The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The forgiveness devices in the Late Romances seem to grow gradually more obtrusive. While the close of Pericles is a miraculous reunion, it is also beautifully human. Cymbeline’s end is facilitated by the hard-not-to-seem-ridiculous descent of the Roman eagle, a Big Bird ex machina. It’s all magic in The Tempest, beautiful but often strenuous magic.

  And The Winter’s Tale? That statue coming to life? It’s hard to know how to react. I’ve found myself rationalizing it: well, it is a Late Romance and as one of my professors at Yale Graduate School, Howard Felperin, liked to emphasize, a Tragedy is an uncompleted Romance, a Romance a completed Tragedy. A miraculous ending was not “unnatural” in a Romance, it was part of the groundwork of its being.

  Still I’ve resisted it on the stage and on the page. A statue coming alive. It’s too … blatantly symbolic I guess. The transformation of art into life. Art redeeming life. All that. It never gave me the pleasure, nothing like the shock that “No cause, no cause” does even now, tapping it onto my keyboard.

  By contrast, the statue coming to life almost seemed to me as if it were the Emperor’s New Clothes of the Shakespeare appreciators, the graven image of the bardolaters. Everyone acclaimed it, yet did they really love it, or did they think they were supposed to?

  And so this moment, this epitome of Shakespearean forgiveness, somehow had always left me stone cold—like a statue I guess. Gave me no pleasure. But I was prompted to revisit it by conversation with the scholar Grace Tiffany.

  Most will know the story: deluded by a fit of Othello-like jealousy, with no Iago but his inner demons to prompt him, King Leontes of Sicily has driven his wife Hermione to her death, which leads his son to die of grief, while he sends his newborn girl to be exposed to the elements and (presumably) death. But sixteen years later, when the long-lost daughter returns to the court of the grieving Leontes (who has found, to his sorrow, how unjust his suspicions of Hermione were), the daughter, called Perdita, asks to see the statue of her mother Hermione in the home of her loyal attendant, Paulina.

  The whole court accompanies Perdita to see the statue, which, we are told by a “Third Gentleman,” was created “by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer.”

  It’s hard not to see in this sculptor, “Julio Romano,” Shakespeare’s evocation of an artist not unlike himself, one who sees himself as both Nature’s rival and Nature’s “ape.” But, in any case, the statue is unveiled, Leontes the guilty husband is “so far transported that/He’ll think anon it lives.”

  Paulina, the former queen’s attendant and keeper of the statue, tells Leontes that she can make the statue move, indeed “descend and take you by the hand.”

  When Leontes expresses doubt, Paulina tells those assembled, “It is requir’d/You do awake your faith,” which they apparently do to a satisfactory degree, because when Paulina commands music to “strike,” then it happens. The statue of Hermione steps down from the pedestal, comes to life, embraces Leontes, gives her blessing to her daughter:

  “You gods, look down/And from your sacred vials pour your graces/Upon my daughter’s head!”

  I’ve found Hermione’s forgiveness of her husband—who in effect killed their first child—almost less convincing than her transformation from statue to living being. (The transformation is never really explained. Was Paulina hiding her alive, is this just a simulation of a miracle—because the “statue” reflects her having aged sixteen years—or is this some genuine miracle of art awakening to life? No certain indication one way or another in the text. Undecidable.)

  And it’s such a conspicuous dea ex machina that it skews every reading or staging of the play after the first time you’ve seen it. No matter what happens in the early acts you know the statue’s going to come alive, forgive and redeem (all but the dead boy).

  Why have I resisted? Perhaps because it lacked the surprise of transformation in human nature that affects me deeply in other forgiveness moments. There was no unexpectedness, it didn’t seem to partake of what I found most appealing in other forgiveness moments: the surprise of seeing people act better than they might be expected to. Why is this a pleasure? I can’t speak for others, but perhaps it holds out a hope that some day, in some way, we may act better than might be expected of us. Forgiveness will transform us from a kind of statuelike lifelessness to a higher plane of life.

  Then I had an e-mail exchange with Grace Tiffany; she’s a Shakespearean scholar who specializes in religious aspects of the works, and who writes deliciously witty reviews of hopelessly jargonic scholarly articles for The Shakespeare Newsletter, in addition to being author of one of the smarter Shakespearean novels, Will.

  I’d asked her if she had any thoughts on the idea of forgiveness as pleasure in Shakespeare and what moments she found most exemplary.

  She agreed that almost nothing surpasses “No cause, no cause.” But she made a case that there was more than dea ex machina miracle-work going on in Hermione’s descent from the pedestal and her forgiveness of Leontes.

  “When Hermione comes down from her pedestal and wordlessly embraces her husband,” Professor Tiffany wrote me, “Shakespeare gives her nothing to say. It seems that he understood that the best expressions of forgiveness were wordless and tending toward silent expressions. Even ‘No cause, no cause’ is as minimal and simple as it is because of the action of Cordelia; she is kneeling to him; her father tries to kneel to her.”

  And then she added something I thought particularly perceptive: “And of course the eloquence of doing and the potential rottenness of saying is a major theme in Lear.”

  Only someone who knows the potential of speech so well as Shakespeare knows all too well the potential rottenness of speech.

  “In The Winter’s Tale he omitted the speech of forgiveness entirely,” Ms. Tiffany added, “it all has to be done by gesture. There’s a poem I’ve always liked by Edwin Morgan wherein Shakespeare gives instructions to a boy actor on how to play Hermione coming down from the pedestal. He concentrates on the action:

  “ ‘You move a foot, slow, steady, down, you guard your balance in case you’re stiff/You move, you step, slow, down from the pedestal/Control your start with one hand, the other hand/you now hold out/to your husband who wronged you long ago …/finally he embraces you, and there’s nothing/I can give you to say boy, but you must show that you have forgiven him.’

  “In the end,” Ms. Tiffany concludes, “Shakespeare chose silence to represent such a moment.”

  From “No cause, no cause,” to “No words, no words.”

  I was won over. I have a new appreciation of this moment of forgiveness, and the silent pleasure it offers. One given to me by someone—I can’t resist saying this—named Grace.

  Her emphasis on silence (was this Peter Brook’s vibrant silence?) made me think of a line in Frank Kermode’s book Shakespeare’s Language:

  “Shakespeare’s later language, and so his theatre, does not lose all contact with the eloquence of his early work, but moves deliberately in the direction of a kind of reticence that … might be close to silence.”

  The always astute Shakespearean critic Anne Barton once said something similiar in her essay “Shakespeare and the Limitations of Language.” She argued that in Shakespeare’s last solo play, The Tempest, “he had reached a point in his investigation of the capabilities of words beyond which he found it difficult to proceed.”

  A fascinating conjecture which, I think, can be taken two ways, not necessarily contradictory: Shakespeare had reached and recognized the limits of his own linguistic powers. Or, more radically, he had reached and recognized the limits of language itself.

  Here I must acknowledge my own limits in not feeling able to decide between these final contending conjectures in the Shakespeare wars.

  And so,
dear reader, perhaps this is the time, epilogue-like, for me to ask your forgiveness. For all I’ve left out of this book, especially all the scholars, actors and directors with so much worthy to say whom I have not been able to include. You know who you are; I hope you’ll understand. I ask your forgiveness for all I’ve left out of the book, and yes, for what’s in: for my necessarily limited perspective on a limitless subject.

  The rest is silence. A vibrant one, I hope.

  And, oh yes: I forgive you, Peter Brook.

  To Peter Brook and the cast of his Dream.

  For changing my life forever.

  Acknowledgments

  First I want to thank—well, no, I want to acknowledge the role of—Adolf Hitler. (Got your attention, you non-Acknowledgment-reader types, right?) Seriously, had it not been for the deep despair I spiraled into after I completed Explaining Hitler it’s unlikely I would have undertaken this book. Spending ten years writing a book seeking an adequate explanation for Hitler’s evil was depressing enough, but after I’d had to let go of the galleys of that book—largely a critique of the failure of most attempts at Hitler explanation—I found myself in a state far more bleak than my customary gloomy outlook on life. One that persisted even after the gratifying reception of that book. It was a state perhaps not unconnected with the dissatisfaction the lack of an explanation left behind. As it turned out the only thing that helped was to start walking around the city listening to Shakespeare tapes on a Walkman.

  Without overstraining the symmetry, I think I found that immersing myself in the genius for creation Shakespeare represented was a powerful antidote to Hitler’s hideous genius for destruction. Shakespeare’s work embodied the obverse side of human nature from Hitler’s. And then the bridge to this book occurred to me: the so-called exceptionalist question about the uniqueness of Hitler’s evil. Was he on the extreme end of the continuum of other evildoers or was he off the grid, in a realm of radical evil all his own? Similarly with Shakespeare: Was he on the continuum of other great writers or did he represent a uniquely exceptional realm of imaginative creation? Like many of the other issues in the Shakespeare wars, a provocative but perhaps unresolvable question.

  So let me acknowledge and thank all the Shakespeare audiotape makers: there’s an unusually high standard among the various series I’ve found, and listening on audiotape turns the mind into a stage without audience distractions or often disappointing visuals.

  And, of course, although it seems radically presumptuous, how could I pen an Acknowledgments that didn’t acknowledge my lifelong, life-changing debt to the “onlie begetter,” W.S.?

  Nonetheless, in addition to Hitler-induced depression and Shakespeare-induced exhilaration, this book owes its existence to many more people and influences. I guess I’ll begin with a couple of inciting incidents, the chief one being my astonishing good fortune at being present at Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford-on-Avon. I’ve dedicated the book to Peter Brook and his cast but I also want to thank him for his patience with me during both interviews and the Embarrassing Incident I relate in chapter 11.

  Another important incident was my lunch with Nicholas Hytner, who, among many encouraging comments, suddenly made the issue of verse-speaking and the fracture within the Royal Shakespeare Company over a delicate pause in the pentameter line seem like a kind of template for writing about other fractious issues, in other chapters.

  Then there were the three Davids. First David Scott Kastan, professor at Columbia and one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, who told me about the scholarly and human situation involved in the transition from Harold Jenkins’s second Arden edition of Hamlet (the last Grand Unification Hamlet) to Ann Thompson’s radically divided three-text third Arden edition. David encouraged me to pursue the controversy that became a nucleus of the future book. I don’t wish to make him responsible for any of my more opinionated judgments, just to thank him for getting me started.

  The second David is D. Remnick of The New Yorker, who is himself quite knowledgeable about Hamlet questions and who understood why apparently arcane new textual arguments about the play mattered enough to underwrite my original travels among textual scholars and skillfully (with the help of Amy Tubke-Davidson and Dorothy Wickenden, among others at The New Yorker) turn a thirty-thousand-word manuscript on textual scholar issues into a manageable magazine story.

  And then, preeminent in the development of this book, among distinguished Davids, David Ebershoff, who became my editor from almost the beginning. Which shouldn’t take away credit from the estimable Jonathan Karp, my editor for Explaining Hitler, and the sagacious Ann Godoff, then head of Random House, under whose auspices the book began its life. I owe them both thanks for their belief in the concept and for not being fazed by my original sixty-chapter outline.

  And after they left, their gifted successors, Daniel Menaker and Gina Centrello (president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group, respectively), who both became valuable supporters who made me and my book feel more than welcome—for which I’m deeply grateful. As I am to so many others at Random House, including legal eagle Amelia Zalcman, managing editor Benjamin Dreyer, production editor Steve Messina, both wise and patient, the astute copy editor Michael Burke, and proofreaders Allison Merrill, Carol Shookhoff, Adrian James and Maralee Youngs. I don’t want to neglect an editor, Judy Sternlight, who brought me into the Royal Shakespeare Company publication process; its editor Jonathan Bate, who had long been one of my favorite Shakespearean writers; Barbara Fillon; and Paul Taunton and Kate Hamill, David Ebershoff’s able assistants.

  I also want to add special thanks to Gabrielle Bordwin, who designed the book jacket, and to Karen Lau, who helped get it just right.

  But to return to the third David … Since writers’ praise of their editors inevitably labors under the shadow of mere obligation I will instead report what I almost invariably hear from the smartest writers, editors and publishing people when I tell them David Ebershoff is my editor: some variation on: “Oh you are so lucky!” And it’s true I am. To have an editor so smart, who also has a gifted novelist’s sensitivity to language and who also is able to say ever so diplomatically, when he reads an eighty-page draft of a chapter, “I have some problems with the middle forty pages” (and of course be right about it), is a rare blessing.

  Another blessing of equal magnitude: Kathy Robbins, a literary agent who possesses one of the sharpest editorial minds, one of the sharpest senses of humor and one of the kindest hearts I know. She has always gone the extra mile for me when it comes to reading and rereading chapters and giving me invaluable advice about literary and not strictly literary matters. Kathy, I hope you know how much you mean to me.

  Nor should I neglect the talented people with whom Kathy surrounds herself. So many have been snatched away in the seven years I’ve worked on this book, but let me pay tribute to the current crew, notably the distinguished agent and poker shark David Halpern and the cast of talented associates including: Coralie Hunter, Yaniv Soha, Kate Rizzo, Rachelle Bergstein, and Carol Choi, among others.

  I want to thank the people at The New York Observer. The paper’s inspired editor, Peter Kaplan, has given me an unparalleled opportunity to write about the clash of ideas in its pages, including a number of Shakespearean obsessions, such as my campaign against the misattributed “Funeral Elegy.” I also want to thank my Observer editors over the years, including Maria Russo, Petra Bartosiewicz, Lizzy Ratner, Suzy Hansen and I-Huei Go. In addition, longtime colleagues including Tom McGeveran, Jake Brooks, Alexander Jacobs, Choire Sicha, Brian Kempner, Rick Syzmanski and Matt Grace, and éminence grise Peter Stevenson, as well as the too-many-to-name-them-all, ever-changing cast of talented people who have passed through the place. And Arthur Carter, who has created and supported a unique paper that became a unique voice of the city—and a home for me.

  I’d like to thank the Shakespearean professors I studied with at Yale, Alvin Kernan and Howard Felperin, and
the Chaucer and seventeenth-century specialists Henry Schroeder and M.J.K. O’Loughlin, respectively, for encouraging my affinity for close reading.

  Much gratitude as well to Adriana Mnuchin and Nancy Becker, cofounders of the Shakespeare Society, a wonderful institution that has provided many important evenings of Shakespearean experiences, introductions to actors such as Keith Baxter (who memorably played Prince Hal in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight among many other Shakespearean roles) and Roger Rees (who’s played with distinction just about every leading role in Shakespeare). The Shakespeare Society also allowed me to present an evening of film and panel discussion in which I could work out my thoughts on the differing merits of Shakespearean film and stage. And I owe thanks to the panelists who helped me: critic John Simon, directors Michael Kahn and Michael Almereyda and actor Liev Schreiber.

  John Andrews and his Shakespeare Guild have been responsible for an equal number of provocative evenings and encounters with Shakespearean actors and directors as readers may have noted throughout the text. And Andrews himself has been a valuable source of thinking not just on the “unmodernized spelling” question but on the Shakespearean experience in all its incarnations.

  Thanks as well to the New York Shakespeare Festival for giving me so many romantic evenings at the Central Park stage and for permitting me to write the program notes for the outdoor Twelfth Night and the indoor Pericles directed by Brian Kulick.

  And to Brian Kulick, heartfelt thanks: I feel I probably learned more about how Shakespeare is staged—and how to think about Shakespeare in a more theatrical way—from my conversations over the years with Brian, who is not only one of the most talented at staging Shakespeare, but someone who offered some of the most profound ways of thinking about the plays I’d come upon. As is evident in the text, my conversations with directors Barry Edelstein and Jeffrey Horowitz have been similarly valuable.