked me, with wonder in his voice, how I could hold such a view.

  I recall my saying that I found the “witty jests” and “spirited raillery” everyone likes to talk about “leaden and strained.”

  And Rosalind herself, preening in her self-congratulatory verbal gymnastics, often seemed a manufactured wit machine, rather than the appealing spirit so often, so reverently spoken of.

  The conventionality of its satire on love and the lack of any sense that there was something real about love worth satirizing left me cold. For a play about love it seemed remarkably loveless, however much Harold Bloom would rhapsodize about Rosalind as the only Being, the only woman, worthy of the exalted company of Hamlet and Falstaff. I had even contemplated a chapter to be entitled “Why I Don’t Like As You Like It.”

  But then I saw Rebecca Hall’s Rosalind. Now, I’ll admit I haven’t seen many Rosalinds and I’ve heard people rave about ones I haven’t seen. But the ones I have seen didn’t prepare me for this one.

  So many previous Rosalinds were simply unable to handle the overly complicated language, much less the wit. They bogged down in verbiage that was meant to be skipped through. It’s just hard for even the most gifted to make such sallies work today. For instance when Rosalind finds Orlando has been hanging poems to her on trees, she tells Touchstone, the allegedly witty clown,

  “I’ll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar. Then it will be the earliest fruit i’ th’ country; for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.”

  Even if everyone in a modern audience knows a medlar is “an apple-like fruit that is not ready to eat until it is on the verge of decay,” as The Riverside Shakespeare glosses it, it’s hard to communicate the complexity of the conceptual wordplay in an appealingly offhanded, teasing, spirited manner.

  Or consider Rosalind’s greeting to her friend Celia, showing her the poems Orlando has hung on trees for her: “I was seven of the nine days out of the wonder before you came; for look here what I found on a palm tree. I was never so berhym’d since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.”

  Or if some Rosalinds did (barely) master the complicated verbiage, they focused on the mockery of love and rarely convincingly evoked its real presence. They rarely made you believe that there was anything worth mocking.

  In her father’s production what Rebecca Hall offered was, to me, a sense that there is more to love than the weight of the play’s mockery of love would have you believe. That there are places in the play where love flares up despite all attempts to mock it. Flares up and catches fire.

  (And before going any further, I think I ought to say how deeply I was touched by the kind of father-daughter love on display in the production: for Peter Hall to risk his own reputation, and to subject his daughter to the potential cruelty of critics on the lookout for nepotism, betokened an enormous confidence and courage on the
part of both of them. But it worked beautifully; the director gave his daughter a setting that was so perfect for her indubitable talent to flourish, to flare up, it was something lovely to behold.)

  In any case, the moment the fire alarm began clanging at the Brooklyn Academy—the moment the five players on stage first tried to shout their lines over it, then stopped to gaze out into the darkness for the cause of the alarm—I was hurled back to that moment when the fire broke out in Peter Brook’s Dream.

  This time there may not have been a fire at all, in the sense of an out-of-control blaze, it may have been an oversensitive alarm system, not the fire, that was out of control. This might define the difference in my reactions to the two moments. The Brook fire was transformative, the BAM fire less life-changing (my life had already been changed), but nonetheless deeply illuminating.

  It started with Hall’s decision to make the forest of Arden cold. In the text of course there’s no suggestion of a chill. As one character puts it of Duke Senior, leader of the Arden outcasts, “They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.”

  While the description doesn’t specify a temperature, fleeting the time “as they did in the golden world” suggests the pastoral meadows of classical Greece. Not the bleak chilly hardship of Peter Hall’s forest of Arden in this production.

  Hall’s forest scene looks like a homeless or hobo encampment with shivering outcasts clutching ratty blankets around themselves as they cluster about a smoky fire for warmth.

  I didn’t quite understand the point of it at first until it occurred to me one could defend the choice as a manifestation of the subtextual chilliness of this supposed “pastoral comedy.” A chilliness perhaps reflecting the coldness of human nature that all the labored frolicking couldn’t conceal. “Shakespeare’s Bitter Arcadia” is the title the critic Jan Kott gave to his chapter on As You Like It and the other pastoral comedies.

  I think I understood that Hall (“Shakespeare hated sex”) didn’t necessarily share Kott’s bleak, contrarian view of the world of those plays, but that he wanted to acknowledge it and to use it as a setting for the potential blazing and redemptive warmth that could be found in the part of Rosalind by an actress who was right for it. One like Rebecca Hall.

  But, in any case, the chill Arden he created and the fire it required sent plumes of smoke ascending to the rafters of the theater, where apparently the fire-sensors, not attuned to the contextual importance of the fire, saw it as a threat and began setting off a noisily noxious clanging.

  After trying to compete, the actors just sat down on their various forest perches and a voice came over the public address system announcing that there was “trouble with the alarm system” and asked the actors to leave the stage.

  At first there was an incipient revolt. The actors refused to leave the stage. Perhaps there was some thought of creating a “moment” with the audience, which was remaining hesitantly in its seats. A moment of communion in the face of a shared threat. Was there a theatrical equivalent of “going down with the ship”?

  But the alarm kept ringing and after a brief interval the actors quietly filed out stage left. Before too long the alarm stopped and they filed back and resumed.

  For most of those in the theater things returned to normal. But if you’re someone with my history you pay attention to deeper resonances when you hear a fire alarm on stage during a Shakespearean play.

  And I had been paying attention. I remember the moment that did it for me. Early in act 1, Rosalind, who has fallen for Orlando as she watches him triumph in the wrestling match, approaches the victorious warrior to give him a token to wear. In this production it’s a necklace she’s been wearing which she drapes around his neck.

  She’s already been won over before speaking to him. It’s another instance of the Marlowe line that Shakespeare actually quotes in As You Like It: “Whoever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”

  Rebecca Hall played that moment in a way that was both balletic and goofy, leaning her slender body like a swan’s neck into Orlando when they first meet and then collapsing in laughter at her infatuation. Expressive and resistant, responsive as if to magnetism, and then exaggerating her response in a swoony way that embarrasses and caricatures herself.

  It is almost as if she were, with extreme subtlety in gesture and body language, turning that single moment into a compression of the entire two-millennia-long debate over love in Western culture.

  Speaking of which, that fire alarm, false or not, was a kind of wake-up call for me because I had up till then failed to look more deeply into the argument about Love and Beauty (and Sex and Pleasure) in Shakespeare studies.

  Or the puzzling recent absence of such argument.

  One of the best summaries I’ve come across of the conflict in the literature that led up to Shakespeare can be found in a 1985 Cambridge University Press study, The Metaphysics of Love, by the British philosopher A. J. Smith.

  Smith tells us that “a prolonged debate about the spiritual worth of love looms large, so large in spiritual regard from the twelfth century to the twentieth century, because it challenged man’s rage for fulfillment beyond change, brings home to us human creatures our thralldom to time and circumstance, the incongruity of our designs with the universe we encounter. Is love strong as death? Or does it betray us to corruption? … The attempt to find spiritual value in sexual love becomes urgent when the love of a fellow human being is taken to redeem our nature in a corrupted world, or when sexual experience is felt to give meaning to life.”

  We’re probably all familiar with that argument and with the conflict—not that anyone’s resolved it—but then Smith raises a fascinating question. He refers to a certain “momentous” assumption in those writing about love in literature—the assumption “that human love in some way rehearses a universal condition. This conceit seized the European metaphysicians in a debate that haunted English love poetry in the seventeenth century.”

  What an understated way of posing an utterly unexpected question. Which is: Are we all talking about the same thing when we talk about the experience of love? Or as Raymond Carver might put it, “What do we talk about when we talk about love?”

  It’s an unanswerable but philosophically troubling question. On one level it’s not entirely different from asking whether we all experience the taste of chocolate or the color blue in the same way. (Could your chocolate be my vanilla, your blue my red?)

  But this is, as Smith put it, more “momentous.” In a way, it occurred to me the question is implicitly there in the title—“As You Like It.” Implying that some may like the same thing but in a different way. No judgments on what you like, or nothing to found them on. As the epilogue suggests, “ladies” may like it (“it” being, ostensibly, the play) in a different way from men. But “it” also recalls the mythological account of Tiresias, the seer whom the gods asked to settle the question whether men or women get more pleasure from sex. (He metamorphosed into a woman so he could make a valid comparison. FYI: he said women had it better.)

  Is there some universal “love” that touches us all in different degrees regardless of love object or gender identity?

  It was after seeing Rebecca Hall’s Rosalind and contemplating A. J. Smith’s question about love’s universality, the possibility that shared language conceals radically different experiences, that I thought I would find some provocative scholarly contentions about love.

  It was, after all, a scandalizing question about love that drove me from graduate school and put me in the path of Peter Brook’s life-changing Dream. That apparently deeply inappropriate question I’d asked about Chaucer’s attitude toward love, the question that a brilliant but condescending graduate student had dismissed because, he sniffed, the really interesting question in Chaucer (and implicitly in all lit
erature) was not about such things as the nature of love, but about “the making of poetry.”

  And it was love of a different, but not entirely unrelated sort, that drove me back to writing about Shakespeare: love of the language, love of the pleasures that increase with recurrent reading. As Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra: others

  … cloy

  The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

  Where most she satisfies …

  What could be more exciting than finding the locus of scholarly contentions about love in Shakespeare and writing about those contentions? But there was one problem: there were no active contentions about love, at least that’s what one of my most authorative scholarly sources informed me.

  I’d sent an e-mail to Russ McDonald, someone whose work represented to me the very best of contemporary scholarship—let me recommend again his Oxford University Press study, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, as an exemplary instance of how scholarly work on Shakespeare can be done with an illuminating clarity as well as intellectual complexity.

  In reading McDonald I felt I was reading one of the few scholars with the acuity about the potential of language that Peter Brook displays, an instinctive sense of the secret play of language. Someone whose work would last, someone whose work I wanted to and intend to hold up as an example that scholars still, after four hundred years, can have fresh and illuminating things to say to us about Shakespeare.

  Indeed McDonald’s remarkable essay “Late Shakespeare: Style and the Sexes” may be the single most illuminating scholarly essay I’d read in the course of writing this book. I’ll return to it in some detail when I take up the contentious issue of Shakespeare’s “late language,” the argument over whether we must, with Frank Kermode, find the “late language” occasionally sloppy and opaque. Or, with Stephen Booth, construe apparent holes in the linguistic fabric as greater wholes. Or is there, McDonald suggests, a “third way” of looking at it?