The Shakespeare Wars
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Chapter Thirteen: Stephen Booth: 777 Types of Ambiguity
I’ve already made my plea for someone to bring Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets back into print. I’ve just learned that another of his influential works, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, originally published in 1983 and long unavailable, has been reprinted in revised form by Cyber Editions. Time to bring back the Essay!
Devotees of the Sonnets will find different and valuable perspectives on them in both Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Arden edition of the poems, and a survey of contemporary criticism in Paul Edmundson and Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2004).
The questions raised by reconstructions such as the Globe and the Blackfriars remind me to point out the indispensibility of Andrew Gurr’s work, especially Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge University Press, rev. 2004).
The best place to begin reading Empson is his Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1986) supplemented by a second volume of essays edited by John Haffenden, The Strength of Shakespeare’s Shrew (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). I still have a fondness for Some Versions of Pastoral (rpt. New Directions, 1960) and Seven Types of Ambiguity (rpt. New Directions, 1966). And for the true hard core, there is The Structure of Complex Words (Harvard University Press, 1989).
One of the most valuable discussions of the question of coherence, organic unity and the drawbacks of the search for it can be found in Shakespearean Iconoclasm by James R. Siemon (University of California Press, 1985). Perhaps the classic study of both/and ambiguity on the thematic level (as opposed to Booth’s more purely esthetic focus) is Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1981). One of the best of Booth’s fellow reader-reception types is Harry Berger, Jr., at the University of Santa Cruz, whose Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford University Press, 1997) is vital and challenging, and whose Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (University of California Press, 1989) was one of the first to make the case against what he calls “the New Histrionicism,” the vogue for seeing Shakespeare as primarily, teleologically, a man of the stage rather than a man of the page. A case for the meditative contemplative rehearsing of the language (and reflection upon the reactions it provokes that are possible only in reading) is championed over the fleeting sounds of the words in performance, which rarely offer such opportunity.
I’m not sure there’s an either/or argument here, as opposed to both/and; both reading and seeing the plays can afford complementary excitements.
Chapter Fourteen: Looking for Love in As You Like It; Looking for an Orgasm in Romeo and Juliet
Dreams of Love and Power by Joseph H. Summers (Oxford University Press, 1984) is not necessarily an exception to Russ McDonald’s observation about the absence of contemporary contentions about Love in Shakespeare, since it was published two decades before he made the statement. But it is worth reading (it was recommended to me by Prof. Grace Tiffany) especially because of its beautiful chapter on The Winter’s Tale.
For those with a taste for an intelligent postmodern struggle to admit the legitimacy of beauty, a struggle which is a symptom of both beauty’s exile from and return to critical thought, I’d recommend Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Allworth Press, 1999).
And for an examination of the aftermath of the fading of Theory there is of course Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (Columbia University Press, 2005), a heavyweight series of essays that has had a great impact, or the more lighthearted life.after.theory, edited by Michael Payne and John Schad and featuring conversations with Frank Kermode, the late Jacques Derrida, Toril Moi and Christopher Norris (Continuum, 2003).
On the question of the “late language” and more generally how we regard Shakespeare when he’s not at his best, “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney (Associated University Presses, 1988), has many provocative essays.
The essay by Russ McDonald, “Late Shakespeare: Style and the Sexes,” which I dwell on, can be found in a valuable collection of essays called Shakespeare and Language, edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Bruce Young noted in a SHAKSPER post another possible symptom of what I’ve called in this chapter the “Bermuda effect” at the 2005 Shakespeare Association of America convention: a talk I had the misfortune to miss by Michael Bristol on the rediscovery of “character” as a legitimate subject worthy of investigating.
Chapter Fifteen: “No Cause”: The Unexpected Pleasures of Forgiveness
Anne Barton’s essay “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language” appears in her Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge University Press, 1994). My essay on “The Quality of Mercy” in Henry V appeared in The Shakespeare Newsletter (Summer 2003) and is reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism (Thomson Gale, 2006).
Forgive me for digressing to mention a delightful (for me anyway) exchange that grew out of the latter essay and continued in the Winter 2003/2004 and Spring 2004 issues of SNL with legendary textual scholar George Walton Williams, who very politely raised the question (in the Winter 2003/2004 issue) of whether I had correctly attributed a pun to Pistol in his line “Be merciful, great duke, to men of mould.”
I had asserted a belief that when Pistol calls himself a man of “mould” he was making a pun on “mould” that “fuses fashion and decomposition.” Professor Williams argued—on the basis of a nineteenth-century OED notation—that “mould was not yet in general use as a word for ‘mold’ or mode (as in fashion) when Pistol used it.” Of course this depends on whether one means when Pistol uses it as a historical (fifteenth-century) character or as a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Elizabethan stage character. Especially since we have Ophelia, in a play written probably a year or so later, referring to Hamlet as “the glass of fashion and the mold of form.”
I agreed with Professor Williams’s general point that it is problematic to find “retroactive puns” as I called them—puns based on the later usage of a word not then in fashion, probably not “available” to the writer, when the writer wrote. (“Prospero’s cell,” for instance, cannot refer doubly to a mobile phone.) But I argued (at great length) that there was evidence that “mould” was in fashion as a word for ideal form at the time it was written (witness Ophelia) and was thus available to Shakespeare’s punning imagination.
Of course there was no definitive way of knowing whether at the very moment Shakespeare wrote Pistol’s words he was in fact aware of both potential connotations of the word, or whether indeed he might have at that very moment created another meaning for the word. Or whether we were witnessing in the transition from Pistol to Ophelia the evanescent period in which mould became à la mode as well as decay, so to speak.
In any case it was one of those moments for me in which I was able to enjoy the sheer delight of scholarly disputation, of attempting to match wits with a legendary textual scholar and feeling myself part of the continuing community of academics and independent scholars and obsessives who felt the value in worrying over Shakespeare’s words. Because in a way we were worrying over the way Shakespeare’s mind worked when it was engaged at play in the field of words. In that most touchy of questions—whether puns were indeed his “fatal Cleopatra.”
Since these are notes to a chapter about pleasure and forgiveness, I hope you will extend to me forgiveness for not attempting an impossibly exhaustive survey of Shakespearean commentary and exegesis (the World Shakespeare Bibliography online will do that for you). And in return I’ll leave you with a guaranteed pleasurable recommendation: the aptly titled After Shakespeare, the British critic John Gross’s compilation of “Writing Inspired by the World’s Greatest Author” (Oxford University Press, 2003).
In addition to a treasury of p
rovocative Shakespearean reflections by centuries of great writers, it includes two excerpts from Vladimir Nabokov, for me the only contemporary writer whose genius is analogous to Shakespeare’s. Mr. Gross’s first excerpt was the comic misprision of Hamlet in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, in which two professors in a northern European dictatorship argue over whether Hamlet is a political allegory and Fortinbras is the real hero (and whether Fortinbras’s father impersonated the ghost of Hamlet’s father to trick him into killing Claudius).
In Gross’s excerpt from Bend Sinister, Nabokov tells of an American filmmaker who wants to make a film about all the parts left out of the play, including “Hamlet at Wittenberg, always late, missing G. Bruno’s lectures.” Giordano Bruno again! Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow theoretician of the infinite, on the faculty of Hamlet’s college, the Hamlet who celebrates man’s “infinite faculties” and has dreams (or nightmares) of being “king of infinite space.”
And then Gross devotes a section to Shakespeare as “a presiding presence” in Pale Fire, my favorite modern novel, one named for a Shakespearean passage of course (“The moon’s an arrant thief,/And her pale fire she snatches from the sun”), the passage from Timon of Athens about the ambiguity of artistic “originality.”
And to my great delight Gross quotes one of my favorite passages in Pale Fire. From the poem called “Pale Fire,” in which Nabokov’s poet character John Shade writes of the possibility of the dead persisting in this world in the form of electricity. I’ll leave you with it:
The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside glows
Another man’s departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights.…
ALSO BY RON ROSENBAUM
Explaining Hitler
The Secret Parts of Fortune
Those Who Forget the Past (editor)
Ron Rosenbaum studied literature at Yale, and briefly at Yale Graduate School, before leaving to write. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Observer, and Slate, among other publications. His book Explaining Hitler, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998, has been translated into ten languages. Random House published a collection of his essays and journalism, The Secret Parts of Fortune, in 2000 and an anthology he edited, Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, in 2004. He has been a member of the advisory board of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s publications project. He lives in New York City.