The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Still, the Peter Brook book I’ve quoted from at the end of this chapter, the thinnest of them all, his Berlin lecture, is, I’d argue, the most indispensable guide to Brook’s own sensibility and his sense of Shakespeare. Evoking Shakespeare (Theatre Communications Group, 1999), it should be pointed out now, consists of two editions, starting with the original thirty-six-page translation of the lecture containing the quotes I refer to about assaulting mercy.

  But there is a revised edition retitled Evoking (and Forgetting!) Shakespeare (Theatre Communications Group, 2003) that contains a full nine further pages, including a critique of naturalistic acting, of the conventional artifice of “Shakespeare voice” in acting and of the “reductionism to contemporary relevance” of much staging, and concludes: “Shakespeare never intended anyone to study Shakespeare, it is only when we forget Shakespeare that we begin to find him.” Forget who?

  When I speak of Peter Holland’s footnote in his Oxford Edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford University Press, 1994), it prompts me to say that some of the best, most accessible writing about Shakespeare by academics can be found in the introductions and footnotes to single-play editions, where some of the best scholars bring a welcome clarity to centuries of commentary and argument and reach out to the nonspecialist reader with their own and other perspectives on the play on the page and, more recently, the play in performance. Russ McDonald’s Penguin edition of the Dream is another example of a graceful introductory essay prompted by that remarkable play.

  Since the footnote on Bottom’s dream explores the engagement of the rhetoric and images in the Bible, it’s worth noting that such encounters are nowhere better explored than by Steven Marx in Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2000), another of the excellent Oxford Shakespeare topic series.

  Chapter Two: One Hamlet or Three?

  Although I speak, in the epilogue to this chapter, of my admiration for Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s third Arden edition of Hamlet (Thomson Learning, 2006), I would urge two things of Arden: first, to make the second volume (Q1 and the Folio) available in affordable paperback as opposed to the current expensive hardcover-only form; and second, keep Harold Jenkins’s labor of love, the second Arden, the last Grand Unification Hamlet, in print. Setting aside the issue of conflation itself (I can see the intellectual, textual arguments against it), there is so much judicious scholarly commentary and so many valuable annotations and discussions, and so much of Jenkins’s fine attentiveness to Hamlet, that if the culture is to have at least one unitary conflated Hamlet it should have this one.

  One book I’d also like to see returned to contemporary appreciation is J. Dover Wilson’s wonderfully obsessively eccentric What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 1935)—the source of the story I relate of Wilson’s descent into Hamlet madness. Wilson’s title in its faux-naïveté captures the terrible, wonderful truth that after four centuries, nobody really knows the answer to such questions as what “dozen or sixteen lines” Hamlet added to The Murder of Gonzago, whether and when he was feigning madness, what Gertrude’s relationship to Claudius was before the murder of her husband, etc.—all questions that are not merely pedantic quibbles but that bear upon theme and meaning. (For an engaging novelistic examination of Hamlet questions through the lenses of its source-texts, John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius [Knopf, 2000] is irresistible.)

  The self-deprecatory irony in Wilson’s title says in effect: Millions of words have been written about what Hamlet means: Can we at least admit we still don’t even know what happens in the play?

  For those who want the full flavor of the 1603 First Quarto without committing to the Arden 3 or one of the other three-text editions I’ve mentioned, the New Cambridge Shakespeare offers The First Quarto of Hamlet, edited by Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  Spirited discussion of Q1’s origins, vices and virtues can be found in The Hamlet First Published, edited by Thomas Clayton (University of Delaware Press, 1992). I particularly recommend the essay by Alan C. Dessen, one of my favorite scholars, for its clarification of the issues and willingness to reserve judgment.

  Gary Taylor’s impassioned contrarian look at bardolatry over the years, Re-Inventing Shakespeare (rpt. Oxford University Press, 1991), is worth reading for its perspective on all the wrong reasons Shakespeare has been idolized, although Taylor can sometimes, in the heat of his polemic, give one the impression that there is no special reason to admire Shakespeare.

  I’ve long been an admirer of John Jones’s Shakespeare at Work (Oxford University Press, 1995) for its nuanced close reading of the variations in Hamlet and Lear, even though I’m not as convinced as he is that we can be certain the changes he analyzes can be ascribed with certainty to Shakespeare.

  By contrast, in his introduction to the New Cambridge Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Philip Edwards makes one of the earliest, strongest counterarguments to the Revisers’ case.

  I feel sadness that Eric Sams died before completing the second volume of his powerfully argued if controversial book, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (Yale University Press, 1995). His son has donated his research materials to the Stratford Shakespeare Birthplace archives. I doubt Sams’s certainty about the early draft theory of the Bad Quartos but I found his brio and urgency on these matters bracing and provocative. If I might be permitted a personal aside, I liked the old curmudgeon.

  The best general introduction to the First Folio can be found in a pamphlet by Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Folger Library Productions, 1991).

  My New Yorker story, much of which was adapted from this chapter, appeared in the May 13, 2002, issue as “Shakespeare in Rewrite.”

  Chapter Three: A Digressive Comic Interlude Featuring Shakespeare’s Ambiguously Revised Testimony in the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit

  Shortly after this chapter went into bound galleys an essay by Anne Barton in The New York Review of Books, highly critical of the biographical impulse, even called for some kind of “moratorium” to be imposed on further biographical studies. What I found most important about her essay was her refutation of the most commonly advanced defense of the continued biographical impulse.

  “Shakespeare’s biographers,” she writes, in the May 11, 2006, issue, “have a way of justifying their endeavors by informing readers that more, in fact, is known about his life than about that of any other literary figure in the period, with the exception of Ben Jonson.”

  But, she points out, Jonson’s highly, almost overdocumented life is a skewed exception: we know lots about him but that doesn’t mean we know slightly-less-than-lots about Shakespeare. Nonetheless “the prying,” as she puts it, “continues.… All the plays become documents to be ransacked for biographical clues—clues that turn out, unsurprisingly, to be both tendentious and conflicting.”

  E.A.J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester University Press, 1999) presents the strongest if not the first argument for the “Shakeshafte theory.” The first to make the case, though, was Father Peter Milward in his Shakespeare’s Religious Background (rpt. Loyola Press, 1986).

  The most influential and detailed dissent from the Shakeshafte theory can be found in Robert Bearman’s “ ‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 53 (2002). Bearman is refuting Honigmann’s refutation of a 1970 article (“Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?”) by Douglas Hamer, if that is not immediately apparent.

  Honigmann’s refutation of Bearman’s refutation of Honigmann’s refutation of Hamer’s refutation can be found in “The Shakespeare/Shakeshafte Question Continues,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 54 (2003).

  I haven’t been convinced by this latest refutation of the refutation of the refutation of the refutation myself. I think it is too late to prove dispositively whether Shakeshafte was Shakespeare, and therefore larger conclusions founded upon the identity of the two have too sha
ky a foundation.

  The Shakeshafte theory is but the latest to claim Shakespeare for some particular religious vision. A very popular book, blurbed by Prince Charles no less (“hard to put down”), called The Secret of Shakespeare (Inner Traditions, 1984) by Martin Lings, former Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts of the British Museum, maintains that all Shakespeare is a Christian allegory. Ted Hughes (yes, that Ted Hughes) in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1992) offers a mega-meta theory of All Shakespeare as a pagan allegory of the devouring female nature goddess, a theory Hughes first finds exemplified in Venus and Adonis.

  And then in 1991 in a little-noticed essay in a short anthology, The Essential Shakespeare (Ecco Press), Hughes essentially changed his mind about Shakespeare’s mind and expounded a very different version of Shakespeare’s mystical transformation: a shift to a belief that all Shakespeare’s greatest work was a product of a Higher Consciousness stimulated by an initiation into the mystical system of the magus of meditative memory systems, Giordano Bruno, the heretical disciple of Galileo eventually burned at the stake in Rome.

  Bruno spent a period in England contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s youth, and Hughes maintained, in his latest theory, that Shakespeare received some occult initiation into Bruno’s system and that lines in the Sonnets like “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon remembrance of things past” were really about Brunovian meditation “sessions.” Everyone wants to recruit Shakespeare to their System or reduce him to a cryptogram or code, a solvable algorithm.

  Chapter Four: “Look There, Look There …”: The Scandal of Lear’s Last Words

  I’d like to dedicate this chapter’s notes to Peter W. M. Blayney, whose monumental The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins, Volume I, Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge University Press, 1982)—a heroic, destabilizing-to-read (and probably to research and write) exercise in textual scholarship—both revolutionized the study of Lear texts, and in its incompletion (Blayney claims, after twenty years’ work on the second volume to have “no interest” in Lear or Shakespeare anymore), embodies the tragic situation of the greatest, most obsessed Shakespearean textual scholars: “Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,—/ The glory, jest and riddle of the world.” As I understand the situation, the long-awaited Volume II, in which Blayney was to treat of the Folio version and its relationship to the 1608 First Quarto (revision? by Shakespeare?), has been abandoned. It is my hope that somehow Blayney will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and try somehow to summarize his thoughts, however inconclusive, in a manageable form before they are lost to the world.

  If I were forced to choose a single edition of Lear to recommend it would probably be the Third Arden version edited by R. A. Foakes. It’s the closest thing to an Enfolded Hamlet in that it uses an initially off-putting but ultimately ingenious and illuminating method to conflate and yet distinguish the Folio and the Quarto.

  Essentially Foakes uses superscript Q’s and F’s in the way Bernice Kliman uses curly and pointed brackets for Quarto-only and Folio-only words and passages. Consider this example:

  GLOUCESTER FO,F strange and fastened villain,

  Would he deny his letter, Fsaid he?F QI never got him.Q

  The passages between the F superscripts appear only in the Folio and those between the Q superscripts appear only in the Quarto. It has come in for some criticism, but I think it’s worth doing.

  More traditional ways of reading the two versions can be found in parallel text editions such as that by Rene Weis (Longman Group, 1993); a beautiful facsimile version of the original texts’ typography aligned is The Parallel King Lear prepared by Michael Warren (University of California Press, 1989).

  The arc of the debate over dividing Lear can be traced in the shift from The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Clarendon Press, 1983)—which takes as a given the belief that the two versions are two distinct works of art, or distinct stages of the same work of art—to Lear from Study to Stage, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), in which opinion is far more divided. There one may find Richard Knowles’s “Two Lears? By Shakespeare?” which aggressively attacks the Reviser evidence, and T. H. Howard-Hill’s useful clarification of the question at stake in his notion of “considered second thoughts”—which variants are Shakespeare’s own reconsiderations and which are the result of others’ mistakes, accidents and interventions?

  The maddening difficulties editing Lear presents are limned in Berryman’s Shakespeare, edited and introduced by John Haffenden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), which recounts the poet John Berryman’s struggle with the Lear textual mystery. Haffenden is the devoted biographer of William Empson as well.

  Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton University Press, 1980), offers perhaps the best close-reading exegesis of the variations in the two texts and deserves to be returned to print.

  Chapter Five: The Great Shakespeare “Funeral Elegy” Fiasco

  I shouldn’t neglect to mention that at the luncheon for Stephen Greenblatt I describe in chapter 4, Julia Reidhead of Norton’s American complete works of Shakespeare, edited by Greenblatt, informed me that Norton was dropping the “Funeral Elegy” and Don Foster’s introduction to it from the forthcoming revised edition.

  To further clarify the matter of Don Foster, me, “Wanda Tinasky” and Thomas Pynchon, my original essay on the question has been reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune; I gave him credit in print for his solution in The New York Observer, September 10, 2001. His misrepresentation of my position appears in his Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (Henry Holt, 2000). My expression of agnosticism in fuller form—“I can’t make up my mind. But I do know that if Wanda is not Mr. Pynchon, she or he,… ought to step forward to be honored for capturing … the spirit of Mr. Pynchon in her prose”—clearly does not imply I jumped on the Pynchon attribution bandwagon in a Fosterian way.

  Foster’s attempt to make this read as an endorsement of the Pynchon authorship theory is strained, to say the least.

  The best, most comprehensive account of “the politics of attribution” in this affair can be found in Brian Vickers’s “Counterfeiting” Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s “Funerall Elegye” (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which also deals with Gary Taylor’s attribution of “Shall I Die?” to Shakespeare.

  But when speaking of Professor Vickers I can’t miss the opportunity to recommend his devastating critique of Theory sophistry, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (rpt. Yale University Press, 1994), which offers a thorough deconstruction of deconstruction and other Theory fashions, the best of its kind—although Graham Bradshaw’s Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Cornell University Press, 1993) is also powerful in a similar skeptical way.

  The scholar Bruce Young felt I was being unfair to American academics in my initial New York Observer pieces criticizing the acceptance of the “Funeral Elegy.” In a letter to the paper he argued that they didn’t accept the attribution “en masse,” that many—most, he believes—didn’t buy it, the way J. J. Tobin doesn’t in the Riverside introduction to it I quote.

  It’s perhaps true that many American academics didn’t accept it, but few spoke out against this gross distortion of Shakespeare the writer—few published any critiques of the acceptance of a poem that would inevitably distort how Shakespeare’s evolution as an artist and a person was understood, if the attribution were accepted. Yes there was vociferous discussion on the restricted SHAKSPER list, and as I mentioned a SHAKSPER post from John Kennedy first identified Ford, not Shakespeare, as the Elegy’s author. But I still believe that more American academics should have cared more about what was—and wasn’t—Shakespearean and why they believed this to be so. Cared enough to be appalled at the Elegy attribution and to come out and say so
publicly in print. Few did, a phenomenon I can’t help attributing to the “death”—or irrelevance—of the author in postmodern theory.

  Chapter Six: The Indian, the Judean and Hand D

  I should note that the play text in which Hand D appears is often referred to as The Booke of “Sir Thomas More” since the play never was, so far as we know, actually printed, and thus exists as a kind of handwritten “prompt book,” thus “booke of the play.”

  Editions of the whole play, not just the 147-line scene and the 21-line soliloquy (which are to be found in most contemporary Complete Works editions), have been hard to find, but recently Oxford University Press announced it would bring out an edition of the entire play, certainly a worthy project since it juxtaposes the array and differential degree of playwrighting talent among Shakespeare’s contemporaries within the framework of a single play.

  The key texts containing the arguments about Hand D include Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, edited by A. W. Pollard, first published in 1923, reprinted in 1976 by Folcroft Editions, though not readily available. R. W. Chambers’s perceptive essay on the thematic similarities, such as “self devouring” and appetite as a “universal wolf,” was called “Some Sequences of Thought in Shakespeare and in 147 Lines of ‘Thomas More,’ ” and first appeared in the Modern Language Review, January 1, 1931. By the way, I should have added to my catalog of such images Othello’s famous evocation of “the cannibals that each other eat/The Anthropophagi.”

  A different, more postmodern but smart examination of the theme of authority, power and human nature can be found in Hugh Grady’s Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf (Clarendon Press, 1996). And Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More”: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearean Interest, edited by T. H. Howard-Hill, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), set the stage for the current near-canonization of the play.