Sly in Bottomless Love
By Gordon Rogoff
The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing
Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
By Ron Rosenbaum
Random House
$35
In a book overflowing with unedited wisdom,
dauntless in its appetite for Shakespearean dimension larger than
life, Ron Rosenbaum rarely quotes scholars, actors, or directors
unless he's had dinner, lunch, or drinks with them. A voluntary
drop-out from Yale's graduate program years ago, having found
his native enthusiasm for Shakespeare under attack from the prevailing
critical agendas of the day, he may be shoring up his credentials
with all those first-hand meetings. Yet if The Shakespeare
Wars proves anything -- and it proves many things -- it demonstrates
his right of possession, if not ownership, of all the hits and
misses that have marked Shakespeare studies and performance since
1970, the year his life was literally overturned by Peter Brook's
production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford-upon-Avon.
He calls that event his "induction," alluding
with pardonable cunning to The Taming of the Shrew's
eccentric prologue in which Christopher Sly, an itinerant tinker,
awakes from a drunken slumber only to be conned into thinking
that he's a nobleman touched by a madness that has kept him asleep
for 15 years, surely now the perfect audience for the "pleasant
comedy" that is about to be presented for his special delight
and perfect cure. Rosenbaum shares a capacity for enchantment
and bravado he finds in Sly and also in that wonderful fool, Bottom
the weaver, the anti-hero of the "Dream" who is transformed into
an ass, momentarily the deliriously happy lover of a bewitched
Titania. But Rosenbaum goes beyond them by dedicating himself
to a lifetime romance with Shakespeare's plays in all their configurations
as dramatic treasure chests, yielding -- for him -- an endless
supply of scholarly argument, all those "centuries-old disputes"
he soon learns to love as much as he adores the magic embedded
in Shakespeare's glittering words. Brook's "Dream" production
acted as "a lifelong love potion" carrying him into what at one
point he calls "Shakes-spheres," the end of which are not in sight
even after this sprawling trawl through the academic thickets.
But, oh those thickets! They remind me
of a remark by a friend who, on hearing the news of another friend
trekking to her 12th "Ring Cycle" somewhere in the world, just
had to say, "What a wasted life." Whatever happened to the enjoyment
of a beautiful spring day or autumn foliage, or even -- heaven
forfend! -- a Shakespeare play? Even Rosenbaum might think soon
of taking a holiday from his compulsive readings, though it's
fair to say that The Shakespeare Wars is an instantly
indispensable guide to the fractious nonsense passing as scholarship.
Those compulsive readings are best summed up by Richard Knowles,
editor of a Lear Variorum, quoted usefully by Rosenbaum
just as I was failing to distinguish the New Criticism hares from
the Deconstructionist hounds: Knowles, unaffiliated with the jargon-ridden
scholarship, describes it as a movement purveying "the immateriality
of the text and the immateriality of the author, the indeterminacy
of meaning, the relation of literature to power and censorship
and other notions." Or, as Rosenbaum picks up the story, the texts
have been parsed into so much fodder for the "over-pessimism of
Theory…squeezing literary judgement out of existence."
Add to this the avalanche of biographies
that only confuse the messy issues by hanging on tenaciously to
still another pseudo-theology -- namely, that the plays can be
read through the lens of Shakespeare's life, even though we have
long since learned from S. Schoenbaum's documentary biography
that Shakespeare left scant evidence that he lived at all. Even
so, Rosenbaum tracks the latest "biographers," including those
by such brilliant writers as Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the
World) and James Shapiro (1599) who parade with
uncommon confidence through the barely visible "evidence" to speculate
on so many textual circumstances that depend on a Shakespeare
who "might have" been somewhere, "could have" thought something,
or -- truly presumptuous -- "must have" done something. Just as
unreliable and almost as much fun as Tom Stoppard's delicious
screenplay, Shakespeare in Love, the biographies can't
disguise the absence of documentary proof for their claims. Like
so many Othellos demanding "ocular proof" from Iago, they're
easy prey for false handkerchiefs.
Nor are they alone: Rosenbaum is hell-bent
on tracking down all the ocular proof available from the Shakespeare
Industry, by now a series of pile-driving territorial wars acting
as weapons of mass distraction for those of us -- students and
faculty alike -- who might wish to return to the pleasures of
the text and our dreams for transcendent performance. The book's
targets include Harold Bloom's "overblown claim that Shakespeare
invented the human," reversed by Rosenbaum into "it's really a
claim that Shakespeare invented Bloom -- a composite character
with the brain of Hamlet and the body of Falstaff…Shakespeare
his secret father." And if this particular thrust and parry isn't
enough, he goes after the anti-Blooms so numerous these days,
busily editing warring versions of Hamlet and King
Lear, so that by now cautious consumers (we're scarcely readers
anymore) keep receiving conflicting health warnings about the
flaws in Norton, Oxford, or Arden, all of this featuring scholars'
mind-numbing arguments about "paradigm shifts," the compositors
of the Quarto and Folio, and "partisans of the Lost Archetypes."
(Better lost than read.) Then there are the Doubters, Dividers,
and Revisers, with one hot warrior, Don Foster, surrendering his
claim that a "Funeral Elegy" must be Shakespeare's (or must have
been?) and another, Gary Taylor, beating back his own besiegers
by insisting that he doesn't really "hate Shakespeare." Both scholars,
devoted to technology, persuaded themselves for the longest time
that the "Elegy," a relatively recent discovery, was dominated
by a vocabulary more commonly used by Shakespeare than his contemporaries;
while it is true that Shakespeare possessed an astounding vocabulary
of roughly 25,000 words, it doesn't follow that the modern computer,
sifting through that vocabulary, can be the sole arbiter of authorship.
Meanwhile, another claimant of dubious claims, Peter Blayney,
has evidently retired from the scene of Shakespeare scholarship
altogether, consumed now by his new interest in Elizabethan printing
shops. And if you don't ask, I won't tell you about the Hand D
controversy.
One miracle revealed by the book is Rosenbaum's
staying power, despite these detours from the miracle of his conversion
at Brook's "Dream." Verbose conversationalist more than the elegant,
shapely prose stylist he might wish to be, he has more patience
for the scholarly and biographical arguments than is good for
him. Patience not only for those territorial gladiators, but also
for all the mixed messages he receives over drinks and dinners.
He's always muddling the argument by stuffing it with details
nobody needs to know. (God was wrong about the details.) Among
others, he has lunch with Cicely Berry, who has been working on
Voice and Verse with professional actors for years, and who coached
Brook's actors for the "Dream." If I tell you now that she was
also my own teacher a half-century ago, and that I talked with
her in June at the Old Vic during a rehearsal we were having for
our appearances at the centenary celebration for the Central School
of Speech and Drama, I am surely crowding your informational capacities
with news that clearly doesn't serve this review. Similarly, do
we need to know that she was the lady who lunched with Rosenbaum
at "Tartine" in Greenwich Village? Or that he met with actor Steven
Berkoff in the "bright-lit dining room of the Gramercy Park Hotel?"
Or lunch with his favorite scholar (now that's important), Russ
McDonald, in Bermuda's Southampton Princess Hotel? One of those
diversions, however, may excuse the others, since it hints at
a delight in words and irony that may be Rosenbaum's strongest
suit: his floridly arcane discussion with Gary Taylor, he tells
us, took place in "the Krispy Kreme Donut shop in a Tuscaloosa
strip mall."
I'd rather meet him in a better organized,
more disciplined book that doesn't find him falling all over himself
to avoid claiming his own territory as a first-rate romancer of
Shakespeare -- whoever he was -- and his great plays and astonishing
linguistic inventions. Even as he takes on professors, theory-junkies
-- his "somewhat wishful thinking…that the reign of Theory in
literary studies (is) coming to an end" -- and his own delight
when he discovers Greenblatt in a relaxed, appreciative mode,
actually referring to the "indelible beauties of Shakespeare,"
he treats himself more as a reporter than an idiosyncratic thinker.
He's both easily pleased and easily intimidated. Yet, for all
that, his plainly spoken perceptions, such as "Shakespeare either
wrote it or didn't write it," are transparently more eloquent
than so much of the official story. He loves the plays in the
theater, but that doesn't stop him from celebrating Shakespeare
on film and recordings, and he's just as good in describing Laurence
Olivier's recorded Othello as Steven Berkoff is when
describing the stage version, both of them finding what Rosenbaum
calls the "devastating…unmarked crack in the voice…almost like
a jeweler's tap in its subtlety and profundity."
"One can get carried away," he says at
one point, but that doesn't spare him from admitted digressions
or what he himself calls "the seductions of a single controversial
textual variation." He -- or his copy editor, if there was one
-- might have parried the contradictions that seduce him, such
as speculation about the Geneva Bible published in 1557, seven
years before Shakespeare's birth, and possibly (therefore?) "the
source of Bottom's name" because of Corinthians' reference to
"the bottom of God's secrets" (his italics).
This differs from the 1568 Bishops' Bible that refers less suggestively
to "the deep things of God." Thus are we lured into forgetting
that it's just possible that Shakespeare hadn't read either version.
Rosenbaum hoists himself on the petard
of his own fascination with words. Like the biographers, he can
be lured easily into speculation, sometimes about the arguments
that still rage over different spellings in different versions.
It turns out that, in Hamlet, the air bites either "shrewdly"
or "shroudly," and Rosenbaum can't get over it, diverting himself
from the brevity of his own frequent wit. His use of words such
as "polysemous" and "disambiguating" are not much better
than the ugly constructions of the dotty deconstructionists he
otherwise scorns. The lasting irony of this book is that its tentacular
overreaching almost strangles the enthralled, modest scholar who
could be better than the whole pack of them.
---------------------------
This is a revised version of a review
that originally appeared in the Sept.-Oct. 2006 issue of Yale
Alumni Magazine.
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