By Michael Dirda
Sunday, September 24, 2006; BW15
THE SHAKESPEARE WARS
Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
By Ron Rosenbaum
Random House. 601 pp. $35
A lot of how you feel about this book will depend on how you judge its tone. Is it boyishly enthusiastic or annoyingly self-indulgent? Certainly, The Shakespeare Wars provides a superb overview of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship, with particular attention paid to textual studies and performance practice. Its author, Ron Rosenbaum, is unquestionably smart, well read, passionate about his subject and a terrific interviewer. But he's also the sort of reporter who makes everything intensely, even histrionically personal -- and he's not one to hide his light under a bushel. Ever.
A few samples are in order:
"Now comes what I'd say was the second most gratifying moment in my odyssey among the textual scholars. Did I hear you say you wanted to know the first most gratifying moment? I'm glad you asked."
"It was something I first considered when the New York Shakespeare Festival asked me to write the program essay for Brian Kulick's production of Pericles at the Joseph Papp Public Theater."
"It was exciting to think not only that three more scholars had joined the struggle against the Elegy attribution, but that they had named John Ford as the author, which I had done four years earlier."
To some, Rosenbaum's constant, inescapable presence on the page may bring welcome color and life to frequently abstruse considerations of the Bad Quarto, Good Quarto and First Folio printings of Hamlet . Doubtless, too, some readers can never be reminded often enough about college days in New Haven, or of pieces Rosenbaum has contributed to the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, or of the panels he's chaired and program notes he's written, or of his previous book about "exceptionalism," Explaining Hitler , or of select parties and elite conferences he's attended, or of the times he offered an insight that made not only critic Frank Kermode gasp (with excitement? with envy?) but also director Peter Brook, or, in short, of his general all-round brilliance coupled with his deep commitment to the first person singular.
Other readers may feel somewhat different.
These latter may actually find the over-excited, in-your-face quality of the book vulgar, note its tendency to wordiness, repetition and digression, dislike its persistent journalistic use of snappy one- or two-sentence paragraphs. In some extreme cases, people might even dismiss The Shakespeare Wars as unreadable.
Which would be a shame.
Given that Rosenbaum's book might be more aptly subtitled "Shakespeare and Me," it is nonetheless a genuinely passionate, insight-filled survey of the serious work being done by many scholars, directors and actors. (Note that word serious : Rosenbaum disdains the whole "authorship" question -- Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and that's the end of it.) He opens the first chapter by recalling how Brook's famous Stratford production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" changed his life, reminding us periodically that he's never forgotten that September day in 1970 when he was lifted into another realm of being. Now, as it happens, while hitchhiking around England that very summer, I caught the same production, possibly the same performance, and friends -- including a famous novelist whose name I'm not going to tell you -- can verify that I too speak about it with awe and reverence. It wasn't just the trapezes, or the giant helices of foil representing the forest, or the lecherous hee-haws of Bottom, it was . . . . Had enough? Now imagine that I were to go on like this for another page or two, and you will gain an inkling of what the button-holing Rosenbaum achieves on a far grander scale.
Haunted by the Brook production, Rosenbaum naturally wonders just what made it all so magical. So in subsequent years he studies the complete works and watches various stage productions (one of his best chapters argues that instead of being bored by some conventional theatrical performance, it's far more rewarding to enjoy a classic Shakespeare film such as Laurence Olivier's "Richard III" or Orson Welles's "Chimes at Midnight," based on the "Henry IV" plays). As a cultural columnist for the New York Observer (and occasional writer for other publications), he periodically covers the Shakespeare controversies of the last 30 and more years -- the arguments for and against various bits of doggerel as works of the master, the decision to print two versions of "King Lear" in the Oxford edition of the plays, whether an actor should pause at the end of each line of blank verse and how Shylock should be interpreted.
He also works on a major article about the editing of "Hamlet," spending time with a dozen scholars, including the elderly Harold Jenkins, whose 600-page New Arden edition will probably be the last attempt at an ideal composite text, and with the ingenious Bernice Kliman, whose "Enfolded Hamlet" project digitalizes the play so that all the variants can be read at once. From here he ultimately proceeds to interview the noted and the notorious: subversive Gary Taylor (who hates unthinking reverence for the Bard and hopes to raise the critical status of Thomas Middleton); glory-hog Donald Foster (whose SHAXICON computer program analyzes word usage and frequency); maverick Eric Sams (who argues for Shakespeare's hand in "Edmund Ironside" and other plays); actor Steven Berkoff (who, while playing Hamlet, appears to have sex on stage with Gertrude); voice expert Cicely Berry; and directors Peter Hall and Peter Brook. He also chats with Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World ), whom he knew back at Yale, and with the ever-controversial Harold Bloom (author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human ). Sometimes, The Shakespeare Wars feels as if it's written partly against, and partly in the anxiety-producing shadow of, those two influential scholars.
Whatever the case, there are terrific insights from all these eminences, and anyone who cares for Shakespeare, textual scholarship and the theater will learn an enormous amount from this exceptionally long book. Still, two sections particularly stand out. While exploring why the smallest typographical details matter, Rosenbaum visits John Andrews, of the Washington-based Shakespeare Guild, who cogently argues for reprinting the plays without updating the spelling of their words. This sounds terribly unimportant, until Andrews demonstrates the added richness that results when you replace the modernized line from Hamlet "the air bites shrewdly" with the original spelling "the air bites Shroudly." Suddenly, up loom death, the grave, the final darkness that awaits us all. Similarly, in another chapter, Stephen Booth insists that by keeping in mind all the meanings of a word, instead of choosing just one, we enhance our experience of the sonnets, allowing these poems to create in us the same vertiginous, even delirious, quality of the love they memorialize.
Certainly The Shakespeare Wars possesses something of a comparable heady drunkenness, as it lurches from Rosenbaum's egregious personalia to digressions on Hitler or Cantor's theory of the infinite to the investigations of real scholars and theatrical professionals. These last redeem all, and make the book invaluable. It's those other pages -- what one might regard paradoxically as all those bel canto arias surrounding the practical recitatives -- that are the problem. Twice Rosenbaum mentions that when he filed his original Hamlet story with the New Yorker, it ran to 30,000 words. The magazine cut it to 10,000. If the editors at Random House had exercised just a little comparable ruthlessness, they might have saved Ron Rosenbaum from himself and given the world a book that was much less individual but a far better testimonial to the intelligence and hard work of its author. ยท
Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., he conducts a freewheeling book discussion for washingtonpost.com.
