The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  I’m not sure my experience that night in Stratford at Peter Brook’s Dream went as deep as that, but I did feel my heart “report” something it never reported before. And ever since I became a reporter, alongside or perhaps beneath all the other stories I was reporting on, I was investigating that report.

  And as my reporting came full circle—as I found myself focussing on scholarly disputations in the academic world I’d fled, I kept finding more to report on in Shakespeare—deeper levels to the bottomlessness Bottom speaks of. As I was writing this section, for instance, I had occasion to consult the Oxford single-volume edition of the Dream, the one edited by Peter Holland, then director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, now at Notre Dame. And I found there, appended to that passage—the one in which Bottom tries to “expound” his dream—a remarkable footnote. In fact, in a lifetime of searching and finding unexpected revelations in footnotes, it’s one of the most remarkable I’ve come upon.

  It’s a footnote on the source of Bottom’s name. For centuries it has been supposed that, while it may have been a fruitful source of bawdy puns, the name “Bottom” as in “Bottom the weaver” had a more prosaic than profane origin: in his craft. A “bottom” was the name given to the large spool at the base of a handloom that spun out the thread to be woven. While that in itself has a lovely resonance for the weaver of plays who spun out the name, the footnote suggests there may be an even more provocative and resonant source of the name Bottom.

  Peter Holland’s footnote begins by tracing the source of Bottom’s lines—“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen”—to First Corinthians in the New Testament, where the line runs, more logically, “The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

  Bottom’s line, then, does more than just comically invert the eye-ear language of Corinthians, it refers to a passage that speaks of an unimaginable, literally inconceivable experience—the experience of “the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” the experience of ecstatic communion with the divine.

  Other scholars have noted the origins of Bottom’s language about eye and ear in those lines in Corinthians. But the remarkable disclosure in Peter Holland’s footnote comes when he takes us just a little bit further into the New Testament passage than the language about eye and ear that Bottom transposes.

  Holland carefully prepares the ground for this by examining the versions of that passage in Corinthians that would have been available to Shakespeare when he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sometime around 1595 (two decades before the King James Bible appeared).

  In the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, the line about the heart of man not yet realizing “the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” is followed by these words: “For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”

  But—and here’s the revelation—in the 1557 Geneva Bible, the one more likely to have been the Shakespeare family Bible (since he was born in 1564, before the publication of the Bishops’ Bible) and the one he paraphrases elsewhere—that last phrase about “the deep things of God” is translated as “For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the bottom of God’s secrets” (my italics).

  The bottom of God’s secrets! Fascinating: Peter Holland goes on to report in this invaluable footnote on a scholarly dispute that has broken out over “the bottom of God’s secrets” and whether it was the source of Bottom’s name. Was Shakespeare thinking only of weavers’ spools and butts and asses in naming one of his greatest characters Bottom? Or is there an allusion as well to the deepest, most bottomless mysteries of creation, “the bottom of God’s secrets”?

  Peter Holland and Thomas B. Stroup, the original author of the “Bottom of God’s Secrets” conjecture in a 1979 Shakespeare Quarterly paper (a conjecture Holland does not endorse), are not alone in linking Bottom’s Dream to that passage in Corinthians. Holland’s virtually bottomless footnote referred as well to an essay by Frank Kermode, a critic both scrupulous and incisive about Shakespeare and not given to overstatement, in which Kermode speaks of Bottom’s dream as a kind of religious vision, one that illuminates the nature of love, both carnal and spiritual, the extrasensory beauty and grace of “blind love.”

  In the conventional notion of “blind love,” Kermode points out, man is the fool, the toy of willful (Puckish) Cupid and treacherous Venus, blinded in a bad way by love. A different notion of blind love is conjured up by Bottom’s garbled version of Corinthians, Kermode says:

  “This exaltation of blindness was both Christian and Orphic … Bottom is there to tell us that the blindness of love, the dominance of the mind over the eye, can be interpreted as a means to grace as well as irrational animalism. That the two aspects are perhaps inseparable.”

  Blind love, the experience of grace: when I had the opportunity to interview Kermode, now Sir Frank, toward the close of our conversation, I ventured to read to him the other line from the Geneva Bible translation of Corinthians that Peter Holland’s footnote called attention to: the one about “the bottom of God’s secrets.”

  I don’t want to exaggerate but in his reserved way, I think Sir Frank was taken aback by that.

  “What translation is that?” he asked. And when I told him it was the Geneva, he said, “Read it again to me.” And after I did: “I wasn’t aware of that language, no, but it’s quite interesting, yes.”

  I’m fond of that footnote because it’s an instance of something I’ve pursued in this book—the way that certain passages in Shakespeare open up like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland to ever-unfolding ramifications. I’m fond of it as well because, as with Nicholas Hytner, Kermode’s reaction validated something inchoate I’d felt so long ago in the playhouse at Stratford, my own Bottom-like experience of the Dream: that there was more to Bottom, more to the Dream than meets the eye (or the ear).

  Of course we can never know with certainty what Shakespeare had in mind, but Holland’s footnote—and Stroup’s underlying conjecture on Bottom’s name and God’s secrets—is an instance of the fact that literary scholarship, at its best, still can give us a lot to think about.

  One of the things I wanted to attempt in this book was to be a kind of guide—leading the reader, like Virgil in Dante, down into the scholarly inferno, hoping to illuminate some of the genuine intellectual—and visceral—delights, the tormenting conflicts, the unbearable pleasures to be found therein.

  When I say visceral, I mean, for instance, that I actually got goose bumps when I read that line about “the bottom of God’s secrets.” It just seemed to chime on some deep goose bump–generating level with some intimation we have about the uncanny power of Shakespeare. (In Pale Fire, in the poem of that name, Nabokov speaks of a similar physical reaction.)

  I’ve gotten goose bumps from that reference to “the bottom of God’s secrets,” and I’ve given them too.

  I will not claim I gave Frank Kermode goose bumps, but he did sit up and take notice when I told him. And then there was the moment just a few days after I’d met with Kermode, when I was introduced at a party to a well-known actress who was then the girlfriend of a writer I knew. The three of us got into a conversation about Shakespeare and I found myself giving them an account of Holland’s footnote about “the bottom of God’s secrets.”

  “Oh my god,” said the actress, grabbing my arm. “You’re giving me goose bumps.”

  “How do you know Shakespeare was reading that version of the Bible?” her boyfriend said, sounding at least a bit jealous. Not of me, I’m sure, but of Shakespeare’s still potent physiological effect.

  DANGEROUS RADIANCE

  But I’m not finished with Bottom’s Dream, I haven’t gotten to the bottom, so to speak, of its importance, to the real question my experience that night in Stratford, my experience over the subsequent three decades of obsession with Shakespeare, raises: the question of Shakespearean bottomles
sness. The question is at the heart of the heart, the knot in the wood, the pearl in the eye, of what is most mysterious about Shakespeare, one of those things that define the “Shakespearean.”

  There is something threatening about the notion of bottomlessness. When I was growing up on Long Island, the legend about one of the local lakes, Lake Ronkonkoma, was that it was the only lake in the world that had no bottom. I’ve subsequently heard this said of a number of lakes elsewhere in the world, each of which is believed by locals to be the only one in the world to have “no bottom.” It’s something people seem to want to believe in, although it inspires dread as well as fascination.

  Similarly with Shakespeare’s bottomlessness. It is my Theory about Theory—the Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian postmodernist fashions that have captured two generations of scholars—that close reading of Shakespeare is at least in part responsible for the flight into the abstractions of Theory. Because close reading opened up something both unbearably pleasurable, beautiful and—in its own way—terrifying. The vision of bottomlessness: of the threatening abyss. Theory was a scaffolding that distanced and protected one from a direct encounter with the abyss: no, you don’t have to gaze upon it, at the radiant literary work itself, you just have to look down upon the foolish or venal reasons some people want you to believe it’s important.

  The close reading of Shakespeare which reached a peak of fecundity in the years from the 1920s to the 1960s brought scholars and readers almost too close to the destabilizing bottomlessness of Shakespeare for comfort. Close reading suggested an inexhaustible depth which would inevitably exhaust if not dissolve the identity of the reader in its depths.

  Recently in an introduction to Frank Kermode’s lecture Pleasure and Change, the literary critic Robert Alter speaks of “the horror of the abyss that is opened up by the concept of pleasure,” a horror occasioned by a “response so intense that it shatters identity …” Or, as it’s elsewhere been called, “the terror of pleasure.”

  Recoiling from this threat, from the identity-shattering bottomless abyss of pleasure that close reading opened up—and readers such as Stephen Booth made dangerously apparent—many felt the need to find distance and the illusion of mastery over this threat by using the leaden jargon of Theory to shield themselves from the virtually radioactive danger of bottomless pleasure.

  Thus did bottomlessness—“the horror of the abyss”—give rise to a more comfortable (however complex-seeming) theoretical “contextualizing.” A contextualizing that was a form of containment.

  Shakespeare himself seems drawn to the experience of bottomlessness. In Troilus and Cressida he conjures up “the incomprehensive deep.” In Hamlet Horatio warns Hamlet against following the ghost because it might tempt him toward

  … the dreadful summit of the cliff …

  And draw you into madness [.] Think of it.

  The very place puts toys of desperation,

  Without more motive, into every brain

  That looks so many fadoms to the sea.…

  There’s a strikingly similar moment in Lear in which Edgar, the good son, conjures up a dizzying vista of bottomlessness in the mind of his blinded father Gloucester as they stand near the top of the Dover cliff. Here bottomlessness becomes not a “toy of desperation” but an instrument of redemption. In Henry IV the elusive secrets of the future are “the bottom of the after-time.” In The Tempest “the dark backward and abysm of time” conjures up the temporal dimension of bottomlessness, the bottomless pit of the past. There is no Tempest more destructive than Tempus, the ravages of time.

  And when Bottom the weaver decides that he shall write a ballad about his dream and have it set to music by Peter Quince, he declares, “It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom.”

  It hath no bottom because, although Bottom knows he was in the dream, he also knows he wasn’t really himself in the dream: it “hath no Bottom” in that sense. The Bottom drops out from his identity, and perhaps that giddy sense of loss of self is what is appealing about contemplating all those alleged bottomless lakes, those unique holes in the world, those sonnets on the blackboard.

  But it “hath no Bottom” also in the sense that it’s fathomless. That it can’t be sounded, that there’s no end to its depths. This to me is one of the wonders and enigmas: is there no end, no bottom to Shakespearean resonances? It is like Rosalind’s declaration of her fathomless affection in As You Like It: it “hath an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal”—another of those mythic bottomless bodies of water?

  For a useful definition of what bottomlessness means in terms of Shakespeare, I would turn to something Christopher Ricks once said to me about value in art. Ricks is the brilliant exegetical scholar, now Oxford professor of poetry, author of acclaimed studies of Milton, Keats and T. S. Eliot, a onetime colleague—and, I’d argue, an inheritor of the mantle—of William Empson, one of the past century’s great thinkers about literature.

  We had been talking in Ricks’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, sitting room (which was presided over by a portrait of Empson in his distinctive neck beard) about the criteria for greatness in literature. A notion that has been scorned and disparaged by most postmodern schools of literary theory which disdain the notion of literary “value.” For whom texts are interesting mainly for the way in which they reflect the political and historical forces that “produced” them—the “death of the author” making the apparent writer just a mouthpiece for the “power relations of the hegemony,” the spirit of the zeitgeist that presses through his language and embeds itself in his art.

  There is, by this reasoning, no reason to “privilege” a text such as Macbeth over some contemporaneous screed by a religious nut denouncing witches. Most people intuitively feel this is wrong, but the attempt to define what makes Shakespeare “better” than other texts runs into real problems in defining value. Ricks, quite deftly I believe, sidesteps the mountainous accumulation of contorted reasoning on the question of esthetic value with an offhand remark that the test of value in a work of art is “whether or not it continues to repay attention.”

  It’s a deceptively simple formula (in what currency does it repay: pleasure? wisdom? intensity?) but what it does, in a subtle way I think, is introduce the notion of time and deepening, a deepening unto bottomlessness. The key word in Ricks’s definition is “continues to repay attention”: that one judges value in literature not from a first or second exposure but from returning again and again, going back to the well, so to speak, and seeing whether the well runs dry or whether the well appears to be bottomless.

  Whether each time one returns to it, one returns not to a repeat performance, to a puzzle solved, but to a mystery deepened, compounded, one that continues to give back, repay attentiveness. Pays it back, so to speak, with interest in both senses of the word. With compound interest.

  Compound in the sense that the more times one returns and rereads, the more disproportionate is the return. A third cycle of rereading does not increase one’s apprehension (in every sense of the word) by a third—it’s more like to the third power. This has comported with my experience of Shakespeare where the fourth reading of a play takes one to depths (or heights) one couldn’t have predicted from the increase from the second to the third reading. Each new level sends back signals and echoes from previously unimaginable depths. Will this go on forever? How far has it gone and are the returns diminishing or—is it possible?—still increasing?

  Let me try another echo-down-the-well metaphor for the phenomenon of bottomlessness, one suggested by Orson Welles. It came up in a conversation I had with Keith Baxter, the actor who played Prince Hal to Welles’s Falstaff and John Gielgud’s Henry IV in Welles’s amazing and, to me, so-far-bottomless 1966 film fusion of the Henry IV plays, Chimes at Midnight.

  Baxter told some wonderful tales about Welles’s Falstaffian filmmaking. But when I asked him about specific acting directions Welles had given, Baxter told me, “Orson didn’t give suggestions
, but the one thing he did say, the night before we started shooting, was, ‘We want to call down the corridors of time with this.’ ”

  Call down the endless corridors of time. Call down the bottomless wells of time, one might say. Welles’s echoing metaphor expresses a longing for immortality in the form of undying timeless reverberations that continue to ramify, growing ever more thrilling in their unfolding, compounding complexity.

  Does Shakespeare do this in a way that other literature does not? This is the essence of what’s known as “the exceptionalist question” in Shakespeare studies. Another meta-contention you might say. Perhaps the best way of defining the exceptionalist question is to put it in the context in which I first encountered it, in the realm of Hitler studies. It’s a question that recurred in different forms throughout the dozen years I spent talking with historians, philosophers, theologians, and literary figures in the course of writing Explaining Hitler. And perhaps the best way of framing the exceptionalist question was the way the philosopher and theologian Emil Fackenheim expressed it to me when I met with him in his Jerusalem apartment.

  “Is Hitler on the same continuum of human nature as us?” Fackenheim asked. Was he someone on the extreme end of that continuum, a very, very, very bad man, but still explicable by the methods which we use—psychology, biology, biography—to explain the psyche of other evildoers on the continuum? By the same methods we use to explain all human beings on the continuum, including ourselves? Or did Hitler’s evil represent a phenomenon beyond any previously known, a “radical evil” as Fackenheim called it using Hannah Arendt’s phrase—off the grid, beyond the continuum? A phenomenon that can be explained not psychologically but—if at all—only theologically. At bottom, a mystery, one of God’s secrets, you might say.