The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Paul Werstine’s dissent, “Shakespeare More or Less: A. W. Pollard and Twentieth Century Shakespeare Editing,” appeared in Florilegium 16 (1999), Carleton University, Ottawa.

  Edward Pechter’s critique of Werstine’s critique of textual editing can be found in “Crisis in Editing,” Shakespeare Survey (2006). The most recent of Pechter’s valuable and accessible (if challenging) assessments of leading tendencies in Shakespeare scholarship is What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice (Cornell University Press, 1995).

  Chapter Seven: The Search for the Shakespearean in a Delicate Pause

  I strongly recommend John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare (Anchor, 2001), which offers Sir Peter Hall’s longtime collaborator and RSC cofounder’s highly influential, antithesis-based method of speaking the speech.

  And of course the entire Players of Shakespeare series—now six successive volumes from Cambridge University Press, edited variously by Philip Brockbank, Robert Smallwood, and Russell Jackson—makes for wonderful reading with its essays by actors and actresses on their Shakespearean roles, how they approached them and what they made of them.

  As for Sir Peter himself, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players (Theatre Communications Group, 2003) and Exposed by the Mask (Theatre Communications Group, 2000) compress his years of experience and heartfelt, hard-won insights into acting and staging into vigorously and forcefully argued form.

  An entertaining if sometimes tormented portrayal of the struggle between Hall and Laurence Olivier over the direction of the Royal National Theatre and the direction of staged Shakespeare can be found in Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle (Harper & Row, 1984), one of the best books of backstage Shakespearean intrigue one can find.

  Cic Berry’s most well-known work is The Actor and the Text (Applause Acting Series, 2000).

  Patsy Rodenburg’s Speaking Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) is an admirable companion for those who want to pursue Shakespearean speech further.

  Kristin Linklater’s Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice (Theatre Communications Group, 1992) is spoken of highly by many working actors and actresses, although a bit too New Agey for some.

  But as counterpoint to these, Sarah Werner’s critique of their unintended consequences, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance (Routledge, 2001), is worth paying attention to.

  Chapter Eight: The Spell of the Shakespearean in “Original Spelling”

  I’d recommend the Everyman editions as a gentle way of easing back into the unmodernized realm. They offer skillfully conflated modernized typography (but generally unmodernized spelling), single-volume paperback editions of the plays. John Andrews calls them “hybrid” editions incorporating as many features of the early printings as he could. Of course there are at least two relatively accessible unmodernized editions of the First Folio, the Routledge facsimile version (London, 1998) with the original typeface and the Applause First Folio “in modern type.” There is also the expensive but authoritative Norton facsimile. It remains for some enterprising soul to offer unmodernized editions of, at least, the generally recognized “Good” Quartos.

  As to the “shrewdly” and “shroudly” question, the newly available text of Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s Third Arden Hamlet (Thomson Learning, 2006) changes “shroudly” to “shrewdly” in its 1604 Quarto text version, and explains in a footnote that “Q2’s spelling, ‘shroudly,’ is attractive for its (fortuitous) association with ‘shroud,’ but it does not occur elsewhere, whereas ‘shrodly’ is recorded as an obsolete spelling of shrewdly.” In other words they imply there’s no intentionality behind the use of “shroudly” or none that necessarily—as opposed to “fortuitously”—evokes a ghostly shroud. This may be true of the text on the page; a lot, however, depends on how it was pronounced to an audience’s ear when played on stage. I like preserving “shroudly,” or “enfolding” both versions. Otherwise “shroudly” disappears like the Ghost, survives only in the “band of terror” collations, a kind of textual purgatory, not unlike that occupied by Hamlet’s father’s enshrouded spirit.

  The obverse of John Andrews’s argument for unmodernization can be found in Stanley Wells’s essay in Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling (Clarendon Press, 1979). First it should be noted that Wells is not an opponent of unmodernized Shakespeare and that in their New Oxford Shakespeare project of the mid-eighties Wells and Gary Taylor produced an entire edition of all Shakespeare in (mostly) pure unmodernized form which was a major step in advancing the unmodernizing cause.

  But in his Clarendon Press essay Wells argues that the exploration of how to modernize “may be seen, not as some would have it, as a work of popularization, even vulgarization, but a means of exploring Shakespeare’s text that can make a real contribution to scholarship.” In other words, he’s saying that traveling the same road, but in an opposite direction from John Andrews, from unmodernized to modernized, encourages a close attentiveness to the language that often discloses nuances otherwise not spelled out, so to speak.

  An illuminating debate about the implications of modernizing a single name—whether to call Pistol in Henry V “Ancient Pistol” as the unmodernized version has it—or “Ensign Pistol” as even the Oxford Henry V edited by unmodernized advocate Gary Taylor modernizes it, can be found in the winter 1985 edition of Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4. It’s an “Exchange” that begins with Jennifer Kraus’s “Name Calling and the New Oxford Henry V” (p. 523) and continues with Gary Taylor’s response, “Ancients and Moderns.”

  In her persuasive essay Kraus calls into question the Oxford decision to substitute “Ensign” for “Ancient” as the rank of the braggart soldier Pistol is rendered in the original unmodernized texts. She argues that “the ‘modernization’ of Pistol’s title from Ancient to Ensign … alter[s] our critical interpretation of Pistol, and even, I submit, our view of the play as a whole.”

  Her essay even scores some points with the often unswayable Gary Taylor, who concedes in his reply that while “Shakespeare did sometimes use ‘ancient’ to mean ‘ensign,’ without any intimation of antiquity … and no immediate juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘ancient’ is demanded,” nonetheless, as Peter Alexander put it, “Ensign … introduces inappropriate notions of youthful Victorian chivalry and it spoils Shakespeare’s joke.” In other words, unmodernized “Ancient Pistol” has comic, thematic resonances with Pistol’s over-the-top, over-the-hill, rusty gallantry that “ensign” does not signify.

  For those who wish to venture beyond mere spelling and go deeper into the profundities that can be found in the minutiae of Shakespearean punctuation, I’d suggest Punctuation and Its Dramatic Value in Shakespearean Drama (Associated University Presses, London, 1995) by Anthony Graham-White.

  And while it doesn’t fall precisely into the category of this chapter I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to recommend George T. Wright on metrics. Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (rpt. University of California Press, 1991) pushes to the very limits the expressive weight that can be imputed to metrical anomalies in Shakespeare. Its attentiveness is a pleasure, but inevitably (to me) raises the question of how much intentionality, how much is being read (often brilliantly) into said anomalies that may pass by all but the most gifted readers such as Wright. But reading Wright (reading right?) is a remedy for this.

  Chapter Nine: Dueling Shylocks

  On the question of acting and “original” emotion, one of the best ways of capturing the multiplicity of potential ways of playing Shakespeare is to pick up one of Marvin Rosenberg’s Masks series. The late Rosenberg deserves more recognition as an exhaustive and intelligent chronicler of how roles were played, or reported to have been played, in some of the greatest Shakespearean productions over the centuries

  In The Masks of Hamlet (University of Delaware Press, 1992) he fills 971 pages with eyewitness descriptions of how each scene, sometimes each line, was played individually and ensemble. Cumulatively it’s dazzling and prodigious in
the range of tone and subtleties it evokes. His works, which include The Masks of Lear, of Othello, of Macbeth (and the posthumously published Antony and Cleopatra), are the equivalent of the variorum of the stage. I recommend as well his Adventures of a Shakespeare Scholar (University of Delaware Press, 1997), his engaging autobiography.

  The Garrick gesture and other moments in the history of the gesture on the Shakespearean stage are assessed in David Bevington’s valuable study, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Harvard University Press, 1984).

  John Gross’s Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (Simon & Schuster, 1992) is the most intelligent account of the ugly history that I’ve come upon.

  A surprisingly valuable (especially considering its nonstandard title for an academic book) look at the concept of “bonds” as manifested in The Merchant of Venice and the rest of Shakespeare can be found in Frederick Turner’s Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford University Press, 1999).

  This is to be radically distinguished from such How to Succeed in Business by Reading Shakespeare books as Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman’s Shakespeare in Charge (Miramax, 1999), which I reviewed in Salon in 1999.

  I also found Stephen Orgel’s “Imagining Shylock” chapter in his beautiful book on the history of Shakespearean images—Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)—to be of great value.

  And a recent collection of essays on the play, The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon (Routledge, 2002), demonstrates the wide range of differing contemporary perspectives.

  Nor should I neglect—since I devote so much consideration to the “turquoise ring” device in the Pacino Merchant, Grace Tiffany’s new novel by that name, The Turquoise Ring (Berkley Hardcover, 2005).

  Finding William Empson’s Milton’s God (Chatto & Windus, 1961) was difficult and rewarding. As more of Empson’s works are being brought back into print with the revival of his reputation and the publication of the first volume of John Haffenden’s biography, William Empson: Volume I: Among the Mandarins (Oxford University Press, 2005), someone should bring Milton’s God, this brilliant subversive book, back. It amounts to Empson’s last testament.

  Chapter Ten: Shakespeare on Film: A Contrarian Argument

  Errol Morris drew my attention to George Orwell’s valuable 1947 essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (widely available on the Web), which anticipates Mailer’s speculations about Tolstoy’s hostility to Shakespeare’s cinematic elision of closely observed psychological evolution—and helps explain Tolstoy’s failure to understand Shakespeare in general.

  For those skeptical of recent Luhrmann-like experiments in Shakespeare, I should like to recommend the less operatic, more minimalist and playfully intellectual Hamlet of Michael Almereyda. The one popularly known as the “Ethan Hawke Hamlet,” or, as I think of it—considering Hawke’s take on the Prince—“the Holden Caulfield Hamlet.” It demonstrates that filmed Shakespeare can be a witty riff on the full-blown play. I recall being stunned attending a preview of it at a Shakespeare Association of America annual convention in Montreal. A hall filled with three hundred or more serious-minded scholars watched, genuinely entertained by the film, applauded it vociferously and engaged in an enthusiastic dialogue with the director, who I thought showed great (justified) courage in showing his film to that kind of audience first. See if you agree.

  There’s a book-length account called John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in “Hamlet” (Random House, 1967) a rehearsal diary by an actor who played the minor role of the Gentleman in that production and who took notes and smuggled in a tape recorder in a briefcase to tape Gielgud and Burton’s dialogues. Not very Gentlemanly, but I’m glad he did, because he preserves for our guilty souls the intimate conversation of two of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the century as they prepare for the production.

  I wish I had more space to praise more film and television productions. I’m one of the few people who really enjoyed Peter Brook’s long-lost seventy-minute 1953 television version of Lear starring Orson Welles in a ridiculously horned helmet. Brook gave me the impression he hated it, did not like to be reminded that it still existed. But it’s out there (go to the Poor Yorick website for such rarities). And then Julie Taymor’s Titus, BBC TV’s Troilus and Cressida, Michael Hordern as BBC TV’s Lear and Prospero, John Gielgud voicing all the roles in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, Ian McKellen’s Richard III. There’s a lot to like, much to love.

  But there has been a valuable development in Shakespearean film studies, the development of an eloquent language of praise, represented by any and all the works of Herbert Coursen, Samuel Crowl and Kenneth Rothwell, for instance (although needless to say they have their problems with some works as well). Crowl’s Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (Ohio University Press, 2003) is a good example. Coursen pioneered Shakespearean television criticism with Watching Shakespeare on Television (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993). I also admire Anthony Davies’s work, including Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge, 1988).

  Chapter Eleven: Peter Brook: The Search for the Secret Play

  Most readers will be familiar with the reason I used a quote from Patrick Stewart as a semi-demi-epigraph to this chapter, but for those not: before his Star Trek fame eclipsed everything else, Patrick Stewart was—still is—one of the most widely admired Shakespearean actors of his generation in the United Kingdom. I was thrilled just watching a videotape of his Prospero in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Central Park Tempest.

  When Peter Brook spoke of Shakespeare’s generosity in emptying himself out, becoming, in both senses of the phrase, “no one,” I recalled something Jorge Luis Borges said about Shakespeare in a short story whose name I’d forgotten. Fortunately, the key Borges quote appeared in the essay by Anne Barton in the May 11, 2006, New York Review of Books. She quotes the passage (from the story “Everything and Nothing”) in which God speaks to a Shakespeare haunted by being “no one”: “I too,” Borges has God say, “am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.”

  Interesting, in the Peter Brook connection, how Borges’s God “dreamed the world.” A dream again. We are living in His dream. The way we live in Shakespeare’s dream in effect. Alexandre Dumas said, “After God, Shakespeare has created most.” But what if, in a certain way, Shakespeare created more (that is, more than God could have dreamed up Himself, more than Darwin dreamed), something utterly unnecessary to existence or survival, something unimaginable by the spiritually inclined, nondetermined by the laws of science, an entity not “necessary” in the strictest Ockham’s razor sense of necessity?

  Brook’s Hamlet, it should be noted, began as Qui est là? (“Who’s there?”), originally done in a French translation which Brook claimed gave it a new kind of energy. Andy Lavender’s study Hamlet in Pieces (Continuum, 2003) offers three idiosyncratic versions of the play including Brook’s, Robert Lepage’s and Robert Wilson’s.

  I’ve already mentioned Brook’s Evoking Shakespeare, but his immensely influential book on theater in general, The Empty Space (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), speaks to the genesis of his vision of emptiness, the vibrant silence. Brook’s autobiography, Threads of Time (Methuen, 1998), may seem a bit reticent but two books by Brook followers, my colleague John Heilpern’s Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa (Faber & Faber, 1977) and Margaret Croyden’s Conversations with Peter Brook: 1970–2000 (Faber & Faber, 2003), supply valuable observations and insight into his work. As does Michael Kustow’s Peter Brook: A Biography (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

  Chapter Twelve: “You Can’t Have Him, Harold!”: The Battle over Bloom and Bloom’s Falstaff

  The most consistently illuminating study I’ve found of the intersection of directors and textual editors, and directors as textual e
ditors, is Alan C. Dessen’s Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Dessen is one of the most profoundly rewarding scholars of Shakespeare on stage.

  It’s unfortunate, the price structure of academic books being what it is, that Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert J. Sawyer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), essentially a collection of papers written for the Shakespeare Association seminar I mentioned as the stage on which Linda Charnes did her tour de force turn, lists for $79.95. (Charnes’s essay is entitled “The 2% Solution: What Harold Bloom Forgot,” and the book also offers the essay she cited by Sharon O’Dair, “On the Value of Being a Cartoon in Literature and Life,” in addition to reflections by the always stimulating thinker Edward Pechter, and William Kerrigan’s essay which offers the best defense of Bloom I’ve seen: “The Case for Bardolatry: Harold Bloom Rescues Shakespeare from His Critics.”

  I think everyone who’s read Bloom, and those who have felt the Bloomian impact on Shakespeare studies, ought to have more easy access to some of these valuable reflections on Bloom—someone who might be called one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time.

  And I should call attention to an essay that appeared just as I was to hand in these chapter notes, James Woods’s “What Harold Bloom Can Teach God” (in the May 1, 2006, issue of The New Republic), on Bloom’s pretentious but incoherent vision of the Old and New Testaments, testament to Bloom’s preference for hectoring generalities over close reading.