The Shakespeare Wars Page 5

  When it comes to Shakespeare, the exceptionalist question asks: Is he on the continuum of other great writers, Dante, Tolstoy, Goethe and the like—very, very great, but great in a way we understand other writers to be great? Or is his greatness bottomless—fathomless in a different way from the others, off the grid, beyond the continuum? Why is this writer different from all other writers, if he is? Does his work occupy some realm of its own, does it create a realm of its own above and beyond other literature? The question then is: When we call down the corridors of Shakespeare, do we continue to hear back deepening, ramifying echoes, or at some point will we have heard all there is to hear? Can we get to the bottom of Shakespeare or is he in some unique way bottomless?

  There is one other comparison between the two realms of scholarship—Hitler and Shakespeare and the exceptionalist dispute about them. In each there is a forbidden or deeply unfashionable word. It was there in the reluctance I found among so many Hitler scholars to use the word “evil” in relation to Hitler. It’s not an easy question defining what we mean by that word of course. But the substitutes, the “explanations” substituted for “evil” were no better. There was a tendency for explanation to become excuse: Hitler suffered from a mental aberration, he was a “psychopath,” a victim of “unconscious drives” that psychoanalysis could have healed, or of organic brain disease, “low self-esteem.” Or he was “merely” a product—a puppet—of his time, of historical and cultural forces, rather than their author (another “death of the author” phenomenon).

  In whatever form it took there was a pronounced reluctance to accord to Hitler personal moral choice, personal “agency” as they call it in academia. In part, all this, I argued, stemmed from a reluctance to confront an unbearable alternative: that human nature is capable of committing such a crime as a conscious choice. That Hitler was morally responsible for his acts, that is, evil.

  Similar to the flight from the word “evil” in Hitler studies (not in all respects, but in some) there is a reluctance to use the word “Beauty” in relationship to Shakespeare’s works. There is similar difficulty in defining the word, and (as Alter and Kermode argue) a similar terror—of pleasure this time—a bottomless “dismay” as Kermode puts it, a horror of the abyss one dissolves into in giving in to bottomless Beauty. The consequences of such a surrender are ones I’ll examine in the final sequence of the book. But they’re there.

  CATULLUS, FOR GOD’S SAKE!

  I came to admire those scholars and directors who had the courage not to deny the dismay they felt in facing this abyss. This is not the only question of interest, but the exceptionalist question is the one—just from the fact we’re prompted to ask it—that gives the other questions I investigate in this book their special significance. Makes even spurious theories about Shakespeare worth examining the way unreliable legends about Hitler are: because they often reveal hidden agendas; the longings, fantasies that we project on Shakespeare tell us something revealing about ourselves.

  Consider the persistence of unprovable theories about Shakespearean authorship—the someone-else-wrote-Shakespeare cult, the way they so often focus on aristocratic candidates—the Earl of Oxford, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon. And the way so many of those who propound those theories suffer from aristocratic pretensions themselves. In a snobby way, they can’t believe that a middle-class glover’s boy without a university education (like theirs) could possibly write Shakespeare’s witty and erudite verse. It’s an affront somehow to their self-image, so they must imagine instead a hidden aristocratic progenitor, someone more like them. It’s the Family Romance of the Shakespeare deniers, much as the unfounded belief that Hitler had a wealthy Jew (a Rothschild in one version) in his family tree is the Family Romance of the Hitler explainers. (One could also speculate that the fact that a surprising number of actors are “anti-Stratfordians” is due to actorish self-loathing: the inability to believe one of their own—Shakespeare was an actor after all—was capable of rising to Shakespearean heights.)

  Consider as well Harold Bloom’s overblown, and yet rarely challenged (on this side of the Atlantic at least) claim that Shakespeare “invented the human”—mainly by creating Bloom’s two favorite characters, Hamlet and Falstaff. Shakespeare, in other words, is the Family Romance secret father of all of us. A claim that dismisses all the brilliant comic and tragic, lyric, self-aware and introspective characters of Greek and Roman literature—Catullus for god’s sake—as irrelevant. One that, taken literally—as Bloom seems to wish us to take it—seems to dismiss all human beings before 1600 or so as being somehow less than human. Not yet “invented.” When you come down to it, it’s really a claim that Shakespeare invented Bloom—a composite character with the brain of Hamlet and the body of Falstaff—it’s Bloom’s Family Romance, too. Shakespeare is his secret father.

  THE GREAT “SHAKESPEARE DISCOVERY” FIASCO

  In any case, for a quarter century or so after I awoke from—or was awakened by—that Dream in Stratford, I’d continued to call down the corridors of Shakespeare, so to speak. But it was a Shakespearean pretender that prompted me to begin in 1996 to investigate and write about Shakespeare questions in a more systematic way.

  The pretender, the one the media hailed as a “major new work” by Shakespeare, was the “Funeral Elegy” by “W.S.”

  On the surface the story had all the elements of great drama: obscure American professor finds overlooked six-hundred-line poem moldering away in an Oxford library, a poem long ignored by British scholars, and with the use of a super-duper, extra-special computer database, a genie in a software program he calls SHAXICON, he “proves” that the cryptic byline “W.S.” signified William Shakespeare.

  What resulted was a rush to judgment without careful examination of the sources and methods behind the claim made by Professor Donald Foster, the scholar who went on to media stardom for successfully identifying the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a triumph that somehow precluded any further serious examination, in the mainstream American media at least, of the shakiness of his Shakespeare claim.

  The more I investigated and wrote critically about Foster’s claim, the more I became convinced of its inadequacy, the flawed assumptions of the computer database evidence, all the doubts I enumerate and explore in a subsequent chapter. What makes the argument important was not my personal embattlement but the question the Elegy dispute raised: What do we mean when we say something is or isn’t “Shakespearean”? A question that is raised by almost every controversy in subsequent chapters.

  But to return to the Shakespeare exceptionalist question, it does not, I believe (as you might have gathered), have anything to do with Shakespeare’s “invention of the human,” as Bloom puts it. A claim so silly it amounts to being a greater misconception than the claim for the “Funeral Elegy.” Bloom’s phrase is so rarely challenged it could be said to be the Emperor’s New Clothes of Literary Claims. But if he didn’t invent “the human” I came to wonder if it might be said that Shakespeare invented something alive, created a kind of intelligent life that survived him, a body of work so bottomlessly self-referential it almost seems self-aware. One that will outlive any one of us because a lifetime of rereading will not exhaust what is there to be found and compounded.

  It’s possible I’m wrong; it’s possible that this process of ramifying, refracting and reflecting isn’t endless, bottomless, that at a certain point, the levels of resonance will cease deepening on each rereading. One reason I wanted to devote myself to deeper investigation of Shakespearean enigmas and the conflicts over them is to find out if and when it would cease. It hasn’t yet. And I’m not alone in invoking the boundary between physics and metaphysics in trying to characterize this strange experience of deepening into bottomlessness. Recently I came across the published transcript of a lecture delivered at Berlin University by a prominent Shakespearean figure. He was speaking about Shakespeare’s language, its “inexhaustibility.”

  He spoke of the way one could take
some apparently anomalous phrase in Shakespeare and find, in seeking to probe that anomaly, that node, that one opens up a universe of rich and strange resonances (such as those expounded upon in Peter Holland’s footnote to Bottom’s Dream). The example given in the Berlin lecture was a phrase in The Tempest, from Prospero’s farewell in the Epilogue. Perhaps the last words Shakespeare wrote, his prayerful farewell to his audience: a prayer he describes as one “Which pierces so, that it assaults/Mercy itself …” Why “assault” mercy, the lecturer asked? Why does Shakespeare use the language of violence to praise an act of mercy? He doesn’t exactly answer the question but he goes on to produce a dazzling array of deepening conjectures, exploring the apparently bottomless depths, liberating the untold levels of resonance compressed within that single phrase.

  What it tells us, the speaker says, is that actors and directors can do what they want with staging, with delivery, with dramaturgy; critics can impose theories from above; but no one should ever neglect the power at the source, the power of the source—the critical mass waiting to be tapped within the words themselves.

  “Each line of Shakespeare is an atom,” the speaker said. “The energy that can be released is infinite—if we can split it open.”

  Oh, yes: The speaker was Peter Brook.

  * More evidence of this preoccupation can be found in Sonnet 23: “O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:/To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”

  Chapter Two

  One Hamlet or Three?

  In 1997, when Harold Jenkins, former Regius professor at the University of Edinburgh and editor of a leading scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s plays, went to see Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet, he was both excited and nervous. Sitting in his home two years later, the ninety-year-old scholar became animated as he described to me the anticipation he felt as the play reached the seventh scene, in the fourth act, when Laertes, huddling with Claudius, reacts to the news that Hamlet is back in Denmark.

  It’s a moment in which Jenkins had made a crucial single-word change in his influential, encyclopedic Arden edition of Hamlet, and he wondered whether Branagh would adopt his emendation. “I listened to see what was coming,” Jenkins told me. “What would [Laertes] say?”

  On screen the actor playing Laertes turned to the King and told him, apropos Hamlet (who had killed his father): “It warms the very sickness in my heart/That I shall live and tell him to his teeth/‘Thus diest thou …’ ”

  “ ‘Thus diest thou’! Yes!” the dapper, mild-mannered Jenkins exclaimed with all the fervor of a soccer fan celebrating a goal. “He got it right. And of course it is so much more effective.”

  Effective or not, Jenkins believes he’s not “improving” Shakespeare but restoring to us Shakespeare’s own long-lost word choice. In the two most substantial early texts of Hamlet that have come down to us from his time—the 1604 Quarto and the 1623 Folio versions—Laertes doesn’t say “Thus diest thou.” He says “Thus didst thou” in one and “Thus didest thou” in the other.

  But Jenkins believes that what he has done is recover the word Shakespeare originally wrote with his own hand and quill—before it was corrupted through carelessness in the printing house or the playhouse. Jenkins believes that he has given us the word—“diest”—that Shakespeare intended.

  THE SIGNATURE DRAMA OF THE DIVIDED SOUL:

  SOON TO BE SUBDIVIDED

  Most people who have read Hamlet at some point in the past are unaware that what they’re reading is usually a version that Shakespeare never wrote, and that his players never played. What most of us have read is, rather, an artificial “conflation” or superimposition of conflicting printed texts from his time and immediately afterward. (There is of course no manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand.) Such conflations obscure marked differences between the competing versions. The conflated play is, in effect, a patchwork quilt composed of fabric from the various versions threaded through with conjectures, guesses, and emendations from editors such as Jenkins.

  The uncertainties Hamlet editors grapple with make crucial differences in the way Hamlet is printed, read and played. “Everyone who wants to understand Hamlet,” argues Philip Edwards, editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet, “as reader, actor or director, needs to understand the nature of the play’s textual questions and to have his or her own view of the questions in order to approach the ambiguities in the meaning.”

  Among literary scholars, those like Jenkins who devote their lives to the maddening intricacies of Shakespearean textual editing are accorded a mixture of awe and pity for the labor they bestow on crucial but seemingly unresolvable problems. And Hamlet editors in particular are a special breed: tasked with the responsibility for the transmission of the closest thing there is to a sacred text in a secular culture. For centuries, to be an editor of Hamlet has often meant to enter a bewildering labyrinth, a garden of forking paths; for some, it has meant sacrificing a good part of their lives to an ordeal of close focus on maddeningly elusive enigmas. Jenkins himself spent twenty-eight years constructing his Arden edition. The demands of this calling have driven editors to tragedies of their own—drink, despair, obsession, an early grave for at least one.

  But for the past century, while there were bitter disagreements over which path to take, there was a reigning consensus on what the final destination was supposed to be: a reconstruction, from the differing texts, of a Lost Archetype, the Hamlet Shakespeare “originally” wrote before it was corrupted in the printing house and the playhouse. There’s a lovely, haunting phrase coined by Fredson Bowers, one of the preeminent figures of twentieth-century Shakespeare textual editing: “the veil of print.” Bowers and his fellow scholars believed that editors could and should attempt to discern, beneath that error-riddled veil of the printed texts, the true hidden face of Shakespeare. To divine, from the fragmentary evidence, the nature of “Shakespeare’s intentions.”

  That consensus has now been shattered. And replaced by a bitter scholarly civil war. One influential faction of scholars has been arguing since the 1980s that the two versions we have of some of Shakespeare’s major works, especially Lear and Hamlet, don’t represent two variations from a single Lost Archetype, but rather first and second drafts, reflecting Shakespeare’s revisions, rewrites, and second thoughts. Drafts that need to be treated as separate works of art, or different stages of the same work.

  And they have been winning converts. In 1986, the Oxford Complete Works edition of Shakespeare printed two versions of King Lear on this theory. The Oxford version was highly controversial (“the Oxford editors should be hanged!” Harold Bloom once exclaimed), but a dozen years later, The Norton Shakespeare, a leading American Complete Works edition, edited by Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, followed suit and published not two but three Lears (the two versions adopted from the Oxford edition plus a third, traditional, conflated version).

  After dividing Lear, the Reviser faction set its sights on Hamlet. The coeditor of The Oxford Shakespeare, Gary Taylor, told me that he would have liked to have published two versions of Hamlet as well as two Lears in the Oxford edition back in 1986, but he feared the notion was too radical back then, and might have undermined the credibility of the case for splitting Lear.

  But now Hamlet’s time has come. In 1995 the editors and publishers of the Arden edition of Shakespeare made a decision that caused the equivalent of an earthquake in textual scholarship. One that will force many in the general public who are as yet unaware that there may be two Lears to confront three Hamlets. The new Arden edition, the one that will supplant Harold Jenkins’s conflated version, will be a radically divided Hamlet, presenting three differing versions of the play printed one after the other. While the new Arden edition does not endorse the Reviser hypothesis, it will continue what has become a heated debate over what kind of artist Shakespeare was and what kind of play Hamlet is, what the differences in the three versions suggest about the play and the playwright.

  The fact that the Arden d
ivision is the product of scrupulous bibliographic scholarship, and not a deconstructionist conceit, will not diminish the sure-to-be-disturbing, even scandalous fact that scholars seem to be giving up on the effort to judge what belongs in Hamlet and what doesn’t. As a result, the signature drama of the divided soul in Western civilization is now to be subdivided.

  THE NEW, NEW PARADIGM

  The source of the split can be found in the uncertainty surrounding the origins of Hamlet. It seems to have been written sometime around 1600, but we don’t even know when it was first performed, or whether Shakespeare was the first to dramatize the prose predecessor story (there are three reports of a lost predecessor play subsequently known as “the ur-Hamlet”). One could say there are two testaments of Hamlet: the so-called Good Quarto, which was first published in 1604, a few years after it was first staged (with Shakespeare playing the Ghost, according to legend). This is the version that Harold Jenkins believes is closest to Shakespeare’s lost handwritten manuscript. And the First Folio version, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, in a compendium of his plays assembled by his theatrical company’s owners. (“Quarto” and “Folio” both refer to the size of the paper they were printed on, a quarto being the size of a contemporary paperback, the folio more on the order of an encyclopedia volume.)

  Some of the differences are dramatic and obvious: the Quarto gives Hamlet a final, fourth-act soliloquy, the embittered meditation spoken as he watches the armies of Fortinbras prepare to slaughter and be slaughtered “for an egg-shell.” It’s the soliloquy that begins, “How all occasions do inform against me,/And spur my dull revenge! What is a man …” But it’s absent from the 1623 Folio.