The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  But suddenly that day this became more than an abstract insight. I recall banging the chalk in my hand on the blackboard, back and forth from “present” to “absent” in the phrase “These present-absent with swift motion slide”—and suddenly experiencing something strange. In some peculiar but pronounced and dramatic way, my self, my identity seemed to be shifting, sliding back and forth from presence to absence, from being there in that classroom to being somewhere absent, looking back on my presence, and then “with swift motion sliding” back to where I was standing again. I was no longer reading alternative meanings into the Sonnet, I felt like the Sonnet was shifting me back and forth between alternative selves, almost physically. I was standing inside and outside myself.

  It wasn’t an intellectual experience, or it was disturbingly, mysteriously more than an intellectual experience. An ecstatic experience in the original meaning of the word “ecstatic”: standing outside oneself. It was almost an out-of-body experience, or an in-and-out-of-body experience. I came to think that at least in part this flickering-back-and-forth effect is one thing the Sonnets are about: the attempt to induce this state, which as Stephen Booth points out, is not unrelated to the shifting, flickering state of being in love.

  I’ve subsequently also come to believe that this ecstatic experience of identity change and exchange, of what might be called an alternating current of two-ness and oneness, can be found recurrently throughout Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It is embodied most explicitly in his often overlooked mystical love-vision ode, “The Phoenix and Turtle.” A poem that seems to express directly some powerful visionary sexual and metaphysical experience of oneness and two-ness that is echoed elsewhere in his work.

  In any case, that moment of transport, or transposition, one might say, was unlike anything I’d experienced before, certainly not reading poetry. And I never experienced anything like it again—until that night in Stratford-on-Avon.

  As I said, I had no such expectation as I drove into Stratford. I was unaware how lucky I was to get tickets to both productions playing at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre that weekend: Trevor Nunn’s staging of Hamlet and Peter Brook’s of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The Hamlet was memorable, one of the very best I’ve ever seen. But it was the Dream that changed my life. I count it one of the greatest blessings of that life to have been there for that moment. I’d never experienced anything of such radiant clarity. To say it was “electrifying” does not capture the effect; it was more like being struck by lightning. I felt “transported” in the literal sense of being physically as well as metaphysically lifted from the muddy vesture of the earth to some higher realm.

  It was a lifelong love potion. It was a lens through which I could not help see all Shakespeare, indeed all literary art, ever after. It was: “Oh, that’s what the fuss is about.”

  It was more than merely the shock of a “first time.” It was more than the fact of its being my first experience of Shakespeare played by great Shakespeareans because in the decades that followed I’ve never seen Shakespeare to equal it. I’ve seen great Shakespearean moments, great Shakespearean performances, unforgettable scenes; I’ve had illuminations reading passages in Shakespeare, some in other writers. But nothing like the total experience of that Dream. Ever after I’ve sought in vain for something to equal it. I’ve rarely found it in art, I’ve rarely found it in life. There’s nothing like it, the initial falling-in-love business, is there? But it doesn’t last, alas, nothing like that does. This Dream did.

  When I say it changed my life let me elaborate a little bit. For one thing it changed the way I came to experience Shakespeare. Suddenly it changed on the page; the words became charged with that electricity I’d felt transmitted to me by that Dream experience. I began to read, I began to hear Shakespeare when reading, in a way I never had before. I began a cycle of reading and rereading all of the plays, sometimes in rough chronological order, sometimes all histories, then all comedies, then all tragedies, sometimes whatever emerged on top of a collapsing pile of editions. Sometimes I’d read through the slender, elegant, sparsely annotated Penguins and Pelicans, sometimes the substantial footnote-fattened Ardens, later the often-exciting new Oxford and Cambridge editions, the Facsimile of the First Folio, the ever trustworthy Folger, Riverside and Bevington Complete Works. And every edition of the Dream, which I’d read over and over with an ever deepening sense of wonder: What happened that night?

  Fast forward from that night—from all those readings and rereadings, from all that futile searching in theater after theater for something to match the sustained experience of Brook’s Dream—to a few years ago at a Mexican restaurant on Lower Fifth Avenue, where I was having a lunch meeting with Nicholas Hytner, the talented British director who had put on a number of acclaimed productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in the eighties and nineties and later as artistic director of the Royal National Theatre.

  Hytner had asked to meet because he was interested in acquiring the film rights to my just-published book, Explaining Hitler. (Nothing came of it.) So we talked about Hitler, but I wanted to talk about Shakespeare, and something I needed explained. I started telling him hesitantly about the way my life had been changed by seeing Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford. How I’d spent the years since trying to recapture or at least explain to myself why that night was so transformative. I felt almost a bit embarrassed at making that kind of statement. Perhaps he’d think me naïve or impressionable, maybe I was overreacting to my first exposure to a Royal Shakespeare Company production after seeing only a few American companies do Shakespeare.

  Was I crazy in reacting so strongly? I asked Hytner, a veteran of decades of directing Shakespeare.

  “It changed my life too,” Hytner said, matter-of-factly, “not just my life but my entire generation of Shakespearean actors and directors. It changed the way everyone did Shakespeare in the U.K.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It was somehow immensely important to me to have someone of his stature and experience confirm that I was not alone in feeling life-changing effects from that performance. It was Hytner as well who alerted me to the conflict over Peter Hall’s “pause” and verse-speaking theory within the Royal Shakespeare Company (see chapter 7)—and thus gave me a sense of how fascinating the controversies over what the true “Shakespearean” way of doing Shakespeare were. Gave me the impetus to investigate them that was one motive for writing this book.

  It’s somehow important to mention Hytner’s validation of my Dream experience before returning to describing that night, and its impact on me. Yes, there are dissenters, but time after time when I find myself in excited discussions of Shakespeare with people in and out of the theater, it will emerge that they too had their life changed by seeing Brook’s Dream either in Stratford or on its American tour. It has grown to near-mythic status now, widely recognized as one of the most influential productions of Shakespeare in the past century.

  So what was it? What made it such a life-changing experience for so many? It’s easier to begin by telling you some of the things it wasn’t: it wasn’t the gleaming satin Chinese circus costumes Brook modeled on the Peking Opera Circus he’d seen in Paris. It wasn’t the trapezes, the juggling, the stilts, the whirring plates spinning on poles, the whirling light sticks. Some subsequent criticism of the production has focused in a completely misleading way on these suits and trappings, the trapezes of innovation—on what made the production on the surface seem radically new. This is a red herring, but one you most often hear from those who only read about the production, never saw it. (Unfortunately the RSC didn’t begin videotaping its performances until the following year, so aside from a ten-second clip there’s no record—believe me: I’ve tracked down rumors of Japanese bootlegs.)

  I’ve come to believe, on the contrary, that what made it so thrilling was not the way in which Brook’s Dream was new but rather the way it was radically old. The way in which it seemed to captu
re what one imagines was the excitement of the moment the play was first produced four centuries ago. The moment when its lines were first uttered, when its language burst from the lips of its actors in a kind of spontaneous combustion, as if the words were not recited so much as thought up and uttered, freshly minted, for the first time.

  Part of it was the, well, charismatic aphrodisiac effect of the production. Many scholars believe the Dream was a kind of epithalamium—a poetic tribute offered to a newly married couple, on their wedding night, in the interval between the ceremony and the consummation. An interlude designed to prolong and heighten the sense of anticipation—the play as love potion—just as the final wedding night act within the Dream does with its epithalamium play-within-the-play, the one presented by Bottom’s troupe of comic “Mechanicals,” Pyramus and Thisby.

  So there’s that, it’s a play about, upon, sexual tension. It was there in the first appearance of the four young lovers. All four of them just spilled out onto the stage with an electrifying burst of erotic energy. In the past when I’d read the play, I’d found the jog-trot rhythm and rhyme of the young lovers’ verse off-puttingly stilted. But suddenly here were these hot-blooded firecrackers going at each other, turning the couplets into virtual couplings on stage.

  But it had more to do with the language, with the “verse speaking,” as Shakespeareans call it. With a company that had so totally mastered the technical and emotional nuances of the verse that it sounded less like recitation than utterances torn from them. Each line fluid, lightning-like, inevitable. It never seemed, as it does in so many mediocre productions, like emoting. The speech bubbled up, burst out, and then sparkled like uncorked champagne. And it had something of a champagne-like effect on me; I felt as if I were imbibing the pure distilled essence of exhilaration. For me it was like the night they invented champagne. It was like a love potion.

  And I did fall in love that night. In the Dream the love potion is called “Love in Idleness” and when dropped into a sleeper’s eyes, its spell causes the sleeper to fall in love with the very next being he or she sees upon waking. That night, in effect, I awoke from the Dream and fell madly, tragically, in love with the experience of Shakespeare played at this dreamlike level.

  SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION

  And if that were not enough, the experience was reawakened, born again, you might say, four months later when the Peter Brook Dream played New York and something extraordinary happened.

  What happened—it seems more than an accident in retrospect, a metaphor as well—was that the production burst into flame. Literally: in the fifth act, during the wedding scene when all the divided lovers were brought together into a ceremony of consummation, celebrated by Bottom’s play, one of the torchbearers accidentally set one of the stage curtains ablaze with his torch. Fire in a crowded theater!

  It was hard not to take it as spontaneous combustion: some kind of metaphor for Shakespeare’s incandescence. For a production so incandescent it virtually burst into flame. In any case, it ignited something in me, a lifelong desire to investigate the origins, the chemistry, so to speak, of that Shakespearean fire.

  And it set me on a course of incessant cycles of rereading the plays, watching them played. With each new round of rereading I found, time after time, with play after play, a quantum leap, well, more like a visceral jolt, to a new level or new depth of apprehension. Each subsequent round of rereading—and listening to great audiotapes—created a kind of critical mass that set off further revelations like chain lightning, illuminating a realm where I felt my own consciousness tuned to a higher pitch. Each new cycle yielded further tantalizing flashes, glimpses through a text darkly, of ultimate enigmas, further echoes of the music of the spheres, or in any case, the music of the Shake-spheres, one might say.

  I began to wonder: How long could this go on? At a certain point with other poets and writers (except, perhaps, Nabokov), rereading had always begun to bring forth diminishing returns. Not here. Which is perhaps the ultimate Shakespearean mystery: the exponentially increasing returns of rereading. The question of bottomlessness.

  To return to that first experience of the Dream, to that initial spell, the trance I’ve never fully awakened from: it was a state of mind perhaps at best expressed by the most human character in the Dream, Bottom the weaver. I say most human because on the one hand there are all these semi-mythological nobles in the Athenian court of Theseus and Hippolyta and the ingenue lovers. And then you have the fully supernatural characters Oberon, Titania, Puck and the fairies. And then you have “the Mechanicals,” ordinary humans, ostensibly Athenian workers, but really Elizabethan, sounding like Shakespeare’s contemporaries, perhaps modeled on his Stratford neighbors: Peter Quince, Flute the bellows-mender and the like. Of whom Bottom the weaver is the most fully realized. Bottom is the only one in the play to be transported back and forth, between bottom and top of the hierarchy of realms, from simple weaver to an ass who ascends to union with a veritable goddess, Titania, Queen of the Fairies.

  And then back again. In any case, when Puck transforms Bottom back from being an ass to Bottom again, the awakened weaver tries to express the radiant dream he’s experienced. His “induction” one might say, to use a term from the opening of The Taming of the Shrew. His sense of wonder is deeply affecting:

  “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t’ expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom.…”

  The loveliness of these lines still breaks my heart. And that night in Stratford I felt like Bottom. I felt I was waking up from a “most rare vision,” from a “dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” A dream I have spent the rest of my life trying to “expound,” to myself and others—trying to recover, trying to relive and repeat. The kind of experience I have just not had from any other dream or drama or dramatist. In fact, from any other literature.

  In a sense this book is an attempt to recapture, define, “expound” as Bottom says, the questions raised by that initial experience, that “rare vision,” that dream—and by three decades of subsequent engagement with Shakespeare. What made that rare vision so rare, what made it so unique and visionary? Can one get to the bottom of Bottom’s Dream—or to the bottom of its bottomlessness? In the seven years or so I’ve spent writing this book, when people have asked me what it’s about, the short answer I’ve found most applicable is some variation of this: One night in Stratford, England, something strange happened to me watching Peter Brook’s Dream. Something I haven’t recovered from. Ever since then I’ve been trying to recapture it, to explain what it was and this book, in effect, involves me seeking out those who can help “expound” it for me.

  Seeking out those who are most illuminating on the question of what Stephen Booth, the great scholar of the Sonnets, argues should be the great question about Shakespeare: “What’s all the fuss about?” Other artists have written great tragedies and comedies, expounded upon themes to be found in Shakespeare, but it is not for the themes, for the themes alone, we value him. Why do we feel—those of us who do—that there is something in Shakespeare beyond what we find in other literature? What’s all the fuss about? Why is Shakespeare, as Booth puts it, still “our most underrated poet”? What is “Shakespearean” about Shakespeare and how best to find and define it: this is the subject of contention at the heart of all the struggles herein.

  BOTTOMLESSNESS: A FOOTNOTE

  In the course of reconsidering what happened to me in Stratford and my subsequent lifelong fascination with this question, I came to think a cl
ue to “what’s all the fuss about” can be found in Bottom’s Dream.

  There’s much more to Bottom’s Dream than meets the eye; it deserves deeper consideration than its comic context suggests. It is one of those nodes, one of those knots in the grain of Shakespeare’s work, that discloses a glimpse, a more palpable sense of what is meant by “Shakespearean,” what is exceptional about the Shakespearean experience. And one of those moments where one rediscovers the value of genuine Shakespearean scholarship.

  There are actually two aspects of Bottom’s Dream that make it the rare vision it is: its synesthesia and its bottomlessness. Synesthesia is the unusual but well-documented (see Scientific American Mind, vol. 16, no. 3) experience of the fusion or the confusion of senses, most commonly when people report the sensation of “seeing” music or “hearing” colors. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reported that he could “see” sounds: the letter k, for instance, was something he’d experience as the color of huckleberry. Bottom actually describes a confused negative synesthesia, one might say, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.”*

  But then he goes on to describe a deeper, rarer kind of synesthesia, a transposition involving the tongue and the heart (or language and soul respectively). Man’s tongue is not able “to conceive, nor his heart to report, what [his] dream was.” In most poetry the tongue reports what the heart conceives. In Bottom’s synesthesia the tongue can’t conceive what the heart reports or speaks—it’s beyond speech. What the heart reports is so ecstatic, so visionary, it’s beyond what poetry can express. In this deeper level of synesthesia the heart gives birth to language, while language—the tongue—“conceives,” gives birth to life.