The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But Brook was onto something even deeper I suspected. Of course for centuries there have been poets, lovers and madmen who have claimed to have discovered secret codes, secret messages, secret anagrams, secret authors, secret esoteric doctrines embedded in the language of Shakespeare.

  But this was Peter Brook, someone who had brought Shakespeare to life in a way that few others in a century have. When Peter Brook speaks of coming upon a “secret play,” it carries with it some authority. He’s been inside the plays, deep inside, he’s gotten a glimpse of the bottomlessness, he returns to report that one thing one discovers in the process of staging them—knowledge apparently privy only to those on the other side of the footlights from us—is something, some experience he calls a “secret play.”

  I was suddenly immensely envious of that experience, that knowledge. But beyond that it struck a chord because it recalled to me a momentary disclosure of some secret level of apprehension, the one I experienced while attempting to unfold the secrets of the Sonnets to my class of freshmen. It made sense in a way: it makes sense that the secrets of a musical composition for instance are more likely to disclose themselves to the musicians who play it than to mere listeners.

  In the month after recovering from my operation—which followed a week after the Embarrassing Incident—I made it a point to look into the literature on Brook, and to make contact with two cast members from the Dream, to investigate just what Brook was talking about when he talked about “the secret play.”

  Most indications are that the concept emerged in the course of producing the Dream, although one study of Brook’s work reports that in the “late sixties Brook would talk of the existence of a secret play beneath the text and encourage the actors to burrow for it.”

  But Brook began work on the Dream in late 1969, so this could well be what David Selbourne reported on in his valuable but hard-to-locate rehearsal diary of Brook’s Dream, which I found in the Royal Shakespeare Company archives at Stratford.

  “On the first day of rehearsal,” Selbourne reports, Brook met with the Mechanicals alone and after rehearsing their various professional duties—Bottom the weaver, Flute the bellows-mender, etc.—Brook had the actors playing the Mechanicals read through the entire text of the Dream, taking all the parts.

  Then on the second day of rehearsal, “Brook talked to the actors about ‘seeking out the mystery’ in a play in which there is a ‘reality beyond description,’ after which he asked actors to explore sounds ‘unrelated to verbal equivalents.’ He then took the actors into a reading, asking them to ‘remember the sounds which came upon the deepest impulse.’ At the end of the reading Brook told the actors that the very last stanzas of the Dream are ‘the most inner portion of the whole drama: tantalizingly close to something secret and mysterious. We approach here whatever is behind the whole play’ ” (italics mine).

  Why the “very last stanzas,” ones that are often dismissed, or ignored anyway, as comic doggerel, part of the fairy fantasy that made the play seem sadly antiquated to many over the centuries?

  Those “very last stanzas”: The wedding banquet has concluded; the “entertainment”—The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby—the inadvertently farcical tragedy put on by the Mechanicals led by Bottom the weaver, comes to an end with Theseus gently cautioning the aristocratic critics of the poor mechanical players with the lovely line, “The best in this kind are but shadows.”

  The revels are now over, “the iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve,” the Duke intones, “Lovers, to bed, ’tis almost fairy time.”

  The three newlywed royal couples go off to consummate their nuptials in the chambers of the palace. And then Puck emerges with a broom and the final stanzas Brook refers to as the locus of something “secret and mysterious” commence:

  Here is how Puck begins:

  Now the hungry lion roars,

  And the wolf behowls the moon;

  Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,

  All with weary task foredone.

  Now the wasted brands do glow,

  Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,

  Puts the wretch that lies in woe

  In remembrance of a shroud.

  Now it is the time of night

  That the graves, all gaping wide,

  Every one lets forth his sprite

  In the church-way paths to glide.

  And we fairies, that do run

  By the triple Hecat’s team

  From the presence of the sun,

  Following darkness like a dream,

  Now are frolic. Not a mouse

  Shall disturb this hallowed house.

  I am sent with broom before

  To sweep the dust behind the door.

  [emphasis mine]

  Look at the world Puck conjures up, in order to apprehend its darkness. One has to overcome centuries of sentimentalizing of “fairies” as cutesy fairytale creatures to see fairy nature “red in tooth and claw.” Forget the lion’s roar, the wolf’s howl, the screech-owl putting “the wretch that lies in woe/In remembrance of a shroud.” What is about to take place in the darkness outside the newlyweds’ rooms is a horrific dance of death: “the graves, all gaping wide,/Every one lets forth his sprite.”

  The fairies are identified as minions of Hecate, the witch-queen of hell, “Following darkness like a dream.” What is being disclosed more explicitly here, what Brook may have been referring to, is the darkness of the Dream. This is a Faustian incantation.

  After Puck’s invocation to the spirits emerging from hell, the King and Queen of the Fairies, the newly reconciled Oberon and Titania, emerge and give orders to their accompanying fairies to fend off the hell spawn. At last Oberon pronounces the protective blessing which mainly involves protecting the newlyweds’ newly conceived issue from birth defects. The dance and blessing are designed to prevent “the blots of Nature’s hand.”

  Then Oberon and Titania depart and Puck takes the stage alone, and directly addresses us, the audience. With an “assault on mercy” one might say:

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended,

  That you have but slumb’red here,

  While these visions did appear.

  And this weak and idle theme,

  No more yielding but a dream,

  Gentles, do not reprehend.

  If you pardon, we will mend.

  And, as I am an honest Puck,

  If we have unearned luck

  Now to scape the serpent’s tongue,

  We will make amends ere long;

  Else the Puck a liar call.

  So, good night unto you all.

  Give me your hands, if we befriends,

  And Robin shall restore amends.

  So where is the secret play in these last stanzas, which are essentially spells cast upon players by the superhuman crew? Spells to ward off evil, spells to ward off misconception, the nightmare of history outside the circumscribed glow of the stage. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I can’t say for sure this was what Brook was referring to, but I think it had something to do with the play itself as spell. With the Dream as spell. A work of theater that works like a love potion dropped into the eyes of the audience.

  A play as love potion that is designed to alter the way we see things ever after. In the play the love potion works to induce love-at-first-sight, mad love with the first being one sees when one opens one’s spellbound eyes. Was the secret play about learning how to turn a text into a spell, a theatrical incantation?

  It certainly worked on me long beyond that one night’s magic. It worked in a profound, ever-deepening way on me, cast a spell over my life. It worked even more powerfully on others for whom Peter Brook became a kind of Pied Piper leading them across continents, consuming their lives under his spell.

  Another interesting stray indication that others think of the play as spells has to do with its use as a counterspell to the dark spell of
“the Scottish play.”

  It was fascinating to discover, cumulatively, how just about every actor and just about every director I’ve spoken to in the course of writing this book will refer to Macbeth only as “the Scottish play.” I thought it was a joke, the superstition that saying “Macbeth” out loud brings bad luck. And it is a joke, on one level, I’m sure. But it is also among the most pervasive and persistent theatrical superstitions.* The spell of which will not be diminished by the fact that the curse of “the Scottish play”—the historicity, the origin and meaning of the belief that saying the name “Macbeth” casts an evil spell upon anyone who utters it—was the subject that dominated SHAKSPER, the leading Shakespeare scholars’ electronic discussion list in America, on September 10, 2001.

  It was in the course of this online discussion that I first learned that the only remedy for the supposed “Scottish play” spell, the only possible counterspell to quell the evil before it was too late, was to instantly recite some verses from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Good magic could drive out bad magic.

  Please understand: I’m not endorsing these superstitions, what I’m saying is that it is testament to the belief that the Dream has some numinous incantatory power which Brook may be referring to as its “secret play.”

  More explicit, less suspect and superstitious authority for the notion of a “secret play” in general in Shakespeare can be found in an unusual passage in another play that seems inserted specifically to suggest just such a notion.

  As I was writing this chapter I was also watching a tape of the BBC-TV production of Romeo and Juliet and found myself arrested by a passage I’d long overlooked, one that almost seems as if Shakespeare were directing our attention to the notion of a secret play. It’s a passage in which Juliet’s mother is rhapsodizing over the qualities of Paris, the man Juliet’s father proposes she marry. In a fourteen-line passage which works as a dramatic sonnet in itself—almost as if composed separately—she compares Paris to a book and asks Juliet:

  Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face,

  And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen;

  Examine every married lineament,

  And see how one another lends content;

  And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies

  Find written in the margent of his eyes.

  This precious book of love, this unbound lover,

  To beautify him, only lacks a cover.

  The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride

  For fair without the fair within to hide.

  That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory,

  That in gold clasps locks in the golden story;

  So shall you share all that he doth possess,

  By having him, making yourself no less.

  [emphasis mine]

  The gold clasps that lock in the golden story. Yes, on the surface it’s just Juliet’s mother describing the beauty of her prospective bridegroom, or the secrets that will be unlocked by marriage. But on another level it’s about a book, a text that has a secret story locked within it. The secret story to be found “within to hide,” obscured from the direct glance perhaps, only to be found “written in the margent.”

  Only by finding that secret story can one then “share all that he [the author of the secret story, that is Shakespeare] doth possess.”

  Does the secret story (the secret play?) in Romeo and Juliet also partake in the mystery of infinitude? Well, Juliet does invoke it, doesn’t she, when in the balcony scene she tells Romeo she gave him her love before he requested it, and wishes she could withdraw it, to give it again, because:

  My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

  My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

  The more I have, for both are infinite.

  I’ll return to the whole notion that there is a secret play beneath each play—and to the debate over whether there is a secret play that underlies all the plays—but I want to get back to Peter Brook at BAM that night in 2001 and the way he related the notion of the secret play to Hamlet, both play and person, and then to “the person who was Shakespeare.”

  He moved from the idea of the inner and the outer play—and the way Shakespeare played to audiences with multiple levels of awareness—to the play going on within Shakespeare.

  “That,” he said, “is the whole complex art of Shakespeare. A complex art that only comes into being if the person who was Shakespeare kept all those whirling levels within him.”

  All those whirling levels. He’s speaking of the mind of Shakespeare as if it were a cosmos, at the very least a microcosm of the cosmos, with infinite levels ever deepening-unto-bottomlessness like a whirlpool in the waves, or, indeed, the whirling internal structure of the atom—the source of its “infinite energies.” A mind that is a model of creation, or vice versa. A mind that Brook suddenly, unexpectedly (to me anyway) but unforgettably, suggests is a model of the mind of Hamlet.

  Hamlet, Brook says, “is perhaps the only model one can have for Shakespeare’s mind.” And what does the mind of Hamlet indicate about the mind of Shakespeare? Brook seems to be saying it has something to do with the tragic burden of bottomlessness.

  “Who was Hamlet?” Brook asks. “Not just a prince, a courtier, a son with Oedipal problems,” not, in other words, all the other reductive theories of who Hamlet was. What was it that made Hamlet exceptional? “Who was Hamlet but a man, a brilliant but normal person who nonetheless exhibited a million percent vitality.”

  So that’s another thing this million percent figure is about. It’s an almost deliberately, flamboyantly vulgar way of specifying richness beyond vulgar quantification, someone who has within him the vision of bottomless infinitude.

  “Now,” he said, “we are very close to what is the mystery of Hamlet.”

  Again, when Peter Brook says we are very close to the mystery of Hamlet, a mystery that has confounded four centuries of investigation, conjecture and debate by poets, madmen and lovers, attention must be paid. It seems that what he’s saying is that the mystery, the secret of Hamlet is the mystery, the tragedy, of bottomless consciousness. Of what it is to walk around with that kind of awareness. The same burden of awareness Brook suggested Shakespeare walked around with. And so what Brook is suggesting is that, in this aspect at least, Hamlet is the closest thing to a portrait of Shakespeare’s mind. When you think about it, the other characters in Shakespeare who suggest self-portrait, a portrait of Shakespeare the writer—Mercutio, Falstaff, and Bottom—each to a different degree, in a different mode, are burdened by knowing too much. Bottom having just had his dream of bottomlessness. Mercutio, someone for whom language itself is a dizzying spiral into which he almost disappears. Falstaff plumbing the bottomless depths of his own lies.

  What does it mean to say the “tragedy” of bottomless consciousness? For one thing awareness of the notion of infinitude, which was only just coming into focus in Shakespeare’s time, can be a destabilizing burden. We’ve seen how contemplation of the maddening paradoxes of transfinite mathematics may have driven their inventor, Georg Cantor, to the madhouse, where he became a Shakespeare obsessive. Not only was the notion of infinitude, or the contemplation of it, relatively new in Shakespeare’s time, it was also still controversial. If it drove Cantor mad it drove Giordano Bruno to the stake, where the church burned this Shakespeare contemporary for thinking about such things.

  As a scholar noted in The Shakespeare Newsletter: “Shakespeare’s use of the term ‘infinite space’ in Hamlet … invoked the new concept of the infinity of the universe: ‘O God I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.’ Ideas of the infinity of space or the universe had been discussed by Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century in his famous theological dictum that God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere [stop and think about that for a moment; it’s dizzying]…. Giordano Bruno lecturing and publishing in England from 1583 to 1588 played an important r
ole in the spread of the concept of the infinity of the universe in … writing ‘There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call “Void” … this space we declare to be infinite.’ Bruno … related his hypothesis of an infinite world in an infinite space to the Copernican solar theory.” And died for it: the church burned him as a heretic when he returned to Rome in 1600.

  This scholar concludes of Shakespeare’s recurrent reference to the infinite:

  “There is no reason to believe that anyone in Renaissance England would know or write about infinite space unless he had been exposed to Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas Digges or Giordano Bruno. Copernicus had hedged on the concept of the infinity of the universe. Kepler later rejected the concept. But Shakespeare acknowledges its possibility.”

  But as Eliot put it, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Such knowledge is a burden, as Brook puts it, to “an otherwise ordinary man walking around” both elevated and burdened by being a million percent alive to the infinitude of creation. Burdened by living with the dizzying apprehension of limitlessness, and the contrary exacerbated awareness of personal limitation—the rock bottom realities of flesh and blood, the unforgiving deadline of mortality. The mind that is indeed “king of infinite space” but also “bounded in a nutshell.”

  So that was Peter Brook at BAM invoking the unbearable burden of infinitude in Shakespeare. It left many questions. And what surprised me when I finally forced myself to listen to the tape of my interview with Brook, which had taken place a few days earlier, was that he answered some of those questions, and deepened others, as he returned to his near-obsession with the infinitude one encounters in engaging with Shakespeare.

  I’m still not sure why I had blocked out some of the exciting things Brook said to me in the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel lounge on that occasion. Perhaps because they were unbearably exciting and I was not in the most stable state imaginable when our talk took place, having gotten virtually no sleep the night before, because of preoperative pain and preinterview anxiety.