The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  This emerged in our discussion of the Henry IV, Part 2 paper, one of the three recent works he sent to me. Booth suggests in that paper that audiences are “likely to find themselves persistently trying to, failing to, and feeling somehow guilty in failing to, respond the way they did in Part One,” the far more celebratory and joyful first Falstaff play.

  Booth doesn’t find this an esthetic fault so much as he feels that it embodies in some way the themes of disappointment and rejection that characterize the play. Again the trapdoor, the hole, makes for a greater whole.

  “Shakespeare appears to have been fascinated by audiences’ generically or locally derived expectations and assumptions and by the theatrical energy to be had from playing his play off against the one the audience manufactures and tries to see [italics mine]…. Henry IV. Part 2 is merely the most perverse and vexing of Shakespeare’s many experiments with perversity.” Shakespeare loves to use “the rhetorical potential available in friction between what an audience wants and expects and what it gets”—the breaking of implicit dramatic promises.

  Booth typically tosses off, almost as an aside, the thematic implications of this rhetorical and dramaturgic strategy: “the breaking of promises that were never quite made [i.e., Hal’s promises to Falstaff] is also a topic of this play.”

  Just as love or “unsteady relationships” just happen to be a topic of the Sonnets.

  I thought this was a remarkably astute, even eye-opening reading, one that linked the structural tics of the play to its deepest theme, a genuine achievement of close reading.

  But Booth almost comically downplays it: it’s “also a topic of this play.”

  Later in our phone conversation when I asked Booth why he tossed off this thematic connection between formal and emotional disappointments he told me, “I don’t want to say that it’s not worth paying attention to, but it doesn’t relate to the question I’m always trying to answer: what’s all the fuss about. Why do we care so much about Shakespeare. And I don’t think an echo in the experience of the play of the experience of the characters has anything to do with why we value it, why we make such a fuss about it.”

  It was exhilarating finally talking to Booth at length all this time after meeting him. And after months of preparation, not round-the-clock, but reading and thinking about why his approach to Shakespeare resonated with me.

  It was fascinating hearing his early experiences with Shakespeare—the cloud of cornstarch, etc.—and even more surprising when I asked him what was the genesis of his approach to the Sonnets and he told me it all had to do with reading a George Herbert poem “Love (3)” in his sophomore year at Harvard.

  “Reading The Temple [the book of poems climaxed by “Love (3)”] made me feel the hair stand up on my neck,” he told me. “I had been trained to argue the essence of a poem away—its effect.”

  At this point I raised the question that had always troubled me about the logic of New Criticism and close reading: Is there any limit to the polysemous effects one can find, in say the Sonnets?

  He slightly evades the question by saying, “I’m usually not concerned with that—with meanings or multiple meanings, but with the experience, what reading does to you. I leave meaning to the man with the note at the foot of the page to tell you what it means.”

  “Okay, forget meaning,” I say, “what about the ‘ideational static’ you spoke of in your ‘Witty Partition’ talk?” I read him the quote about this “ideational static”: “substantively insignificant, substantively inadmissible, substantively accidental linguistic configurations … are exciting to the minds it plays across and probably brings those listening minds a sense of possessing and casually, effortlessly exercising an athleticism beyond that imaginable in human beings.… ‘More than cool reason ever comprehends.’ ”

  “Is that what you’re talking about when you talk about ‘what all the fuss is about’ over Shakespeare?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You know I think I got everything important I ever said into that talk.”

  And here’s where he introduced the pole-vaulting-on-the-moon metaphor.

  “This athleticism you speak of, is it available to everyone who reads Shakespeare?”

  “My guess,” he said, “is that it’s something like pole-vaulting on the moon. Pole-vaulting is something you can’t imagine being able to do. Or at least I can’t imagine being able to do. I once took a pole and ran toward that little pocket [where you’re supposed to plant the pole] and ran right past the little pocket. While with Shakespeare you feel the ability to apprehend or comprehend what you can’t possibly apprehend or comprehend otherwise.”

  His insistence that this experience is available to all, not just to superattentive readers like himself, raises an interesting philosophical question about close reading: If a tree—or an allusion, say—falls in the forest and no one notices, or no one notices it but the nearby superb close reader, can it be said to be a feature of the poem or of its ordinary reader? Aren’t there certain kinds of violinists, certain kinds of listeners, who can hear things in Beethoven others might not?

  In his passage on athleticism, Booth mentioned the mind reading Shakespeare being capable of attaining the graceful leaping pirouettes of Michael Jordan.

  “But everybody’s not Michael Jordan in that respect, right?” I asked Booth.

  “I think that everybody is Michael Jordan.”

  But what about repeated rereading, rereading in cycles? Doesn’t that result in your becoming a better athlete, so to speak?

  “No,” he says, stretching the metaphor: “it may make you a better sports reporter.” That is, better at articulating what has always been happening. Here he shifts metaphors to make an important distinction.

  “It’s important to me,” he said, “to get you to understand the difference between audience experience and critical perception.”

  He chooses a startlingly homespun mechanical metaphor to illustrate this point.

  “It’s like the difference between riding in a car and being an automobile mechanic. The experience of riding in a car is not much different for someone who could take the engine apart and put it back together, from someone who didn’t have any idea how the engine ran.”

  Before I could object he anticipated my objection:

  “I get people a lot who will say, ‘But automobile mechanics can hear what’s going on.’ But I don’t think it’s a great difference.”

  Of course he says that from the perspective of someone who has one of the most finely tuned ears for—to extend the mechanic metaphor—what’s going on under the hood, beneath the surface of the lines.

  I would say that here Booth is being not so much disingenuous as, I think, genuinely modest. He doesn’t want to say that his intimate knowledge of the esthetic nuts and bolts that make the car (or verse) run makes his experience superior in any way. But I just don’t think—not after hearing his tour de force disquisition on “The Witty Partition”—that this is true.

  I’d pose against his automobile mechanic metaphor my violinist one. That the experience of an audience hearing Isaac Stern play Mozart is exalted, but not quite as exalted as the experience Isaac Stern has playing Mozart.

  (Recently as I was writing this passage I ran into Brian Kulick, who was directing Twelfth Night at New York’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park Delacorte Theatre. I told him about Booth’s auto mechanic contention and what Kulick said, picking up on the surprisingly useful, if unpromising-sounding, metaphor, was that as a director what he found was that the nature of the car changed in the process of rehearsal and preview.)

  LOVE (3)

  At this point I sought to shift gears, so to speak, and see what Booth thought of my theory of Theory, my belief that close reading brought many too close to unbearable pleasure and led to the flight into Theory, which offered the comfort or the illusion of distance.

  “I don’t know,” he began cautiously. “I certainly believe that about the distancing.…”

  But,
he said, he wasn’t sure close reading brought people closer; close readers were really close interpreters, and he felt that where close reading went wrong was in its tendency to search for a single reductive interpretation: close reading that closes out rather than multiplying the possibilities. Because it was this multiplicity of possibilities that was responsible for the effect of, if not pleasure, the physical response great poetry gave him.

  Here is where George Herbert’s “Love (3)” comes in. Booth told me he’d had a transformative experience reading “Love (3),” a poem he then proceeded to recite for me from memory at a rapid-fire pace over the telephone line.

  Herbert was one of those knotty seventeenth-century “Metaphysical poets” whose championing by T. S. Eliot brought him back from obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century. Herbert is the author of difficult, resonant, religious poems—piety that managed to be shocking, in the way Emily Dickinson can be shocking, in a brilliantly compressed, almost sneaky way. A poet of trapdoors if ever there was one.

  “Love (3)” comes at the very close of a book of nearly two hundred short poems called The Temple. As is perhaps not necessary to say, it is the third poem with the name “Love” and because the experience became the basis for Booth’s reading of Shakespeare, I want to reproduce it:

  Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

  Guilty of dust and sin.

  But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

  From my first entrance in,

  Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

  If I lacked anything.

  A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

  Love said: you shall be he.

  I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

  I cannot look on thee.

  Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

  Who made the eyes but I?

  Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame

  Go where it doth deserve.

  And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

  My dear, then I will serve.

  You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

  So I did sit and eat.

  “What was it about ‘Love (3)’?” I asked Booth.

  “It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” he repeated.

  Not having “Love (3)” at hand, I did not press him about why this poem in particular should have shaped his approach to the Sonnets, but clearly his preoccupation with the physical response engendered by the Sonnets may well have grown out of the effect of reading “Love (3).” And when I had a chance to dig out my copy of George Herbert’s collected poems I saw lines there that did it for me and might, I guessed, have done it for Booth.

  In particular there was that exchange between the poet and personified Love that went:

  I, the unkind, ungrateful?…

  I cannot look on thee.

  Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

  Who made the eyes but I?

  Who made the eyes but I? It’s Sonnet-like wordplay endowed with a higher Love.

  A couple of weeks after our first interview I e-mailed Booth asking him if he could tell me more about his response to “Love (3).” He came back with the demurral that it would take “two hours of fast typing” to even approach his feelings about “Love (3).” He did recall that that year as a college sophomore “I was initiated into a remarkably non-exclusive club for bookish boys [at Harvard] and got drunk for the first time in my life, and that the next day a junior who was newly my fellow member met me at lunch and said, ‘You know, Booth, the reason we elected you was because we wanted someone who could talk about George Herbert for two hours without pausing for breath.’ ”

  Is Booth drunk on the Sonnets the way he was drunk on Herbert? I’m not sure; “intoxicated” might be a better word. What’s interesting about Herbert is that his are love poems, like the Sonnets yes, but love poems to a far more reliable, welcoming and dependable lover, namely God. But I saw something else in “Love (3)” I had not seen before—something that seemed to bear upon Booth’s critical method: a focus on that which appears marred, that which appears strenuously impertinent if not impenitent. And the revelation that that which appears marred can be mended in a transformative way. One that makes for instance an apparently marred passage in Shakespeare, a trapdoor, a hole, the key to its transcendent wholeness.

  It perhaps helps elucidate, that difference, what at times is, if not my problem with the Sonnets, then my resistance: their ambiguities are so destabilizing that there is no center. No one irritant to become a pearl, but rather a sickly, slippery iridescence. With Herbert, like the fluctuation and nutations in the orbit and spin of the planets, there is a kind of universal gravity at least, at the dependably Newtonian calculable level, prevailing—God’s Love—while with the Sonnets, with few exceptions there is an unstable, even fickle, sometimes cold Sun at the center of a haze of probabilities.

  But Booth’s recollection of drunken ecstasy over “Love (3)” was one I found touching, first because it suggested a side of Booth that is not immediately evident in his reserved, aloof persona. It suggests that he is not the cool sardonic customer of “They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none.”

  Another thing that struck me also about Booth’s later work can be found in the abstract of his paper on The Winter’s Tale, when he talks about the way “I’ve spent a lot of time and ink in the last few years on particular elements in Shakespeare plays that displease us.…” On elements that seem unworthy, but looked at through the eyes of Love, or of “Love (3),” one might say, become far more worthy than one could have imagined. “Who made the eyes but I?” Booth, it could be said, is now the one who makes the eyes—envisions the way we see—the purported faults and sins of Shakespeare, and how they are “redeemed” by closer reading.

  But to return to the question of close reading, Booth takes pains to separate a true love for the text from what has become in his eyes a caricature of true close reading, one that seeks simply to decode a single hidden meaning: creates cosmic mystery only to solve it as if it were an Agatha Christie.

  He opposes this search for meaning as “trying to squeeze the juice out and then maybe squeezing the vitamins out of the juice.”

  Boothian reading is—he doesn’t put it this way—but in retrospect after thinking about his love for “Love (3),” I would say Boothian reading is about loving all the “nonsignifying, even insignificant meanings.” Especially the insignificant meanings. A redemptive love for the conspicuous irrelevances and the strenuous impertinences of linguistic transgression.

  When I read him the passage from his “Witty Partition” paper, his ten-minute summa, the passage about the attraction he has to the “ideational static” in Shakespeare’s plays generated by “substantively insignificant configurations,” he interrupted me to say, “Did I say insignificant or nonsignifying?” I repeated the quote emphasizing “insignificant.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” he said. (I sensed he thought I got it wrong, which indeed, I may have. But with characteristic charity he turned something marred—my memory—into something stronger.) In some ways one could add to the balletomane metaphor for Boothian reading another analogy: that in his most extreme formulation Booth sees Shakespeare as Moorish art—infinitely filigreed and gracefully echoic, full of intricate beauty but signifying nothing—nothing beyond the infinite beyond-signifying beauty of the Cosmos. In a sense that signification is at least part of “what the fuss is all about.”

  To some, even among Booth’s most fervent admirers, this can be too extreme. Consider one of the most thoughtful critiques of Booth as expressed by Russ McDonald, whose underlined copy of Booth’s Essay on the Sonnets I had been reading. In Shakespeare and the Arts of Language McDonald writes:

  Stephen Booth argues that “clarification” or “epiphany” or whatever spiritually charged term we choose has little to do with the real value of Shakespeare’s use of language. This argument resemb
les the position taken in his later years by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: in the Principia he called it “the language game”; he proposed that the virtue of language resides chiefly in its power to amuse, and insisted that we should not attempt to overstate its explanatory capacities. For Booth, it is the experience of the clarification that matters, the pleasure of making the discovery [the threshold of comprehension!], not the content of the revelation. Process is all. Speaking of the first scene of Twelfth Night he contends “that to experience that scene is to be given a small but metaphysically glorious holiday from the limitation of ordinary logic … an effectively real holiday from the inherent limitations of the human mind. The artifice of the dramatic language ensures that we never entirely lose ourselves. That we recognize, even as we watch, that we are on holiday, and this double-vision gives the spectator an immense sense of pleasure.”

  I think Booth would disagree mainly with McDonald’s suggestion that Booth completely dismisses “significance.” I think for Booth significance is there, significance is significant; it’s just that significance is just not “what all the fuss is about” in Shakespeare. Or not the only thing.

  The fact that Booth could call the end of Lear “the most terrifying five minutes in literature” is a response to more than its nonsignifying patterning. It’s a deeply humanistic response. But not the only response for Booth. Or even the deepest, most bottomless one.

  PORNOGRAPHY AND PEARLS

  I dwell on these questions because to me and to others Booth’s reading of Shakespeare is often revelatory in the way Peter Brook’s direction is. (Indeed Booth told me that he too saw, and he too was electrified by, Brook’s Dream when he was doing graduate study at Cambridge.) And still influential.

  We had a funny exchange on the question of Booth’s influence when I pressed Booth on what he’d call what he does.