The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  Praise for

  The Shakespeare Wars

  “The Shakespeare Wars: a conversation, a debate, a polemic, a memoir, a seduction, an ecstasy!… Electrifying. A spectacular book.”

  —CYNTHIA OZICK

  “Everyone seriously interested in Shakespeare must read [it], and anyone even mildly interested should. Mr. Rosenbaum possesses … a restlessly inquiring mind, a vivid style, a welcome sense of humor, and an impressive knowledge of not only Shakespeareana but also much else besides.”

  —JOHN SIMON, The New York Sun

  “In his besotted, passionate new book about contemporary Shakespeare studies … Ron Rosenbaum sets out to … transmit a sense of ravishment, ‘unbearably pleasurable,’ brought forth by the ‘bottomlessness’ of Shakespeare’s writings.… His search … turns his book into a sort of romantic detective story.… informative, diverting … Rosenbaum reminds us that scholarship … can be a freewheeling battle royal.… To be tired of Shakespeare, for Rosenbaum, is to be tired of life, while to be excited about him—in every inky nuance and detail—is to live a deeper, wider life.”

  —WALTER KIRN, The New York Times Book Review

  “Dizzying, idiosyncratic, entertaining, and illuminating.”

  —MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’s Fresh Air

  “Mr. Rosenbaum pursues his quarry with energy and flair. He brings to life the personalities of the scholars and theater directors whom he interviews.… His gift for clear exposition is matched by a lively wit.… It is hard to imagine another commentator doing more to convey to general readers the fascination, and the importance, of scholarly topics.… Mr. Rosenbaum shows exceptional sensitivity to Shakespeare’s language.”

  —JOHN GROSS, The Wall Street Journal

  “A superb overview of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship … genuinely passionate, insight-filled … Anyone who cares for Shakespeare … will learn an enormous amount.… The investigations of real scholars and theatrical professionals … make the book invaluable.”

  —MICHAEL DIRDA, The Washington Post

  “Rosenbaum’s rewarding book bears witness to Shakespeare’s unrivaled appeal [and leads readers] even more deeply into the amazing complexities of his art.”

  —WILLIAM E. CAIN, Boston Sunday Globe

  “Rosenbaum’s title … is spot on.… He is the Christiane Amanpour of Shakespeare studies.… His book is timely not least for the economy and clarity with which he outlines the casus belli.… Rosenbaum’s reportage is enlightening.… We now have a better sense of what the fuss is about.”

  —JOHN SUTHERLAND, The Financial Times

  “Rosenbaum [is] upfront, ecstatic,… complex—a streetwise Ancient Mariner.”

  —The Economist

  “In … brightly written, playful, argumentative and intelligent prose—even the bibliographic notes are good reads—he makes some of the more arcane literary battles over Shakespeare seem lively, fascinating, important and even sexy. Partly, it’s his skill in bringing the scenes and participants to life. Partly, it’s his at times self-deprecating humor, heavily garnished, almost to a Shakespearean degree, with puns and other forms of wordplay. Above all, it’s Rosenbaum’s ability to fill his pages with the passion that underlies his intellectual quest.… The best thing about Wars is Rosenbaum’s ability to make scholarship almost as exciting as a first-rate performance, and to make reading about well-performed Shakespeare almost as rewarding as a great night in the theater.”

  —ROBERT HURWITT, San Francisco Chronicle

  “[I’ve been] a lifelong admirer of [Rosenbaum’s] work.… A joyous appreciation … a fine piece of reportage on the scholarly infighting behind the scenes in Shakespeare studies.”

  —STEPHEN METCALF, Slate

  “What is lovely about this book … is its exaltation of the vastness of Shakespearean riches—a vastness proven by the endless intensity of the very debates that Rosenbaum writes about.… And then there’s Rosenbaum’s passion for his subject. It’s genuine and highly infectious.”

  —MARJORIE KEHE, The Christian Science Monitor

  “Penetrating and deeply felt … engrossing, emotionally charged and highly moving.”

  —MARK OLSHAKER, The Washington Times

  “Fascinating and passionate … He engages the reader with his own eagerness, deep reading and lively good sense.”

  —JEROME WEEKS, The Dallas Morning News

  “Once upon a time Rosenbaum was a graduate student in English at Yale. But he left that behind to become the most sui generis of investigative reporters. The English department’s loss was literature’s gain.”

  —SCOTT MCLEMEE, Newsday

  “Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler) is one of our best most omnivorously curious journalists. These scholarly wars aren’t over who ‘really’ wrote the plays, but over the actual language: what it reveals and conceals. Is there an encoded orgasm in the speeches of Romeo and Juliet? That is the question.”

  —Newsweek

  “Rosenbaum … brings the style he has perfected over the years—the style of the journalist engaged in indefatigable search of answers to various knotty questions.… Engaged in these intellectual quests, Rosenbaum has displayed unfailing intelligence, doggedness, a genuine willingness to entertain different points of view, [and] a relaxed and highly readable prose style. You can see the journalist in Rosenbaum even when he’s dealing with brilliant Shakespeare scholars.”

  —PHILIP MARCHAND, Toronto Star

  “Rosenbaum has now done for Shakespeare studies what he did for Hitler studies.… [His analysis of The Merchant of Venice] is as nice a summary definition of Shakespeare’s uncanny genius as one could desire.”

  —THOMAS L. JEFFERS, Commentary

  “Thrilling … The Shakespeare Wars is too packed with brilliance to ignore.… [Rosenbaum] compel[s] us to reach for Shakespeare and begin reading with a new and more nuanced appreciation.”

  —JOSEPH BEDNARIK, The Sunday Oregonian

  “Throughout its 600 pages, he manages to transmit genuine sparks of bedazzlement and wonder.… It accomplishes something extraordinary: it sweeps the dust off academic discourse and proves that centuries-old language can produce palpable exhilaration.”

  —JENNIE ROTHENBERG, The Atlantic Online

  “I’ve always hoped for a book on Shakespeare … by a passionate, brilliant reader steeped in her own reading of the Bard and in the debates by contemporary scholars.… But even I couldn’t have anticipated how lucky I would get. To have Ron Rosenbaum, the most original and interesting cultural journalist working today, wade through the depths and heights of Shakespeare is more than an embarrassment of riches. It is the very thing itself: like Shakespeare reading Shakespeare to us.”

  —PRADEEP SEBASTIAN, The Hindu, India’s national newspaper

  “In-depth critical analysis handled with a light touch and unfailing respect for the reader’s intelligence: cultural journalism of the highest order.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One of the best books of the year.”

  —Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, The Kansas City Star

  “Just when you thought nothing more could be said on the subject, Ron Rosenbaum comes up with a wholly fresh approach—a thrilling personal confrontation with the inexhaustibility of the work, the frightening bottomlessness of Shakespeare’s genius. The Shakespeare Wars comes to us in waves of new revelations.”

  —BILLY COLLINS, former U.S. poet laureate

  2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2006 by Ron Rosenbaum

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Rando
m House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.

  Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the works of William Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), edited by G. Blakemore Evans, copyright © 1997 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80792-2

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface: Why?

  Part I: The Bottom of Shakespeare’s Secrets

  I. The Dream Induction

  Part II: Civil Wars among the Textual Scholars

  2. One Hamlet or Three?

  3. A Digressive Comic Interlude Featuring Shakespeare’s Ambiguously Revised Testimony in the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit

  4. “Look There, Look There …”: The Scandal of Lear’s Last Words

  Part III: The War over What Is—and What Isn’t—“Shakespearean”

  5. The Great Shakespeare “Funeral Elegy” Fiasco

  6. The Indian, the Judean and Hand D

  Part IV: The Promise and Perils of Shakespearean “Originalism”

  7. The Search for the Shakespearean in a Delicate Pause

  8. The Spell of the Shakespearean in “Original Spelling”

  9. Dueling Shylocks

  10. Shakespeare on Film: A Contrarian Argument

  Part V: Three Giants

  11. Peter Brook: The Search for the Secret Play

  12. “You Can’t Have Him, Harold!”: The Battle over Bloom and Bloom’s Falstaff

  13. Stephen Booth: 777 Types of Ambiguity

  Part VI: Love, Beauty, Pleasure and Bad Weather in Bermuda

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

  15. “No Cause”: The Unexpected Pleasures of Forgiveness

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliographic Notes

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Preface

  Why?

  Why is this Shakespeare book different?

  First, permit me to protest: it’s not another book “on Shakespeare,” the shadowy historical figure. It’s not a biographical study. I don’t propose to tell you whether Shakespeare poached a deer, slept with men, or contracted syphilis from the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and what any of that might tell us about his work, his language, his plays and poems. It’s always seemed to me that the work is what is most worth caring about and that Shakespearean biography, with its few indisputable facts, its suppositions, its conjectures, its maybes, does more to distort than to illuminate the work.

  I have nothing against literary biography in general, but I suspect most serious literary biographers must be a bit dismayed at the fantasies spun out by Shakespearean biographers on the basis of such fragmentary evidence. Just as in the old story of the man who persists in searching for his keys under a streetlamp (even though they’re not there) “because that’s where the only light was,” Shakespearean biography, especially the obsessive—often circular—attempts to make inferences about the work on the basis of the few known facts and anecdotes about the life, can be a distraction from the true mystery and excitement, the true source of illumination, the place the hidden keys can actually be found: the astonishing language. (Look how little we know about Homer and how little it matters.)

  Thus most efforts to forge, fabricate or flesh out the life (as opposed to placing the work in its cultural context) have ended up doing a disservice to the work because they lead inevitably to a reductive biographical perspective on the work and use the work to “prove” suppositions about the life.

  Someone once wrote that Shakespearean biographers at their best are like the great old jazz musicians who can spin dizzying riffs out of a few notes of an old standard. But at their worst Shakespearean biographers are like cardsharps, piling suspect suppositions upon shaky conjectures into rickety houses of cards.

  Even worse is the tendency to use the suppositional conjectures, and the conjectural suppositions—what Shakespeare supposedly thought of sex, marriage, death, religion—in order to craft a blurry lens through which to look at the attitudes of the plays and poems.

  So this is not a biographical study; it is less concerned with Shakespeare the man than with the figure the thoughtful textual scholar Edward Pechter has called “Shakespeare the Writer”—the voice, the mind we can find in the work. What is “Shakespearean” rather than who was Shakespeare. Here, by contrast with the poverty of biography, rich resources are available for this task: thirty-eight or so plays (depending on whether you include collaborations), two long narrative poems, one mystical ode, 154 sonnets. This book is concerned with the clashes over how best to experience the work of Shakespeare the writer, the thrilling esthetic intelligence, more deeply. I want to bring you closer to some of the genuinely exciting contentions over the work, how best to read, speak and act it.

  I’m hesitant to say that the sudden river of Shakespearean biographies is merely a symptom of celebrity culture, but one could trace the origin of the plethora of biographies to the moment in 1998 when Shakespeare became a contemporary celebrity, a movie star, in Shakespeare in Love.

  Yes, he’d been renowned in elite and popular opinion for four centuries, but suddenly in 1998 he was in bed with Gwyneth Paltrow on the big screen, writing Romeo and Juliet while making sweet, sweet love, and his “bio-pic” went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. The same year Harold Bloom in effect pronounced him God—“inventor of the human.” God, the ultimate celeb in a faith-obsessed age.

  So many biographies followed, with so many speculations, so little besides unproven conspiracy theories and secret codes to add. I’m not saying this is true of all the new wave of biographies (I particularly like the contrarian skepticism in Ungentle Shakespeare by Oxford’s Katherine Duncan-Jones and the focus on the work in Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare).

  But I tend, like Stephen Booth, the great scholar of the Sonnets, to distrust the reading of Shakespeare’s work through the lens of biography—or vice versa. As Booth put it: “William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The Sonnets provide no evidence on that matter.”

  But there is a price to be paid for the biographical focus. Just before receiving the first galleys of this book, I was alerted by the valuable Arts & Letters Daily website (aldaily.com) to a short, sharp critique of the Shakespearean biographical fad by Daniel Swift, a scholar at Columbia, an essay that originally appeared in The Nation. In it he argued that, in the obsessive and largely futile focus on the life, “Shakespeare’s imagination becomes no more than a mechanism for reproducing biographical experience.… If there is a lesson to be learned,” Swift suggests, “it is that we must clear a space for wonder.”

  A space for wonder: Yes! That is what the contentions herein are about: how best to reawaken that sense of wonder.

  If there is a virtual river of biographies of the man, they’re at least read, and perhaps encourage some to read or reread the plays. The same cannot be said for the veritable ocean of scholarly papers and books on Shakespeare. So many are really about vindication of their own methodology and the ways in which Shakespeare can be subordinated to fit into Larger Theories that they encourage little but further theorizing or a habit of inattention among readers. Others are written in impenetrable jargon that rarely sends one racing to read the plays.

  But while this can be true of some scholarly work, it obscures the fact, the surprisingly pleasurable discovery I made in the seven years I’ve spent writing this book, that there are white whales, so to speak, out in that ocean. Extrem
ely important issues, immensely exciting and unresolved questions that defy easy harpooning (Shake-spearing?). White whales often pursued with Ahab-like intensity, if not madness (although this has happened), by brilliant scholars and directors who have devoted themselves to finding a way to make Shakespeare the writer come alive.

  Brilliant scholars (and directors) writing, thinking, clashing over these questions, with illuminating clarity. There are fierce struggles, indeed virtual civil wars going on, not over the Theory of Shakespeare but over the language of Shakespeare. Many of these struggles are lost to the world, or to the realm of “civilian” Shakespeare readers and audiences, invisible behind the curtain of academia, obscured by the forbidding squid’s ink of opaque theorizing.

  It was a realization that began to dawn on me after I began to meet and correspond with Shakespearean textual scholars in the course of writing a piece for The New Yorker on the Hamlet-text controversy—the question of which of the three earliest texts of Hamlet is most “Shakespearean,” and what it means to say so.

  “Textual scholarship”: it doesn’t exactly sound seductive, but I found myself seduced. One hope I have for this book is that it will make the seductions of Shakespearean textual scholarship apparent. The best among textual scholars are not pedants, self-exiled to arcana, but quite often lively and acute intellects at the forefront of one of the most provocative and significant debates in all literature: the question of what Shakespeare actually wrote. More often, which version of what he wrote is more truly “Shakespearean.” Whether the two versions we have of a line or a passage—or a whole play—represent Shakespeare’s first and second drafts, his original or his final intentions, whether we can recapture his “considered second thoughts” on a line or a passage—or whether the differences were the result of errors in transcription, actors’ interpolations, clumsy compositors’ errors.