I’d also like to thank Harry Keyishian and Fairleigh Dickinson University for inviting me to participate in their valuable colloquia.
Alex Star and Emily Eakin saw their magazine (Lingua Franca) fold before I could finish my assignments for them, but they enabled me to have an important conversation with Christopher Ricks, who himself merits thanks for his valuable insights and for being forbearing about the actual interview’s evanescence.
My conversations with Dan Kornstein over the years about Shakespeare and literature (he is the author of the valuable study of Shakespeare and legal thematics Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal) have been helpful as has been his wise counsel in matters legal.
The all-knowing Thomas Pendleton, coeditor of The Shakespeare Newsletter, has been a valuable interlocutor and discussant, has published my speculations in his pages and was kind enough to give an early stage of the manuscript a once-over to help me eliminate major errors. Any that remain have almost certainly been introduced later by me.
Thanks as well to Stephen Bates of the Wilson Quarterly for inviting me to do a review essay on Shakespearean staging, to Jodi Kantor at The New York Times for encouraging me to write about both Henry IV and Henry V and to Julie Just at The New York Times Book Review for encouraging my essay on the state of Theory, which led me to explore the future direction of Shakespeare studies.
My debt to Professor Russ McDonald is great both for the inspiring and challenging quality of his work and for his kindness and patience with my questions. The same could be said of just about everyone interviewed herein. And I’ve had valuable conversations with Barbara Mowat, Ed Pechter, Grace Tiffany, Tiffany Stern and Ralph Alan Cohen. Thomas Berger, A. R. Braunmuller and George Walton Williams were generous in admitting me into their company at a couple of scholarly conferences, as was John Meagher, author of the valuable work of dramaturgy Shakespeare’s Shakespeare.
I’d like to tip my hat as well to the collective membership of the SHAKSPER electronic discussion list for the numerous provocative questions, suggestions, discussions and arguments that made its posts something to look forward to.
Errol Morris, Jonathan Rosen, Steven Weisman and Helen Whitney are friends who over the years have also been valuable sounding boards for testing out my ideas on this subject, although they bear no responsibility for my conjectures.
Two gifted editors and writers, Naomi Wax and Tara McKelvey, were kind enough to read drafts of several chapters and make helpful suggestions about them.
Noah Kimerling is a wise protective figure for many writers and I’m lucky to have found shelter under his umbrella. Dr. Joseph Fetto, Dr. Paul Belsky, Dr. George Dolger, Dr. Joyce Gerdis: thank you for keeping me going.
Turning to the more personal or the personal and professional, I’d like to thank a special group of friends, and people I’ve been close to or relied upon in various ways through the years I was writing his book. None rivals the contribution of my sister, the brilliant psychotherapist Ruth Rosenbaum, whose kindness, support and insight and wisdom have meant the world to me.
I feel nobody could have stronger or more supportive friends than Betsy Carter and Gary Hoenig. I’ve relied for years on the kindness and good humor of Helen Rogan and Alfred Gingold, and Alfred was responsible for the rediscovery of the vinyl recording of Olivier’s amazing Othello, whose existence I only learned about at a party given by my friends Fred Kaplan and Brooke Gladstone during a conversation with Brooke’s sisters Stacey and Lisa.
Special thanks to the talented Nina Roberts for the jacket photo and for having Nina Roberts’s unique sense of humor.
Special thanks to Susan Kamil for her friendship and advice.
Special thanks to Liz Groden, whose word processing and research skills made writing this book possible.
Special thanks to Cynthia Ozick and Billy Collins for their generous early response to my manuscript.
Also important to my getting the book done: David Livingston, who did his best to keep order among my cluttered and collapsing stacks of Shakespeare books, the late Faye Beckerman, who cared for my cats, along with Dr. George Korin, Christine Sarkissian and Rachael Koeson. Special thanks to my high school classmate Holly Stavers, tireless sparkplug of the wonderful cat-rescue group City Critters, who was a source of great solace in finding me a successor to my orange cat Stumpy—my new orange cat, Bruno, who’s been a valuable comic companion during long sessions of reading Shakespeare commentary.
My apologies to John Kennedy for inadvertently identifying him on this page in the first and second printings of the hardcover edition of this book as the first to name John Ford as the author of the “Funeral Elegy.” This reference should have read, and now does, “Richard Kennedy.”
And now a more amorphous but no less highly prized list of friends who have been helpful to me in Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean ways, including some who have sat through some bad Shakespeare for my sake:
So, thanks to Stanley Mieses, Jesse Sheidlower and Elizabeth Bogner, Nancy Donahoe, Chris Schoemer, Rachel Donadio and Daniel Kunitz. And to David Hirshey and other companions of the alas, now rarely reconvened Game (including David Blum, Gil Schwartz, Gene Stone, Robert Asahina, Richard Ben Cramer, Peter Herbst, Tom Jencks, and Michael Hirschorn, to name a few I’ve lost poker money to). To Liz Hecht, Kenneth Gross, Herbert Weil, Caroline Marshall, Terry Karten, Amy Gutman, Laura Frost, Zoe Rosenfeld, Virginia Heffernan, David Samuels, Michael Drosnin, Jeffrey Goldberg, Craig and Allison Karpel, Kathryn Paulsen, Petra Bartosiewicz, Larry Rosenblatt, the Slymans, Sarah Kernochan, Judith Shulevitz, Lisa Singh, Robert Vare, Antonia Cedrone, Natalie Standiford, the Greenberg family, Deb Friedman, Lauren Thierry, Jim Watkins, Sarah Alcorn, Eve Babitz, Dora Steinberg, Mark Steinberg, Tom Disch, David Yezzi, John Roche, Rebecca Wright, Michael Yogg, Gil Roth, Richard Molyneux and Julia Sheehan.
Profound gratitude to Tara McKelvey for helping me understand the meaning of love in the Sonnets.
Much appreciation to Diana Fox at Random House for her valuable work in preparing this paperback edition.
And to the many whom my poor memory—but not lack of gratitude—has caused me to neglect, let me “assault mercy” and ask your forgiveness.
Bibliographic Notes
I don’t pretend to plumb the bottomless depths of Shakespearean scholarship here but rather have a more specific purpose.
One thing I’ve attempted to do throughout this book is highlight the contributions of Shakespearean scholars I most admire, many of whom have written with clarity and insight but whose works are often out of print, or available in limited, expensive, academic press editions not readily accessible to the reading public.
Nonetheless things are changing in the online world, and in various ways (Google Scholar, JSTOR, Project Muse, etc.) many of these works have a chance at a second life. One of the most satisfying things that resulted from my column writing for The New York Observer has been the reissue of the out-of-print novels of Charles Portis, including his classic, The Dog of the South—which, by the way, contains within it one of the single funniest lines involving Shakespeare I’ve ever read. (It would require too much space here to give it the context that it requires; just take my word for it and read the novel.)
If this book somehow similarly encourages some smart publisher to reissue or make accessible Stephen Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets so that it’s no longer scholarly samizdat, I will feel it has served a purpose.
The notes that follow are designed to be more personal and selective than any comprehensive attempt to survey all Shakespeare controversies, much less all Shakespeare studies. I just want to call attention to some of the works that have meant the most to me in writing this book, works that demonstrate that there is much exciting thinking out there overshadowed lately by the fad for books that beat the dead horse of dubious biographical speculation. And by the emphasis in the academy on running all Shakespeare through the jargonic milling machine of the latest Theory fashion.
Here’s another example of the kind of works I’d like to see made more accessible: I know one of the most valuable experiences for me in the course of writing this book was compiling an almost complete set of Shakespeare Survey, the journal published annually by the Stratford-on-Avon–based Shakespeare Institute and Cambridge University Press since 1947. Going through those volumes sequentially was an invaluable way of tracing a half century’s evolution of the most sophisticated—and accessible—Shakespearean scholars’ thinking, along with reports on publications and—particularly—memorable performances over that span. It would be wonderful if back issues of journals such as Shakespeare Studies and Shakespeare Quarterly as well as the Survey could be made available online, scanned and archived on the Web in some form so that “outsiders” could get a sense of what scholars have been arguing about.
But before proceeding on a chapter-by-chapter basis let me venture a personal favorite. If one had to have a single Shakespearean reference work, while there are so many I admire—Russ McDonald’s Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Bedford Books, 1996), for instance—the one I would never wish to be without is Marvin Spevack’s Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Belknap Press, 1974), an indispensable, inexhaustible delight. This huge 1600-page volume essentially does nothing but list, alphabetically, all the words in Shakespeare, and—play by play—compiles every instance in which that word is used, usually in a ten-word contextual excerpt.
So one can turn to the entry for “sweet,” for instance, and read that the word is used 873 times (out of some 884,000 words in the complete works, according to Spevack’s count), and then one can plunge into the sweetness. One can trace the flavors of sweetness, and the nuances, the combinations and permutations of sweetness. Or one can follow the word “deep” through the plays and see how the contexts inflect its deepness. One can hear the way sweet and deep echoed in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote. One gets closer to Shakespeare’s language in a unique way.
Having said that, let me begin with some chapter-by-chapter suggestions and digressions, along with, in some instances, more specific citations.
Preface: Why?
The limits of Shakespearean biographical raw material and the lengths to which biographers will stretch and elaborate upon the apocrypha are demonstrated in two invaluable books by the late Samuel Schoenbaum: William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford University Press, 1987), which exhibits the paltry undisputed records available, and Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1970), which exhibits the centuries of biographical fantasies projected upon those records, fantasies that tell us more in most cases about the biographers than about Shakespeare. One of the few attempts to paint a detailed portrait of Shakespeare’s youth, for instance, Shakespeare in Warwickshire by Mark Eccles (University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), has the courage to admit, as most biographers will not, that “the picture of Shakespeare’s life in Warwickshire is a mosaic with most of the pieces missing.” The mosaic, however, is one worth viewing at the very least for context.
Again going against the grain of my animus toward biography, Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (Arden, 2001) offers a detailed contextualized portrait of the unceasing rivalries between Shakespeare and his playwright contemporaries. Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1998) seeks more successfully than most to explain why Shakespeare’s work rose above and survived the scrum of his rivals. In addition Bate offers one of the most exciting conjectures about the intellectual history of Shakespearean criticism, one which, as I’ve sought to adumbrate in a previous chapter, explains the importance of William Empson’s notion of ambiguity.
The line about biographers being like cardsharps at their worst is adapted from a review of Peter Ackroyd’s biography in Publishers Weekly (July 11, 2005) by yours truly.
The quote from Daniel Swift’s critique of Shakespeare biography on leaving “a space for wonder” appears in his essay in The Nation (March 13, 2006).
Recently John Updike wryly observed that most biographies are “novels with indexes.” If you must rake over the worn fragments no one reinvigorates them more than Anthony Burgess’s visionary novel Nothing Like the Sun (rpt. Norton, 1996). Russell Fraser calls his unconventional, frankly novel-like two-volume series, Young Shakespeare and Shakespeare: The Later Years (rpt. Columbia University Press, 1992, 1993), a “biography.” But I like his elliptically compressed prose style and his book has the feel, the spirit if not the letter, of the life. As does Grace Tiffany’s recent Will (Berkley Hardcover, 2004), which is filled with smart offhand observations about the work as well.
And I must admit a weakness for two novels about two largely imaginary figures: Robert Nye’s The Late Mr. Shakespeare (Arcade, 1999) and Leon Rooke’s (don’t laugh) Shakespeare’s Dog (Ecco Press, 1986).
Of all the recent books that take on Shakespeare as a whole, I’d recommend Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) for its focus on what counts. I once witnessed Kermode and Harold Bloom speak at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. It wasn’t a debate but as they say at the fights Kermode—ever so politely—wiped the floor with Bloom, leaving Bloom to mutter audibly to Kermode as he left the stage at intermission, “You should have been a lawyer.” As if it were only lawyers’ tricks that made Bloom’s overblown vision of Shakespeare seem so impoverished by contrast with Kermode’s rich immersion in the language.
I discuss Edward Pechter’s notion of “Shakespeare the Writer” in my essay, “Shakespeare & Company” in the Winter 2005 edition of The Wilson Quarterly. Pechter’s original essay appeared in Textual Practice (2003).
When I speak of circularity in biographical studies I’m referring to what’s become known as “Dowdenism,” named after Edward Dowden, the editor of the first Arden Hamlet. In his nineteenth-century biography of Shakespeare, Dowden adopted the soon-to-be-popular four-part periodization of Shakespeare’s life: early comical historical years; mature Hamlet, Henry IV and Henry V period; then the alleged dark years, the 1606–1608 period, which included Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens; and then the final fourth period: the Born Again Romantic spiritual period of the Late Romances. Nice if there were any biographical as opposed to conjectural evidence for the link between the life and the work. In fact, the contrary seems more true when you consider that the supposedly spiritualized Shakespeare of the Late Romances was involved in less than exalted, petty tax-farming transactions and moneylending in Stratford (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Dowdenism comes in for particular circular misuse when it comes to the Dark Years, where the darkness of the plays is said to betoken either a spiritual breakdown or the brain-damaging effects of syphilis, and the allegedly organic brain disease is then said to be the source of the embittered darkness.
I frankly didn’t want to waste much space in the text of the book itself explaining why I don’t care, for the purposes of this book, whether Shakespeare’s work was written by one of the anti-Stratfordian candidates such as the Earl of Oxford, although I do refer to such fantasies as “the Family Romance of the Shakespeare explainers.” Nonetheless for those who want to waste their time discovering what a waste of time the “anti-Stratfordian” arguments are, I recommend Shakespeare, in Fact (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999) by Irvin Matus, or The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea (Praeger, 2005).
Chapter One: The Dream Induction
Since this is a chapter about the profound effect of a single brilliant production, a production that has left no visual recording behind, the first thing I’d like to do is urge some publisher to bring David Selbourne’s The Making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (rpt. Routledge, 1984) back into circulation. It’s the kind of book that’s come to be known as a “rehearsal diary,” but it’s an important document in theater history, the only complete eyewitness account of how Peter Brook made his Dream so trans
formative.
I’ve found that I’ve often gotten to deeper levels of a play when I’ve had the privilege of watching rehearsals, especially when choices have to be made that are not explicitly called for in the text. The director Brian Kulick once allowed me to watch him rehearse the comic scenes in the fourth act of his Winter’s Tale and I saw three gifted comic actors, Bill Buell as the Old Shepherd, Michael Stuhlbarg as his clownish son and Bronson Pinchot as the con man Autolycus, seek the various ways of evoking what they called “the invisible schtick”—the comic business Shakespeare had built into the text without spelling out in so many words, the comic business gifted clowns over centuries have tuned in to like dog whistles and turned into roars of laughter. All the implicit but unspoken physical actions, the double takes, the winking asides, and the like that made the comedy on the page come to life on the stage.
Tiffany Stern’s Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford University Press, 2001) is an illuminating account of the evolution of the practice of rehearsing, quite revelatory about the use of “cue scripts” during Shakespeare’s time—most actors never saw the play as a whole before production; instead, they saw just a list of cue lines that immediately preceded their lines.
There’s a long history of “rehearsal diaries” of memorable Shakespeare productions; they rarely sell well but I recommend that those who browse secondhand bookstores pick them up, as they’re often the best way to learn the plays from the inside out.
My account of the fire in the theater during the Broadway run of the Dream that became so metaphorically important to me can be found reprinted in my collection The Secret Parts of Fortune (Random House, 2000; HarperPerennial, 2001), which is a good thing because otherwise I’d think it was a dream. There’s a growing number of Peter Brook biographies and autobiographies and Peter Brook theoretical works, some of which I’ll discuss in notes on the chapter devoted to him.
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