Endpaper
Passion for Shakespeare
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A guide to the scholarly inferno that rages around the Bard's works.
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Original and interesting: Ron Rosenbaum.
I'VE always hoped for a book on Shakespeare that wasn't by some seminal Shakespeare scholar or literary critic. I wanted a book by a passionate, brilliant reader steeped in her own reading of the Bard and in the debates by contemporary scholars over his (her?) work. But even I couldn't have anticipated how lucky I would get.
To have Ron Rosenbaum, the most original and interesting cultural journalist working today, wade through the depths and heights of Shakespeare is more than an embarrassment of riches. It is the very thing itself: like Shakespeare reading Shakespeare to us.
Embarrassment of riches
His monumental new work, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (601 pp. Random House) is, he explains, "a kind of guide — leading the reader, like Virgil in Dante, down into the scholarly inferno, hoping to illuminate some of the genuine intellectual (and visceral) delights, the tormenting conflicts, the unbearable pleasures to be found therein."
I have written previously about his other irresistible book, The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations And Edgy Enthusiasms (also Random House), which is a seductive anthology (800 pages, 57 speculative essays) of compelling, thoughtful non-fiction; intellectual adventure stories that somehow manage to be philosophical, comical and suspenseful. His writing in that book, and in his new work, is of such high order (provocative thinking combined with great prose) that reading Ron Rosenbaum becomes one of the great pure pleasures — both visceral and cerebral — available in contemporary non-fiction. The writing is opinionated, brilliant, intensely (almost diabolically) researched, witty, deeply intelligent, and restlessly probing. His essays (always satisfyingly lengthy and intriguing) read like beautifully written spy stories.
Rosenbaum has constantly alluded in his previous essays, books and column (the unfailingly arresting "Edgy Enthusiast") to his fierce passion for Shakespeare. This is a book that has been on his mind (and soul) for a long time, and in his introduction (addictively digressive and personal) recounts how he came to be Shakespeare-smitten.
"On the last evening of the summer of 1970 in the village of Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of Shakespeare, I had an experience that changed my life and has haunted me ever since. One that left me, ever after, with a question I've been trying to answer: What was that about? An improbable chain of circumstances had resulted in my witnessing one of the first performances of a now-legendary production of `A Mid-summer Night's Dream' (by Peter Brook), one that I subsequently learned changed more lives than mine: it changed the lives of an entire generation of
Shakespearean players and directors, changed the way Shakespeare has been played ever since ... It was the experience that, for me, gave a lifelong urgency to the conflicts over Shakespearean questions examined in the ensuing chapters... I'd never experienced anything of such radiant clarity... It was a lifelong love potion."
Into the citadel
Until that moment, Rosenbaum had not been a Shakespearean obsessive. But seeing Brook's staging of the Dream marked his "outsider's odyssey into the innermost citadels of scholarship". He writes that he would walk "around the city listening to Shakespeare tapes on a Walkman." Now, I haven't seen Peter Brook's legendary production (nor can I ever hope to see it) but because I have seen his "Mahabharata", I can fully understand why Rosenbaum was so affected: Jean Claude Carriere and Brook 's film version of the epic is, for me, the definitive one. I return to it again and again.
For The Shakespeare Wars, Rosenbaum researched and interviewed the foremost living scholars, theatre directors, and actors. The book contains summaries of the work of important critics, asides on his own encounters with the poems and plays, and scholarly and critical issues that are being "warred" over. Debates over authentic way to pronounce and deliver the lines, deconstructionists/ new historicists versus critics who write for a lay public, moderate versus fanatical hunters of verbal ambiguities, and the importance of the early 17th-century spellings. One Shakespeare scholar Rosenbaum visits argues for reprinting the plays without updating the spelling of their words.
When the modernised line from Hamlet "the air bites shrewdly" is replaced with the original spelling "the air bites Shroudly" the reader can suddenly and clearly see death looming.
Textual variants
The battle that he gives fullest coverage to (in a 30,000-word chapter) is over textual variants: The squabbles, for instance, among editors of "Hamlet" on sources for the definitive text. A "good" and a "bad" quarto and the trimmed version that appears in the complete Folio published in 1623, eight years after Shakespeare's death. Are the variants among these editions the result of compositors' errors or are they Shakespeare's own revisions?
The debate over King Lear variants and the decision to print two versions of the text in the Oxford edition. And an "Enfolded Hamlet" project that digitalises the play so that all the variants can be read at once.
The biggest fiasco Rosenbaum reports on is the one trigged by an American professor claiming that a "Funeral Elegy" signed "W.S." had to be by the W.S. because his computer told him so. The professor later retracted this but by then publishers had already included this "new work" in their collected editions.
`Bloggish' quality
Rosenbaum shows here that he can dish Shakespeare with the best of the academics, making one reviewer observe that his "disorganised, free-associative efforts to show off his expertise belong on a Shakespeare blog, not between the covers of a book." But perhaps it is the book's `bloggish' quality that makes it so appealing and inviting. In particular, I enjoyed the blow-by-blow account of feuds between rival scholars (he gamely attacks Harold Bloom for arguing that Shakespeare "invented the human" personality) and Rosenbaum's own interjections that keep the book from becoming one more pedantic Shakespeare study or another fashionably opaque post-modern project.
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