The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The more stringently postmodern historicists essentially say that authors as individual consciousness are irrelevant, that authorial free will does not, in effect, exist. Texts are there to be dusted for fingerprints of the power relations of the culture that gives birth to them.

  Needless to say one of the authors who didn’t really exist was William Shakespeare, whose individual identity, Theory partisans insisted in various ways, was shaped by “the hegemony,” the patriarchy, the hierarchy of royalty, every archy but autarchy. Shakespeare, like everyone else, was not possessed of an autonomous self.

  But—and here was the Great Admission, the Great Rebuke really to virtually all postmodern lit crit, that Greenblatt had now made. He now clearly believed, or at least professed to believe, that such a creature as an author existed, in a significant way. And that the author’s life—his self!—could be—in a (gasp!) biography, autonomously!—used by said author to shape his art. (My problem with Shakespearean biography has been lack of facts; for postmodernists it has been lack of subject—lack of “author.”)

  They say that in America there are no second acts, but really there are no second glances. That whole author-doesn’t-exist thing no longer existed! Might as well never have.

  I’d last been in touch with Greenblatt when we exchanged faxes about the “Funeral Elegy” Donald Foster had been promoting as Shakespearean. Greenblatt had somehow been persuaded by the American branch of the Norton imprint to include the Elegy in his Norton Shakespeare Complete Works edition. Foster was at that time claiming the inclusion as an endorsement, and, when I inquired, Greenblatt faxed me back from Berlin where he’d been on fellowship, to make sure I knew that “It doesn’t sound like Shakespeare to me” and that he had included it only for the purposes of studying “questions of attribution and authorship.” A hedge, but an important one.

  I had the feeling that his offhand concession that there was something definably “Shakespearean” that can be distinguished from the non-Shakespearean (“doesn’t sound like Shakespeare to me”) was important.

  It comported with something I’d felt while reading his most recent book (the one before Will in the World), his best book to my mind, Hamlet in Purgatory. It was an exemplary work of scholarship which placed Hamlet in the context of the debate over the fate of souls supposedly in Purgatory—after the English Protestant Reformation had abolished the existence of Purgatory. It was a book in which he’d abandoned postmodern jargon almost entirely for the kind of historical literary scholarship that set him apart from Historicist theory and justified his reputation as a leading Shakespearean. Greenblatt seized upon two warring pamphlets published in the 1530s and 1540s that debated the fate of the souls in Purgatory after Purgatory was abolished. One was ingeniously written in the voice of the supposed souls in Purgatory bemoaning their sudden unexpected abandonment. Before the English Protestant Reformation there was an entire monastic social establishment devoted to the souls in Purgatory—the chantries and their chanters, subsidized by the relatives of the dead to say constant prayers for their lost loved ones, paid prayers which were said to be a way of speeding the dead through the purgatorial fires (in which Hamlet’s father’s ghost was purportedly confined) to the bliss of God’s heavenly Paradise.

  Now with the abandonment of the chantries and the chanters, they were, the inhabitants of Purgatory complain in this pamphlet, stuck forever in a Purgatory that no longer had an officially approved theological existence. They felt the loss of all those living humans who had been devoted to praying for their release.

  There was a reply pamphlet written on the question—by Sir Thomas More, in fact. But I was fascinated by Greenblatt’s discussion of the plea from Purgatory in relation to Greenblatt’s own intellectual trajectory. It was almost as if this touching sympathy for these fictional souls abandoned and trapped in Purgatory could be seen as a kind of sympathy for the “authors” abandoned by postmodernists, whose existence they’d denied, consigned to the realm of superstition and myth—the Purgatory of nonbeing—for so long.

  Will in the World could then be seen as a further reversal; it represented, in effect, Greenblatt’s return to rescue them, or at least one of those authors. If Hamlet in Purgatory signaled Greenblatt’s almost total rejection of fashionable jargon and theoretical sophistry, Will in the World is almost defiantly unfashionable, indeed unashamedly Old-Fashioned.

  Still, it was absolutely stunning to see how far along this road Greenblatt has traveled—or traveled back—in the glimpse of his method (and his book) he gave the luncheon in his talk, which essentially summarized his novel argument about Shakespeare and Shylock. (“Novel” is a word I use advisedly. As Rachel Donadio put it in a New York Times Book Review essay, “Whether it belongs on the nonfiction list … or the fiction one is a matter of some debate.”)

  Will in the World does have the sustaining virtue of Greenblatt’s intelligence. He’s acutely self-conscious that he’s weaving the few tattered, picked-over rags and bones of Shakespearean biographical anecdotes and old wives’ tales that have come down to us from a variety of narrators of unprovable reliability over the centuries into a tapestry of sometimes ingenious, sometimes strained conjecture about the relationship of these alleged episodes in Shakespeare’s life (a Catholic Lancashire stay? a deer poaching charge?) to moments in the plays.

  Often the point he wants to make is so smart it scarcely needs the shaky foundation of the grab bag of anecdotes and suppositions that make up the usual ragtag Shakespearean biography.

  In his talk that day he gave us one of his most precarious leaning towers of suppositions, one that allows him, he says, to connect the life of Shakespeare with the character called Shylock he created. This one involves an absolutely unfounded conjecture that Shakespeare witnessed the execution of a Jew, the queen’s physician, Roderigo Lopez, a Jew converted to Protestantism, but still under suspicion that treacherous Jewishness lay beneath the professed conversion. And that all this tells us something about The Merchant of Venice.

  There is no doubt Lopez was executed, not much doubt that his Jewishness was a known factor and a factor in his conviction. But there is no evidence that Shakespeare witnessed the public execution, which included the cutting out of the intestines, and burning them in front of the still-living condemned man along with further butchery as required by “drawing and quartering.” And there’s no evidence of Shakespeare witnessing or overhearing any one specific crowd reaction at that execution. Nor is there any evidence that Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta was the source of the crowd’s reaction. Nor that any of this had a crucial effect on Shakespeare’s depiction of the Jew, Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice.

  Nevertheless Greenblatt gives us a graphic description of the execution of the (converted) Jew Lopez, and then asks, “Was William Shakespeare in this crowd?” that witnessed the execution. And answers only that we “know” he “was interested in executions … [and] mobs” and “the comportment” of men and women facing the end. So he must have been there, then! It’s not impossible!

  Or as Greenblatt puts it in his book, “It is reasonable to suppose [Shakespeare] had witnessed executions for himself,” and “the execution of Dr. Lopez was a public event. If Shakespeare did personally witness it, he would have seen … a ghastly display.…”

  And now he’s off on a tear. Assuming what is pure supposition, he makes an elaborate argument about Shakespeare’s reaction to the crowd’s reaction to the Jew’s reaction to being executed.

  It all rests on the secondhand report of an Elizabethan historian, William Camden, who tells us that before Lopez was hanged and butchered alive, the allegedly treasonous and treacherous Jew-turned-Christian prisoner (convicted on the basis of torture-extracted testimony from his “confederates”) cried out that he, Lopez, “loved the Queen as he loved Jesus Christ.” A remark which, Camden tells us, “drewe no small Laughter in the Standers-by.”

  Then Greenblatt tries to see, to hear, actually, that remark and that
laughter through Shakespeare’s eyes and ears. Assuming of course, without evidence, that Shakespeare was there, Greenblatt tells us that Shakespeare would have reacted by seeing the laughter at the foot of the scaffold as the product of the crowd’s familiarity with The Jew of Malta, the work of Shakespeare’s playwright rival Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe made his Jew, Barabas, a comic villain, someone who courted and indulged in laughter at the extremity of his melodramatic villainousness. A treacherous former doctor and poisoner in fact, Marlowe’s Jew of Malta had the over-the-top mustache-twirling generic evil glee of a cartoon villain.

  Thus, according to Greenblatt (and again he’s reading Shakespeare’s mind) what was in the mind of the spectators, or at least in the mind of Shakespeare reading the mind of the spectators—in the mind of Greenblatt—was this:

  “These laughing spectators thought … they were watching a real-life version of The Jew of Malta.…”

  Because the crowd at the execution had seen The Jew of Malta (Greenblatt insists) they interpreted the condemned man’s last words as ironic. “I love the Queen as I love Jesus Christ” really meant he hated them both because his conversion to Christianity was a sham, a Jewish trick. He didn’t love Jesus, thus not the queen either.

  So Greenblatt told the luncheon, and tells us at greater length in his book. He believes that Shakespeare believed that the spectators laughed at Lopez’s last words—because, Greenblatt believes, Shakespeare believed these laughing witnesses had seen that particular play.

  From questioning the author’s “agency,” the freedom of his (or anyone’s) choices, Greenblatt is making up incredibly elaborate fictions about him and his choices, which he then applies to the author’s fictional character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. A character which, according to Greenblatt, grew out of Shakespeare’s discomfort with the cruelty of the ironic laughter he thinks Shakespeare thinks Marlowe inspired at the execution of Lopez, the one Shakespeare may or may not have attended. And this discomfort led Shakespeare to choose to create his own Jew, who would have more humanity than the Marlovian butt of laughter and cruelty he chose to feel sympathy for.

  Shylock is different, Greenblatt says, because of Shakespeare’s reaction to the crowd’s reaction at the execution: “Did he admire the [alleged] way Marlowe’s dark comedy had helped to shape the crowd’s response?”

  And then without answering the question he tells us that Shakespeare wanted, it seems, “to excite laughter at the wicked Jew’s discomfiture [as Marlowe had] and he wanted at the same time to call the laughter into question, to make the amusement excruciatingly uncomfortable.”

  Voilà! The Merchant of Venice.

  Well, it’s a nice fantasy.

  All this strenuous supposition brings Greenblatt gasping close to the finish line for his thesis, in which he again reads Shakespeare’s mind for us:

  … it is as if Shakespeare had looked too closely at the faces of the crowd, as if he were repelled as well as fascinated by the mockery of the vanquished alien, as if he understood the mass appeal of the ancient game he was playing, but suddenly felt queasy about the rules.

  Well, maybe or maybe not, it makes for good speculative reading, but it’s an instance of Greenblatt’s new method, no longer denying “the author” or his autonomy here, but authoring the author—making a fictional narrative about the author’s thought process. And of course, in doing so, tacitly asking us to believe that Shakespeare has given us a more humane Jew, and thus, tacitly exculpating the play from what some might call an even deeper anti-Semitism than Marlowe’s. Shakespeare can do no wrong. He can see through false prejudices the way Superman can see through walls, and build us all a new Jew: it’s the New Historicist become bardolater.

  It was a dazzling performance, but clearly, a performance, a multi-suppositioned notion, with conjecture piled on conjecture. An elephant dancing on a shot glass mounted on top of a beach ball. It seemed to me that one could applaud it. It was his way of engaging with the text, his way of attempting to bring Shakespeare the man closer to Shakespeare the text. Or at least it brought Greenblatt the man closer to Shakespeare the text.

  To me the close examination of the way the variant versions of certain plays such as Hamlet and Lear interrogate each other may be less glamorous than a fantasy of some imagined Shakespeare in Love figure watching executions in London and suddenly feeling compassion for the Jews—less glamorous but in some way more genuinely exciting. Exciting because textual scholarship focuses close attention on conjecture about what Shakespeare wrote, and perhaps rewrote, and challenges us to ask why, and how we decide. It takes us inside Shakespeare’s actual language and characters rather than into a fantasy of his life. It allows us to imagine Shakespeare’s work through Shakespeare’s eyes, the eyes that could have reread, rethought, revised.

  So (and this is the point of my Greenblattian digression) I decided, when Greenblatt seated himself next to me during the dessert course, to ask him where he stood on the Lear revision question. After all, his Norton edition printed three versions of Lear: a Quarto and a Folio (on facing pages) and a traditional conflated edition with the editor, Barbara K. Lewalski’s, choice of the best bits from both Q and F incorporated.

  Clearly Greenblatt thought the contention over Lear texts was important enough to preserve the separation of Quarto and Folio texts that he adopted from Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells’s Oxford edition. But on the other hand he didn’t wish to commit himself to a strict anticonflationist dogma, thus the third, traditional conflated text as well. So I asked him over dessert: Did he think Shakespeare was a reviser, did Shakespeare revise Lear to the extent that the two versions are different enough to be considered not just separate texts but separate works of art?

  He did not give me a definitive answer; he circled around the question of whether the changes resulted from revision or errors of transmission, or the intervention of someone in the company. He communicated a sense that Shakespeare did revise, but rather than going further turned to the rest of the table and said, “Ron asked me a question that thirty-second-degree adepts of textual scholarship argue about.”

  The effect, if not the intent, of what he was saying was to dismiss the revision question, which in fact has been—most others agree—the single most divisive and important “site of contention” in Shakespeare scholarship for the past quarter century, as if it were merely an arcane (tacit implication: irrelevant) controversy of interest to specialists and pedants and decipherable only by them.

  I took it as a challenge. I felt I had succeeded in making the complex controversy over three Hamlets clear to New Yorker readers. Did Greenblatt think intelligent readers were incapable of appreciating the complexities of two Lears? I didn’t think they were.

  IN WHICH TWO ADEPTS ARE QUESTIONED

  And since the argument over texts and revision was still ongoing and evolving, I wanted to step back and examine the opposing points of view more closely before proceeding to the local question—if one can call such a profound problem “local”—of Lear’s last words.

  I wanted to begin by getting to know better the positions of two of the leading advocates for each pole of the revision question especially as it pertained to Lear—a revisionist and an antirevisionist. I chose two of the most adept of the thirty-second-degree adepts: Steven Urkowitz and Richard Knowles.

  What surprised me was that their positions were not simply oppositional, there was a complexity to both the revisionist and antirevisionist positions that had consequences for how one decides which version of the last words of Lear was more “Shakespearean.”

  Still, talking to Urkowitz and Knowles in succession about the two versions of Lear, and the two versions of how there came to be two versions, is akin to stepping back and forth between two visions of Shakespeare.

  I met Urkowitz, a founding figure of the Lear revisionists, a CCNY professor and professional theater director as well, at a restaurant near his Greenwich Village apartment.

  I told him abou
t Stephen Greenblatt’s “thirty-second-degree adept” remark about the controversy.

  Urkowitz responded by saying that one unfortunate consequence of defining the conflict as too arcane for ordinary readers is denying those outside the small circle of scholars the benefits of reflecting upon the differences, great and small, between the two Lears. “Knowing both versions can mean knowing each of them better.” It is the same, rather persuasive, argument Ann Thompson gives for introducing nonadepts (even undergraduates!) to the variations in the Hamlet texts.

  “That ‘thirty-second-degree adept’ response,” Urkowitz said, “has long been the authoritarian response to textual problems. It’s what Fredson Bowers back in the fifties and sixties was pushing, the idea that this is too complicated, leave it to us, dears …”

  “We’ll give you the texts and—”

  “It’s so condescending, it’s condescending because usually the people who say it have only minimal appreciation of how the texts work and differ dramatically.…”

  He goes on to denounce conflated texts from the perspective of a director who has found that stage directions from one version imported into another text’s version of a scene can render the scene incoherent dramatically and thematically.

  But before going further into the Urkowitz analysis of the two-text problem, let me introduce Richard Knowles, Urkowitz’s arch-foe in the Lear debate. (The one thing the two of them do agree on is that the two-Lear question is important outside a small circle of adepts.)

  You might recall Knowles from the previous chapter. It was his attack on the revisionists in the International Shakespeare Yearbook that brought pleasure to Frank Kermode—long a skeptic about the Revisers’ case—when I faxed it to him.

  Knowles is the editor of the Lear Variorum, the new Modern Language Association–sponsored compendium of textual and interpretive commentary designed to succeed the 1908 Furness version. As such Knowles is a powerful institutional figure. (He’s been working on the Variorum for more than two decades.) The closest thing to a king in the divided realm of King Lear studies. And yet his dogged opposition to the revisionists’ case has never seemed to me the product of an elitist possessiveness and resistance to “disintegration”—the division of his kingdom—on principle. He genuinely believes the arguments of the revisionists are flawed, even destructive in their implications.