The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Ron Rosenbaum

Mr. Rosenbaum's book is an exception to the way most current authors go about presenting William Shakespeare to a general audience. Most of the current crop of non-fiction books in the last few years focus on trying out various theories pieced together from what little biographical details we have about the most important single author in the English Language. The reader is introduced to some sort of theory about how young Will was a secret Catholic, such as in Stephen Goldblatt's recent best-seller, "Will in the World" or how he was actually a front man for some shy but noble writer with a fancy title, good connections to royalty, and a university education. Those books that feed the "anti-Stratfordian" maw of conspiracy theorists who write books with super-clever titles like "Shakespeare: Who Was He?" or "Alias Shakespeare". The premise is always the same: no son of a village glove-maker with an elementary education could write poetry and prose like that!

Refreshingly, Rosenbaum doesn't go into any historical theorizing or twist around the facts to prove his subject is an impostor. He offers instead is a journey around the scholars and writers and actors who concern themselves with the lines, the speeches, the words that went into his plays. It's a very personal journey--he relates how as a young journalist he was transfixed by the 1970 production of Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at Stratford, a production that was so popular it later went to London and New York and has taken on a legendary status in the modern theatre history.

The focus is what makes Shakespeare's verses so "brilliantly transcendent", his ability to create works of art like "Hamlet", "King Lear" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" and imbue them with enough meanings that no actor or reader, much less an audience can plumb the complete depths of meanings hidden in the phrases and similes he draws upon.

Here is a portion of Mr. Rosenbaum's first chapter, his introduction to the book (and himself).
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"Just two years before that I had begun what seemed like a promising academic career at Yale Graduate School's Department of English Literature. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had studied primarily pre-seventeenth-century literature and had been granted a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship to Yale Graduate School, a fellowship designed to spur those undecided about an academic career to spend a year tasting the supposed fruits of such a career without many onerous responsibilities. I was only required to take one graduate seminar and teach one undergraduate class per semester, in return for which I was given an official-sounding appointment to the Yale faculty and named a Junior Fellow of Jonathan Edwards (residential) College.


"At first things went swimmingly: I was thrilled to find I'd been admitted to a select seminar with Richard Ellmann, the acclaimed biographer of Yeats and Joyce, masterminds of modernism, and felt quite vain when Ellmann singled out a paper I'd read at the seminar, a critique of the determinism of Yeats's muddleheaded mystical cosmology.

"But sometime in the second semester, although enjoying a Shakespeare seminar with Howard Felperin, I lost heart, or maybe it was more that my heart was broken. In point of fact, my heart was broken by a question I asked--and an answer I got--about love.

"The occasion was a special, ad hoc, invitation-only seminar I'd been asked to, a presentation by one of the English department's favorite wunderkind scholars. A paper on Chaucer's lesser-known love-vision poems, including the Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowles.

"Unlike the wild digressive fabliaux of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's love-vision poems are exquisite and mysterious shorter works, and I was looking forward to the occasion, although by this time my disillusion with graduate school life had already begun to undermine the pleasure I felt from the study of literature. The faculty sherry parties had a lot to do with it: watching my fellow graduate students assiduously sucking up to Harold Bloom and other stars of the department, their sherry-flushed faces perspiring from the damp mothball-mildew warmth of their tweeds. While the world outside--it was 1968!--was exploding with fearful, thrilling events."

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It was at this point that Rosenbaum went out of academia and into small magazine journalism. He soon had credentials to cover the seminal 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, the tidal wave political event of the American Counter Culture Movement.

But the book is about his more recent pursuit of Shakespeare. (Apart from recalling his transformative experience with Peter Brook's version of "The Dream". The book reads briskly like a piece of fresh first-person journalism.) Some of the stops are familiar: the controversy over how to depict the character of the villain Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice". (The more villainous the better as far as Roenbaum is concerned.) In his chapter, "Dueling Shylocks", the author ridicules the modern idea some play directors and filmmakers have done by making Shylock a sympathetic figure who is in the play to point out Christian hypocrisy. This doesn't wash so well with Rosenbaum, who is also the author of a best-seeling book called 'Explaining Hitler". He notes that "Merchant" was performed dozens of times in Germany during the Nazi Era.

He also explores the controversy over the various editions of "Hamlet" and "Lear" and how modern publishers and scholars have dealt with the various sometimes subtle, sometimes important textual changes between The First Folio version of the Bard's plays (published in 1623, seven years after his death, by two of Shakespeare's former friends in The King's Players) and some of the unauthorized "quatro" versions that were pirated by booksellers depending on the popularity off the plays. Shakespeare's bloody "Titus Andronicus", an early play in the tradition of Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" was a frequent target for rip-offs. (The copies of the plays were called "quatros" because they were printed on sheets of paper folded with each sheet into four sections.)

It has long been alleged, for instance, that the 1604 Bad Quatro version of "Hamlet" was a text that had been stolen from Shakespeare's fellow players by an actor who likely had a small part in the production.

Rosenbaum brings a good deal of humor to his explorations and interviews. He even finds the time to get back a bit at the arch-Modern American Intellectual, Harold Bloom, for his over-reaching infatuation with Falstaff's character. (Bloom apparently feels Sir John Falstaff is worthy of a holiday unto himself, one of the many blatant cases of "Bardolotry" in Bloom's recent and exasperatingly long tome, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human", a title that "gilds the lily" for certain. At one point he opines:

"Bloom! Bloom! Bloom! Like the beating of a big bass drum one can't help hearing it, having it drummed into you. Certainly not if you're writing a book about Shakespeare. What do I think of Bloom? How much time do you have? Short answer: I'm deeply conflicted...My conflicts are not about him, personally; it's impossible not to feel affection for the larger-than-life Falstaffian "character" he plays...Impossible not to wonder if it's all--for better or worse--an act, a performance, a conceptual con game worthy of the con artist of braggadocio he most admires, Sir John Falstaff."

This is a good book to get away from reading the arcana of Shakespeare theories and doubts about his authorship and actually do what a good journalist should do with Old William of Avon--make you want to get back to seeing the plays, watching the movies, and actually reading the words the man wrote.