The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “It showed me clearly an awareness of the physicality of theatricality that is so much part of my experience of the theater.”

  In a sense, as well, Stephen Booth’s way of looking at Shakespeare’s dramatic works came to focus on finding the holes, the trapdoors, in the text, the holes that make for a greater whole.

  But the other formative stage experience for Booth, he told me, was a remarkable King Lear. It was not too surprising to hear that Lear should affect him so deeply so early. In preparing for our talk I’d come upon an essay in which Booth described the climactic moments of Lear—when Lear learns that Cordelia’s reprieve from execution arrives too late, and Lear comes on stage bearing his daughter’s body and literally howling with grief—as “the most terrifying five minutes in literature.” Terrifying in particular for the way it recurrently raises hopes and then crushes them.

  “I saw my first Lear at the age of twenty-two. And there was this fellow named Paul Devlin who was in his late twenties or early thirties who was apparently sensationally good at Lear [who is, in the play, an octogenarian] but not good at anything else. He played Lear at the Brattle Theatre,” near Harvard, where Booth was writing his soon-to-be-legendary Ph.D. thesis on the Sonnets.

  “I went to it and that was the point where I really got hooked. Lear was on the heath and his hair was full of cornstarch” (to whiten and age his appearance). “But Devlin’s hair still wasn’t fully white and he was standing there and Jerry Kilty who was playing the Fool was crouched at Lear’s feet, but still taller than his head, and the cornstarch floated up into Kilty’s nostrils and Kilty sneezed” into Lear’s hair, causing an explosion of cornstarch.

  It sounds like a comic moment, the sneeze and the cloud of cornstarch. But Booth saw something more, something strange through the cloud:

  “So what I was seeing was a tiny little man [the Fool] crouched at the feet of a tall man [Lear], and what was obviously there was a man [Kilty] taller than the ‘tall man’ [Devlin] who was crouched at his feet but his head was above the head.… It was dazzling.”

  In other words, in real life, Devlin was shorter than Kilty, but his theatrical stature was something else again. (I think.)

  “The theatrical illusion [of Lear being taller than the taller Fool] was so complete it was almost like a hallucination then?” I asked Booth.

  “Yes, it was like that. And the thing I keep talking about all the time is the essential fact, the essential pleasure we get from drama is generally that one is always looking at two things: what one is being shown and what one is seeing. This is the quintessential example of that.”

  What one is being shown, versus what one is seeing? Disjuncture is a recurrent theme, virtually a founding principle of Booth’s later criticism. The pleasure to be derived from the disjuncture between the two, an awareness of doubleness, of similitude and difference. Or as Wordsworth puts it in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in a quote which, it turns out, is a keynote to Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets: the pleasure received in literature has much to do with “the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude and dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds and their chief feeder. From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite and all the passions connected with it, take their origin.”

  It seemed of interest, in the light of his focus on literary pleasure, that Booth recalled for me a dream he had at about the time he was writing his Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets some thirty-five years ago. The dream involved—on the surface at least—his dilemma about whether to remain at Harvard after completing his dissertation on the Sonnets or to accept offers elsewhere, including Berkeley (where he eventually ended up). But I think there was more to it than that.

  There was a powerful professor at Harvard whom Booth didn’t feel in synch with when it came to what to focus on in Shakespeare studies. The professor (whom Booth did not want me to name) was known for his detailed studies of Shakespeare’s playhouses, his audiences, the material conditions in which Elizabethan drama in general was performed.

  “I had a dream,” Booth told me, that “X [the professor he’d rather not name] came into my room with a freshly baked potato and told me he knew how long it took to bake a potato and that from that he’d know how long it took to bake a chocolate pie. And I realized,” Booth told me, “this was information I didn’t want to acquire.”

  In other words, if I can play dream interpreter, or at least dream close reader, here, Booth was in the process of realizing that the academic emphasis at that particular time at Harvard on the analysis of the mechanics of Elizabethan theater in general (i.e., the baked potato offered by the starchy professor) was nothing to be sneered at, solid and nourishing, yes. But in the dream Booth was experiencing resistance to the idea that this kind of analysis was the way to get closer to the uniquely rich pleasures of Shakespeare, i.e., the chocolate pie.

  In support of this conjecture about chocolate and pleasure and Shakespeare—and the source of the shift in critical fashion Booth’s Essay may have precipitated, I’d cite the conclusion of a paper Booth wrote in the late seventies on the second of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. When I reached him on the phone in Berkeley some months after I’d first met him he told me he’d like to send along a few other papers of his that represented his recent direction in criticism more fully. And this Henry IV, Part 2 paper was one of them.

  The Henry IV paper was fascinating in several respects but particularly for illustrating the tendency of Booth’s criticism, when approaching Shakespeare’s dramatic works, to look for holes, for trapdoors in the surface of the language, trapdoors such as the one in the Litchfield Theater Hamlet that made him aware, in a double sense, of his theatrical experience.

  The trapdoors, the disjunctions in Henry IV, Part 2, Booth argues, have to do with expectations raised and then frustrated. Part 2, you’ll recall, the somewhat darker sequel to the first Falstaff play, builds up in Falstaff hopes of acquiring power and influence when his tavern crony Prince Hal becomes King Henry V, only to see them dashed in a crushing way in what is known as “the rejection scene.” (“I know thee not, old man.”) Booth argues that audiences are likely to experience recurrent premonitory versions of this disappointment embedded in the language of the play.

  It’s about pleasure, the expectation of it, the loss of it. In the remarkable final sentences of his Henry IV paper he suggests that “Shakespeare elsewhere experiments successfully with frustrating audiences’ dramatic expectations and withholding their moral and esthetic prerequisites, but in 2 Henry IV, although he may succeed in the perverse rhetorical purposes I propose, he does not succeed in making his audience like it. I like thinking about it but I do not like it—do not like it as I like 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Twelfth Night and chocolate bars. Do you? (in answering that question, do not let yourself be led astray by reason).”

  Remarkable for one of America’s leading Shakespearean exegetes to close a densely argued textual essay with a question about chocolate bars. But it’s a characteristically sly, dry, Boothian question about pleasure—and reason.

  Chocolate bars, chocolate pie? This is a critic who is serious about pleasure, but serious in a literary way. The appearance of chocolate pie in the dream, chocolate bars in the paper about 2 Henry IV and the emphasis on sensual, even sexual pleasure (in the Wordsworth quote about similitude and dissimilitude in poetry), reflect a fascination with pleasure in literature, in Shakespeare specifically. But it is not so much hedonistic, orgiastic pleasure for Booth as it is the graceful pleasure evoked in the mind as it finds itself impelled to graceful balletic leaps, thrilling gymnastic twists and turns in the experience of reading Shakespeare’s poetry. The way Shakespearean language can choreograph the mind. This experience, the reader’s experience of being transported, a special kind of graceful “transport,” is one that later in a phone conversation Booth would analogize to “pole-vaulting on the moon.”

  But just as a
thrill ride or even a rapid elevator lift will cause in some a feeling of both thrill and queasiness in the stomach, just as “pole-vaulting on the moon” may engender a fear of pole-vaulting off the moon perhaps, into cold deep space, the focus on the pleasure to be found enfolded in the language, the rush of pleasure opened up by Boothian close reading may have provoked a counterreaction.

  This was something—my Theory of Theory and the terror of pleasure that lies beneath it—that began to dawn on me as I prepared to drive south to Staunton, Virginia, to the scholars’ conference where I first hoped to meet Stephen Booth. As I searched frantically but fruitlessly to find a copy of Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as I reimmersed myself in the four hundred pages of footnotes and commentary in his still very-much-in-print Yale University Press edition of the Sonnets, I returned again to that strange destabilizing experience I had at Yale when teaching the Sonnets, and to the paradoxes in that sequence that had destabilized me so memorably. That cluster of sonnets beginning with 39 and continuing to 45 is a sequence riddled (in every sense of the word “riddled”) with flickering multilayered polysemous wordplay.

  It’s a sequence (39–45) at the heart of a peculiarly Shakespearean preoccupation: to be or not to be one, or twinned, or, alternately, both simultaneously. In this sequence the speaker begins to worry over, to worry to death—or worry into life—the paradox of two lovers being both one and two selves. United by love, although separated by geography. The paradox that results from their being Together in the most profound metaphysical ways, yet separated in the most petty physical ones, so that in some ways they are united and divided, twinned and twain, double and singular selves at the same time, or in rapidly flickering pulsation.

  Sonnet 40 may be the most dramatic, dazzling and destabilizing of all 154 fourteen-line engines of pleasure and derangement.

  Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all,

  What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

  No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call,

  All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.

  Then if for my love thou my love receivest,

  I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest,

  But yet be blam’d, if thou this self deceivest

  By willful taste of what thyself refusest.

  I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief,

  Although thou steal thee all my poverty;

  And yet love knows it is a greater grief

  To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.

  Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,

  Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.

  The drama stems from the inciting incident: The narrator is in love with someone who has just stolen away the narrator’s (somewhat lesser) beloved or mistress. Just how much lesser is evident from the dismissive opening line:

  Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all …

  He then goes on to make an elaborate argument that, for several complicated reasons, stealing his lover means stealing nothing, or at least gaining nothing:

  What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

  No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call,

  All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.

  So far barely understandable, or at least paraphrasable: Everything that was his—the speaker’s—was already his lover’s. So his lover taking his (the speaker’s) other lover from him wasn’t getting him (the primary beloved) anything he didn’t already have.

  But then in the next quatrain, things get really complicated. The apparently maddened speaker can’t let go of the conceit and ties himself into mental knots elaborating upon it:

  Then if for my love thou my love receivest,

  I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest,

  But yet be blam’d, if thou this self deceivest

  By willful taste of what thyself refusest.

  Indulge me: read that over (at least) twice and notice how it drives you not merely to the brink of comprehension but over the cliff of incomprehension, virtually into the abyss of destabilization.

  Consider Stephen Booth’s annotation, just of the first line, of that increasingly complicated quatrain:

  5. “Then if for my love thou my love receivest …” For, love, and receivest each has several appropriate and syntactically available meanings here; some of their many combinations are these: (1) if, out of affection for me (for love of me), you take my mistress; (2) if, because of my affection for you, you courteously welcome my mistress; (3) if, for yours (as your possession—you being my love, my beloved), you take my mistress; (4) if, in place of my affection, you take my mistress; (5) if you understand my mistress to be my true-love; (6) if you understand what I feel for my mistress to be love; (7) if, because of my affection for you (or yours for me), you accept (or suffer) my affection.

  Try reading aloud Booth’s seven-part explication of the ambiguities; it’s criticism that rises to the level of poetry itself. Booth’s footnote to line 5 in which he unfolds the dazzling multiplicity of possible meanings of “for,” “love” and “receivest,” and how each shift in meaning in one unfolds multiple shifts in the others, is an example of the polysemous pleasures of his reading of the Sonnets. Pleasures that almost threaten to dissolve not just the singularity of meaning—but the singularity of self.

  Booth doesn’t encourage one to choose one particular combination of “for,” “love” or “receivest” but rather to contemplate—to revel in—the way the multiple possibilities are choreographed. Change one’s way of looking at one word’s connotation and the other two dance to a new tune. Look at another word through a different lens and the others shift into a new focus. It’s a dizzying but pleasurable destabilization. One won’t crack one’s head open going off this cliff, but it might open the mind in a way it hasn’t been opened before. Something Boothian commentary tries to celebrate. To celebrate the way the words and meanings in effect enact a beautiful and pleasurable dance of significations in which one possible meaning of “for” might combine with four other possibilities for “receivest” and then four more for “love” in an exponentially more complex and yet deeply pleasurable way. The way entertaining all possible, that is plausible, meanings at once is preferable to attempting reductively to single out one.

  It is more than William Empson’s famous “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” It is Seven Types of Ambiguity set in motion—taken to the seventh power (at least) and then raised another nth degree to the point where the shifting possibilities literally dizzy the arithmetic of consciousness. It has something of the quality of “indistinctness,” the term the critic John Carey gave to what David Lodge described as “Carey’s idiosyncratic name for what other critics and theorists have called variously ambiguity, polysemy. In other words the capacity of poetic language to generate an inexhaustible but non-random supply of meaning in the consciousness of readers.” By “indistinctness” Carey doesn’t mean blurriness; rather it suggests a multiplicity of distinct states.

  Inexhaustible, but non-random: an important almost-but-not-quite oxymoronic phrase. It does not mean “anything goes.” But, rather, more than you might imagine.

  Is this a good thing? Is this what the Sonnets were about, more than about love but about creating a delirium, here the delirium of meaning’s shifting, interacting multiplicity? But isn’t that precisely the maddening and seductive quality—the special delirium and paranoia—of mind-dizzying soul-dissolving love?

  Booth’s vision of the Sonnets, the vision expressed, unfolded in this endlessly divided and recombinant efflorescence of exegesis, this haze of particles, this cloud of cornstarch, around the words, was in fact an illustration of the secret play he finds beneath the Sonnet language.

  A play about the pleasures of polysemy—one that has provoked stimulating debate over the limits of polysemy between Booth and Helen Vendler. In her edition of the Sonnets, Vendler, the distinguished Harvard professor of
poetry, made a pointed objection to what she felt could be an out-of-control polysemy. Booth’s point as I interpret it is that the Sonnets are designed to induce a state that can feel perilously, destabilizingly “out of control”—one which happens to suggest the state of being in love.

  But one thing that can be said about Booth’s secret play is that, up until Booth came along, so much of the debate about the Sonnets was devoted either to lesser biographical questions such as who the apparent dedicatee, “Mr. W.H.,” was. Or to deducing from the Sonnets the nature of Shakespeare’s sexuality, “proving” him one thing or the other.

  Recall Booth’s way of disposing of the latter controversy was to say, with typical asperity, “William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The Sonnets provide no evidence on that matter.”

  Wordsworth famously said that the Sonnets are “the key to Shakespeare’s heart.” They may or may not be. But to Stephen Booth they are the key to his art. One can see that in Booth’s beautiful footnote to that single line and those three words: “for,” “love” and “receivest.” The way they are, one might say, “by love possessed.” Booth’s exegetical love. In unfolding the manifold possibilities, the shifting, pulsating, flickering patterns of meaning, the interactions of possibilities conjured up, Booth doesn’t suggest that one must embrace any one of the seven (or the seven to the seventh power) possible ways he adumbrates. He is suggesting that the pleasure of the Sonnets is that, at some level, not quite conscious, we experience the play of all of them, we’re not meant to reduce them to a singular meaning but to be subtly stimulated by their dazzling multiplicity.

  BOOTH AT THE BLACKFRIARS

  I thought about this while driving down to the Shenandoah Shakespeare Scholars’ Conference in October a month after the September 11 attacks in New York. My first attempt to talk to Booth. It was a month in the Shenandoah Valley, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, when the foliage coloration was at its peak, particularly on the last leg of the journey, the Blue Ridge Parkway. Something about the riotous multiplicity of foliage colors suggested a kind of analogy to Booth’s sonnet exegesis. Each word, like a leaf, able to appear in an array of colorations and configurations, depending on angle of light and shift of shadow, affecting and being affected by the array of leaves around it and the way their colors shifted in the shifting sunlight. A spectacle that couldn’t be focused or experienced leaf by leaf, but only in its glorious panoply of shifting totalities. (It suggests as well Cic Berry’s vision of multiple vocal resonances coloring each other, doesn’t it?)