The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  And so from the invented language in Persepolis he took his troupe to Africa, out to villages where no one had seen theater in any Western sense before, unrolling a carpet amidst mud huts and seeing what could hold the attention of these virgin spectators. It was a kind of madness, but he had a Pied Piper appeal: many people left their lives to follow Brook and never returned to them in any conventional sense even after Brook’s hejira ended.

  Then there was a flight into another kind of theatrical realm which seemed to offer a bottomless infinitude similar to Shakespeare’s: the years Brook spent transforming the many thousand pages of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata into a nine-hour theater experience.

  When I met with him in 1998 he’d been staging operas, most recently Carmen and Don Giovanni, but at the time he had no immediate plans to do any Shakespeare (although he conceded there were three plays that might tempt him—Othello, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet, which he’d last done in 1961 with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Paul Scofield playing the prince).

  So at the time I first met him Brook seemed a long way from Shakespeare. Someone who had gone deep inside Shakespeare, come out the other side perhaps. He was in other words the perfect person to ask the exceptionalist question about Shakespeare. And here is the hesitant, awkward way I raised the question.

  “You’re a man who has explored the great theaters of the world. Setting aside naïve bardolatry, is there something unique or exceptional about Shakespeare, something that makes Shakespeare a realm of its own beyond that which you’ve experienced in the theaters of other cultures, something that isn’t culture bound—”

  He interrupted me with a reply that was stunning in its unambiguous conviction:

  “I think he is a unique case and I think the uniqueness inheres in his generosity. I think there’s no one else who manages to insert himself totally in such a wide range of human beings. If you count how many human beings [he created] … That he could have, in the act of writing, instead of using them partly to express what he himself wants to say, lets them say what they want to say … to be such a highly developed, highly acute servant of other people’s truths is unique.”

  A “highly developed, highly acute servant of other people’s truths”—it occurred to me that Brook was, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not, describing his own relationship to Shakespeare’s “truths.”

  “One level of author, Shaw,” Brook continued, “uses his characters as his mouthpiece. The next level of author uses human beings but only aspects of them, their humanity is not complete; another level can give brief life but to a small cast, small parts. But Shakespeare’s sense of each character having endless facets so you can see year after year, after year, new interpretations can be given to any character and they’re always based on truths which are there—that is what is unique and I think this is inseparable from Shakespeare being so anonymous. One thing everyone can agree about him is that he is the least known of any great writer.”

  The so-called authorship obsessives, Brook says, the “anti-Stratfordians,” are misled by this anonymity into a search for someone else who “really” wrote Shakespeare, “quite simply because he does disappear, dissolve, parcel himself out to his characters”—an echo perhaps of Juliet’s line about cutting up Romeo and parceling his incandescence out to the night sky as stars.

  “And yet none of his plays could have been written by themselves,” Brook continued, “they have to have one person using the vision and craft of playwriting. For mysterious reasons this [Shakespeare] was the exception to every rule.”

  The exception to every rule. It’s a lovely way to express an exceptionalist position. A powerful and complex one as well. It defines Shakespeare’s exceptionalism in the negative, a negation of all rules. It goes along with what seems to be a similarly negative way of defining Shakespeare’s exceptional genius as a playwright: he’s someone who empties himself out. But it is not mere emptiness; the absence of evidence about him becomes something more than mere anonymity: it becomes a highly charged void.

  Brook invokes the imagery of infinitude when he speaks of the “endless facets” of Shakespeare’s characters, endlessness being the horizontal equivalent of bottomlessness’s depths, you might say.

  I was only beginning to become aware of what I now see as Brook’s preoccupation with the infinitude in Shakespeare. It was in fact at the close of this first interview that Brook called my attention to a lecture he’d recently given in Berlin, the one published in the slim book Evoking Shakespeare. The one in which Brook spoke of the way “each line of Shakespeare is an atom. The energy that can be released is infinite—if we can split it open.”

  I’d come to suspect that Brook’s sense of Shakespeare’s exceptionalism and his preoccupation with Shakespeare’s apparently bottomless infinitude are linked: that the latter is at the heart of the former. And so when I learned, some two and a half years after my first interview with Brook, that he was coming back to New York again, this time with a Shakespearean production, a controversial Hamlet, I made a determined effort to secure another interview. For me, by that time, after some two years of working on this book, Brook had grown even more in importance. I felt gratified that I might have another chance to get to the bottom of the question of bottomlessness with Brook.

  Indeed there was a kind of Brookian convergence in the spring of 2001. In addition to Brook himself bringing his Hamlet to New York for a one-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there was another Hamlet on a near-collision course with Brook’s: the Royal National Theatre (artistic director: Trevor Nunn) version of Hamlet, directed by John Caird and starring Simon Russell Beale. But featuring—and here my heart stood still when I found out—Sara Kestelman, the brilliant redheaded actress who had been Brook’s leading lady in the Dream, playing both Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and Titania, Queen of the Fairies, now playing another queen, the tormented Gertrude in Hamlet.

  Sara Kestelman not only played a goddess role in the Dream, she played a heroic role in my life—in the meta-drama that erupted the second time I saw Brook’s Dream. When the production came to Broadway and a fire broke out on stage in the fifth-act wedding banquet scene, and the audience began a dangerously panicked exit from the theater until—as I recall it—Ms. Kestelman stepped forward to prevent the comedy from turning into a tragedy by insisting the crowd not panic. At least I thought it was her—my interviews with Brook, Ms. Kestelman and later John Kane, who played Puck, raised new questions about the source of the Mysterious Voice who intervened to prevent the Dream from turning into a nightmare.

  ENTER “THE SECRET PLAY”

  Meanwhile as Brook and his Queen from the Dream were heading to New York, I was heading for the hospital for a fairly serious operation, one I actually postponed to make sure I would be able to see the two Hamlets and secure interviews with Brook and Kestelman. I have a feeling that the imminence of the surgery, the pain I experienced during the postponement, was less important than a different kind of pain: my conviction—my delusion—that I had somehow failed utterly during my interview with Brook three days before the Embarrassing Incident. Failed to get to the bottom of his bottomlessness. It meant so much to me by that time to get at least a glimpse of what it was like to see Shakespeare through Peter Brook’s eyes, and somehow I was certain that I’d failed. So convinced was I of my failure that it took a full eight months before I could force myself to listen to the tape of my interview with Brook and realize how much was there. Realize that in my pain I had blocked out some remarkable things Brook said on the question of infinitude, bottomlessness and Shakespeare’s “metaphysical dimension.”

  I’ll get to those things, but on the evening of the Embarrassing Incident as I raced up the steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music it seemed to me 1) this was the last chance I’d get to hear Brook and get to the bottom of his vision, and 2) even that chance was slipping away from me because a traffic tie-up on the Brooklyn Bridge had made me very late. When I arrived breathless
at the top balcony of the BAM Rose Theater, scene of Brook’s “BAM dialogue,” Brook had already been speaking for at least twenty minutes, and it seemed I’d missed the beginning of some strange but fascinating Brookian riff that involved percentages. One that led to the even more provocative notion of the “secret play.” I was bitter at myself, convinced it would be too late for me to ever reconstruct it and apprehend it in its entirety.

  Things started to go wrong as soon as I whipped out my tape recorder to catch what Brook was saying. And was almost immediately busted by one of the BAM monitors who instructed me that no taping was allowed. Shamed, I stumbled down the steeply raked steps of the small auditorium and found a place to hide on the side, although I found it hard to focus my attention again until I heard Brook utter the phrase “secret play.”

  Fortunately, even though I wasn’t allowed to tape, there was an official BAM tape being made of the occasion, and a couple of months later, after I got out of the hospital, I persuaded the people at BAM to play for me, over the phone, the recording of what I’d missed, of what led up to that mystifying “secret play” disclosure.

  Brook led up to the notion of a secret play by suggesting a sort of secret play going on within Shakespeare.

  He began with a deceptively simple inquiry: Just how alive was William Shakespeare?

  “With Shakespeare I like to stick to things that are beyond dispute,” he began. “And one of the few things we can say about Shakespeare that is beyond dispute is that he was alive. But to say someone is alive is not enough. You can be one percent alive, you can be twenty percent alive. With Shakespeare one has something very extraordinary: a man who was not only one hundred percent alive, but perhaps a thousand, even ten thousand—a million percent alive. Now what is the difference between being one percent, ten percent, a thousand percent alive?

  “This person walking through the streets of London [Shakespeare] must have lived each single moment with an incredible richness of awareness. So many levels, infinite levels of meaning.”

  Infinite levels of meaning! It becomes clear that what Brook has been leading up to with his deceptively simple discourse about percentages of aliveness is the phenomenon of infinitude.

  “A million percent alive,” I’d suggest, is actually a way of expressing that specific recurrent preoccupation of Peter Brook: the challenging, dizzying, even destabilizing apprehension of bottomlessness, endlessness, limitlessness in Shakespeare’s work. Brook seems to be suggesting that it is a reflection of some state of being, some state of dizzying elevation within Shakespeare’s mind. A state Shakespeare sought—at times at least—to evoke, to conjure up in his work.

  Consider that moment when Edgar is conjuring up the dizzying view from the top of Dover Cliffs for his blind father, Gloucester. Edgar warns “How fearful/And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!… I’ll look no more,/Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight/Topple down headlong.”

  This last moment is particularly apropos because Edgar is trying to explain, conjure up the vista, the visual experience of dizzying bottomlessness to a blind man, with words. And, in a way, Brook is trying to be our Edgar, to make apparent to us in our blindness, the infinitude that can be glimpsed in Shakespeare, indeed within a single line.

  I was fascinated by Brook’s use of numbers to invoke this vision; it seemed oversimplified to quantify it. But looked at more closely, listened to reflectively rather than in the hectic circumstances at the BAM dialogue and the Embarrassing Public Incident, the choice of numbers is suggestive.

  If one hundred percent alive is almost by definition as alive as one could be, that is already, one might say, infinitely alive. Then a thousand, ten thousand, one million percent alive, are what you might call transfinite levels of aliveness. “Transfinite” in the sense that Georg Cantor, the inventor of the mathematics of infinity, meant the word when he was the first to categorize the “transfinite numbers”—degrees of infinity beyond the infinite. For instance, the way the infinity of integers—1, 2, 3, 4—while undeniably infinite, endless, bottomless, must necessarily be a lesser level of infinity than the infinity of the number of points on a line. Because the latter would include all the fractional points between the points on a line represented by the integers.

  It is not without interest or significance, I believe, that, as I recently learned, Cantor was widely supposed to have been driven mad by the contemplation of the ultimate unbearable enigma of bottomlessness—“the continuum problem”—and had to spend much of the latter half of his life in a residence for the mentally disturbed. During which time Cantor became obsessed with Shakespeare. He became a Baconian enthusiast who believed Shakespeare encoded cabalistically in his language hidden revelations about its true author—a Gnostic version of the search for the true occluded deity which is a different kind of “authorship” question. (The Gnostics—some of them—believed it was not God but a lesser demon who is the author of our world.)

  So in speaking in thousand and million percentages Brook is trying in a way to open our mind to what it’s like to gaze into Shakespeare’s mind. For Brook the lip of the stage is like the cliff’s edge in Lear: the boundary of a bottomless abyss.

  “When I say ‘infinite levels of meaning,’ ” Brook continued, “the only reason his plays are redone, rediscovered for centuries, is the phenomenon that a line of ten syllables has within it level after level of meaning.

  “But where did these meanings [the infinite levels within the line] come from?” Brook asks. “From his surroundings, yes. This extraordinary person hearing the sounds around him, hearing through his eyes.”

  Did I hear that right? “Hearing through his eyes”? It seems as if Brook is making an explicit reference to the language of synesthesia Bottom used to describe his dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen” the stuff of Bottom’s Dream, the dream that “hath no bottom.”

  In doing so Brook comes close to suggesting that Shakespeare had some version of Bottom’s Dream, or experienced, walking through the streets of London, some analogy to Bottom’s synesthesia. Brook goes on to conjure up what he imagines it’s like to, well, hear through Shakespeare’s eyes, you might say:

  “He can overhear and notice two kinds of things: all the life and noise pouring out with great excitement. Yet at the same time, even though he’s a very practical man, he can evoke in words faraway worlds, strange tales, astonishing ideas, and develop and link them to an intimation of meaning in society, in regard to the gods, a sense of cosmic reality—these were all pulsing through his mind, all these levels at the same time.”

  Pulsation and simultaneity. I’ll be dwelling further on Peter Brook’s pairing of these phenomena in chapter 13, in which I explore the way Stephen Booth’s exegesis of the Sonnets transforms them into exquisite devices that produce a sense of pulsation and simultaneity in the reader—the sort that shocked me when I first experienced just that, banging chalk on a blackboard in a Yale classroom.

  But at this point Brook shifted from a discussion of Shakespeare’s mind to that of his audience, a discussion which leads up to his disclosure of the notion of a “secret play.”

  “He didn’t have a lot of quiet, attentive people in a dark room such as this,” Brook said. “It was, rather, the most mixed audience that ever existed in the theater: thieves, pickpockets, whores, drunks, half-drunks, brawling in fights. As well of course as the bourgeoisie, there for entertainment, sophisticates looking for things that are sharp, witty, erudite. It is difficult to understand how deeply difficult the task was: Shakespeare at every moment had to bring all those along. Because if you learn anything from the theater it’s that if you lose part of an audience, you’re dead. The work is to bring them all together into one organism beating with one heart.…”

  By now he had the audience at the BAM dialogue “beating with one heart.”

  All of which, this discourse on the audience, was preparation for his conjecture—no, his lived certainty—about Shak
espeare’s work:

  “In all his plays there is the outer life of the play and the inner life of the play. Sometimes within one single line—which on the surface is so clear it registers in the most crude, vulgar level, yet within that line there may be an adjective, some vibrant word that both keeps that clarity on the surface, but at the same time suggests something way beyond it.”

  Something way beyond it! Is he speaking here of the infinite energies released by splitting open a line of Shakespeare, or does that “vibrant word” unlock something else?

  “Plays exist for one purpose only: to be brought to life. To be this million percent alive. A performance should bring the plays, with the audience, to the highest level of life within them.”

  So that’s where the million percent enters the picture. But it is here he gets into strange territory:

  “In every play there is the inner play. When we were doing Midsummer Night’s Dream with the actors we called it the secret play. It can’t be analyzed, it can’t be described, it can only be experienced. But the secret cannot be unveiled unless there is also the outer play, aware of the needs of the theater and audience. Shakespeare used all the conventions of his time. That is why today one has to balance these two aspects. What is the inner aspect, what is the secret play? It’s why we bother to do Shakespeare instead of any given modern story: The secret play of Shakespeare is deeper, finer, more important to us than any other writer.”

  What was fascinating and frustrating to me about this notion of the “secret play”—and what lent urgency to my impatience with the long-winded questioner who was bent on demonstrating how familiar he was with aspects of Brook utterly irrelevant to that question or to Brook’s talk in general—was Brook’s insistence that this experience of the secret play is not one that can be obtained from reading and interpreting, even from seeing and apprehending the plays. But rather that it may be the esoteric possession of players and directors alone—because it can only be experienced in rehearsing and staging the play.