Review: The Shakespeare Wars

For all the childhood joys and wonders grad school has held for me thus far, there's still hard work to be done. My first paper for our Graduate Seminar class this quarter was to read and review a book about Shakespeare, chosen by our own discrection.

Silly me, I picked a 600 page critique and analysis. It would have taken me three weeks to get it all read if I hadn't put it off until the last mintue - I read the whole thing in four sittings across seven days, one of them (yesterday) lasting ten hours.

And how did it go? You tell me, I only just emailed it to my professor a few mintues ago...

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Who was the man named William Shakespeare? More importantly, what difference does it make? Ron Rosenbaum has given us a comprehensive analysis of exactly how little it matters. Shakespeare’s life has so few known facts, allowing for extremities of conjecture and supposition to become more important than the body of work which spoke to us as a world culture, made us care about him in the first place.

In The Shakespeare Wars, Rosenbaum places primary focus on the most important part of Shakespeare’s life – the written materials published under his name. He argues the detrimental effect of using the few known facts about Shakespeare’s life, saying

Just as in the old story of the man who persists in searching for his keys under a streetlamp (even though they’re not there) ‘because that’s where the only light was,’ Shakespearean biography, especially the obsessive—often circular—attempts to make inferences about the work on the basis of the few known facts and anecdotes about the life, can be a distraction from the true mystery and excitement, the true source of illumination, the place the hidden keys can actually be found: the astonishing language. (Look how little we know about Homer and how little it matters.)

Thus most efforts to forge, fabricate or flesh out the life (as opposed to placing the work in its cultural context) have ended up doing a disservice to the work because they lead inevitably to a reductive biographical perspective on the work and use the work to ‘prove’ suppositions about the life.

Throughout his book Rosenbaum does a fantastic job of keeping quite well away from Shakespeare the man. Instead he focuses purely upon the written material attributed to him in all its glorious versions and alterations. When he speaks of Shakespeare, he is clearly referring to a personage, not a person. He spends much of the first third of the book reminding the reader that no one knows exactly who the man was, and thus every supposition about what he wrote and/or rewrote is nothing more than that.

Rosenbaum begins with his transcendental theatrical Shakespearean experience that began the depths of his passion about Shakespeare’s material – Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Company in September of 1970 (an experience unfortunately lost to time as the RSC didn’t record the performance). He describes most pointedly the actors’ performance, “as if the words were not recited so much as thought up and uttered, freshly minted, for the first time,” an utterance that makes the actor in me jump up and shout Yes, you idiot! That’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be! What had you been watching before?! (Fun Fact: I really did shout this out loud when I read this passage. My cat, accustomed to my behavior, was unsurprised).

Rosenbaum goes on to discuss the three competing texts of Hamlet (the Bad Quarto of 1603, the Good Quarto of 1604, and the Folio version of 1623) pointing out their differentiation. Through an extensive series of interviews and discussions with various Shakespearean scholars he illuminates the additions and omissions of each, and how the whole of the text is altered both stylistically and thematically with each version. He does the same thing with the two differing endings of King Lear, eloquently delineating the enormity of the themes based upon the sole difference of Lear’s last two lines.

Rosenbaum continues by pointing out and exploring what he calls “The Great Shakespeare ‘Funeral Elegy’ Fiasco”. Here Rosenbaum tears into Don Foster with a passionate tenacity for using a computer program, SHAXICON, to analyze the poem and prove it definitively to have been written by Shakespeare. Whereas throughout most of The Shakespeare Wars Rosenbaum delights in the intellectual stimulation of discussion and discovery, this chapter sees him enjoy a perverse childish delight in making Foster eat his words. He sparked within me a mutual disgust for the audacity of SHAXICON, as if a computer program can be supplanted for the intellect and intuition of human sophistication to answer the question of what is Shakespearean.

He goes into detail about the mysterious Hand D, the person behind the section of a never performed, never printed work called Sir Thomas More. The handwriting of Hand D is believed to be Shakespeare’s own.; the very handwriting which crafted Othello’s last words condemning either the “base Indian” (as it was published in the Quarto version) or the “base Judean” (in the Folio), and the drastically divergent ramifications of either option.

He picks the brain of Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who makes a most passionate, table pounding argument insisting the necessity of a pause at the end of speaking a pentameter line.

Though interviews with John Andrews Rosenbaum gives a new insight into the unique facets of exploring Shakespeare’s work through its original spelling (“Tomorrow and tomorrow” vs. “To morrow and to morrow”). He illustrates just how thoroughly we have in a sense adapted, translated, altered and diluted the original depths of meaning without altering the pronunciation of the original text.

He goes into detail of The Merchant of Venice and the nature of Shylock. Through the portrayal of that character, Rosenbaum explains how the play doesn’t necessarily have to be anti-Semitic, but can rather be viewed as a play about anti-Semitism.

He makes a strong case for the superiority of Shakespeare’s work on film. Through pointed examples of close-ups, voice-overs and eye contact, Rosenbaum describes how (in some cases) the plays work better as movies than they ever could have on stage. He even explains the merits of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in a way that will make me decide to finally watch it.

With an appropriate amount of self-effacement, Rosenbaum describes a heat-of-the-moment comment he made at a Peter Brook Dialogue, and includes his subsequent letter of apology to Brook. He uses this as a segue to get into the mind of Brook, and thorough a series of interviews, attempts to discover what Brook means about his notion of a “secret play” within each of Shakespeare’s plays.

Rosenbaum takes on a second foe in Harold Bloom and his “Santa Claus-like interpretation” of Falstaff. It becomes clear that Rosenbaum’s most pointed irritation with anyone’s opinion of Shakespeare comes down to the inflexibility of said opinion. Like Foster with his SHAXICON, Bloom’s vision of Falstaff is in direct conflict with Rosenbaum’s love of the unfathomable depths and reverberations of exploring Shakespeare’s work. The audacity of thinking one has nailed an aspect of Shakespeare to the wall sets Rosenbaum over the edge, repeatedly quoting director Jack O’Brien’s tirade about Bloom’s vision of Falstaff: “Oh, shut up, Harold. Enough already—we get it. You can’t have him! You can’t have him, Harold. You can’t contain him. You can’t nail him. You can’t put him in amber. You can’t define him. You can’t reduce him. You can’t have him.”

He explores Stephen Booth’s analysis and interpretations of the sonnets, referring to Booth as one who “represents in the realm of close reading what Peter Brook represents to me in the realm of directing.” His admiration for Booth is so strong that he uses it to further delineate the disgust of the previous chapter, calling Booth the “un-Bloom”. Rosenbaum counts and recounts Booth’s work with such a thought-provoking analysis that it earns its place amongst Booth’s own; a footnote to the footnote, if you will.

Through a conference in Bermuda on the pleasure contained and expressed within Shakespeare, Rosenbaum explores the pleasures expressed in As You Like It and R&J. Pleasures of the heart and pleasures of sex so profoundly conveyed that it seemed to un-rust the gears of the otherwise stodgy old scholars in attendance.

And finally, the discourse on physical pleasure melds into the repetitive theme of forgiveness within Shakespeare’s plays, describing it as “perhaps the ultimate pleasure.” Here Rosenbaum explores several examples of forgiveness, from his delight at Puck asking for the audience’s forgiveness in Dream to his shock of pleasure at Cordelia’s forgiveness in Lear with “No cause, no cause.” He ends the book asking for the forgiveness of the reader, “for all I’ve left out of the book, and yes, for what’s in: for my necessarily limited perspective on a limitless subject.”

Personally, I found The Shakespeare Wars the most pleasurable non-fiction read of my limited life. Rosenbaum’s love and passion for the seven-year project of writing this book is quite clear. His conversational writing style made all the notions and experiences he related a most enjoyable pleasure to read. I respect and admire his notion that the exploration of Shakespeare is bottomless, for it has a reverberative quality that makes each pass of the material unfold deeper possibilities of discovery than the last. He takes his appreciation for and exploration of Shakespeare to an art form in and of itself; it is art that describes art, a work that will never finish. In so doing it heralds the words of Leonardo daVinci, that “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”