Berryman's Shakespeare [Hardcover]

John Berryman (Author), John Haffenden (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1999

With a Preface by Robert Giroux

A fascinating collection that unveils john berryman's lifelong preoccupation with Shakespeare.

As a critic, John Berryman was called "not only one of the most gifted Americans of his time, but also one of the most honorable and responsible." Berryman began as a protg of the Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren and developed into a perceptive critic whose advantage was his own experience as a major poet. His voluminous writings on the Bard have now been collected and edited by John Haffenden.

After the opening section on Shakespeare's dramatic early years, the book continues with Berryman's brilliant reconstruction, "Shakespeare at Thirty," and seven other lectures, including "The Tragic Substance" and "Shakespeare's Last Word" (about The Tempest). The next section is devoted to King Lear, to a discussion of the difference between the quarto and folio texts of this masterpiece, and to the absorbing correspondence about the play's problems between Berryman and another of the greatest Shakespeare scholars, W. W. Greg. The fourth section investigates William Haughton as possibly being "Mr. W.H." of the sonnets and a collaborator on The Taming of the Shrew. After a group of essays on various plays, including Henry VI and Macbeth, the book concludes with "Shakespeare's Reality," which Berryman apparently intended to be the end of his unfinished full-length study of Shakespeare.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Issued in the wake of major books on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, this compendium of admiring, cogent and reflective essays, which have remained uncollected since Berryman's suicide in 1972, testifies to the unusually resilient and enduring value of the Bard's oeuvre. A poet known primarily for his sequence poem The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman gave three lecture series on Shakespeare but left his ambitious written projects, including an annotated edition of King Lear and a critical biography, unfinished. Given these circumstances, readers will be grateful for Haffenden's extensive introduction, which helpfully contextualizes the bibliographical ambiguities of the extant editions of the plays. The book's five sections afford readers an opportunity to examine Berryman's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's characters, imagery, plots and, crucially, the textual puzzles that convinced him that poets make better annotators than editors. The introduction and notes to his edition of Lear are included, as is his correspondence (a letter to his mother illustrates his healthy, wry sense of humor, imagining Shakespeare "now merry with wicked joy peeping over Olympus at sorrowful scholars"). In essays arranged both chronologically and by individual play, Berryman offers readings of the plays that are not only fresh and immediate but reflect his own literary personae. He identifies prevailing themes, examining in the tragedies both "sexual loathing" and "the Displacement of the King"; in The Tempest he notes "how often, and with what longing, sleep is invoked." Like the writings of Coleridge and J.V. Cunningham, this is a book that relishes its resources, by a poet-critic who felt Shakespeare's language on the pulse.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When one great poet decides to study and write on the work and life of another, magic can occur. Berryman, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, conjured some powerful magic with his examination of Shakespeare. Collected and edited by Haffenden (The Life of John Berryman, LJ 12/15/82), these writings, produced from the late 1940s until the poet's death in 1972, offer insight into both the works of Shakespeare and the mind of Berryman. Divided into five parts, the book also collects Berryman's biographical studies, eight lectures (most notably "Shakespeare at Thirty"), eight essays, and his last writing on the Bard, "Shakespeare's Reality." Public libraries may not want to go beyond Harold Bloom's recent Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (LJ 10/1/98), but Berryman's work should be a required purchase for all academic libraries. It seems destined to become as much a part of Berryman's legacy as his poetry.?Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374112053
• ISBN-13: 978-0374112059
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,900,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A must for Lear-lovers; a skip for Berryman fans, July 19, 2003

By 

J. Ott "John Ott" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Berryman's Shakespeare (Hardcover)

Unless you are preparing a PhD thesis on Berryman, this book will not offer you any insight into his poetic works, including THE DREAM SONGS. However, for those interested in Shakespeare, it will offer fresh and not-so-fresh insights into Shakespeare's methods, similar to Bloom's SHAKESPEARE: INVENTION OF THE HUMAN. How interested in Shakespeare must you be? Well, you have to be into Q's and F's (quartos and folios), obsure Elizabethan personages (William Houghton anyone?), and reading text with lots of u/v j/i substitutions. John BERRYMAN'S SHAKESPEARE is not much like Anthony BURGESS' SHAKESPEARE, though they are probably next to each other in most libraries.

Parts One and Two cover scattershot the entire Shakespearean oeuvre, including CARDENIO and SIR THOMAS MORE, with lots of historical dalliance. It is clear that Berryman knows his drama Elizabethan, and often the best insights are who was borrowing what plot from whom, if not what words. His take on HAMLET is standardly Freudian, but I did enjoy his heretical insights into ROMEO & JULIET and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM as well as his discussion of why the so-called historical 'tetralogies' are actually 'trilogies.'

Where this book is a must read, although admittedly for a small number of people, is in Berryman's writings on KING LEAR. The Introduction prepares you for the massive depth and critical brilliance that Berryman brought to his never-finished edition of the great play. For those who are excited to hear that Berryman has an arsenal of proof that Q was taken by shorthand during an actual performance, and includes changes the actors made in their lines, the Lear portions are a must. Covering about half the volume and including Berryman's correspondence with W.W. Greg, the discussion of Lear is a scholar's wet dream, a veritable barrage of evidence and counter-evidence, two tantalizing texts (Q and F) that may represent two equally authorial versions, i.e. Shakespeare rewrote Q to eliminate a character and streamline action for a performance in another context.

I have adressed my review to the various readers that may be approaching this book (Berryman fans: don't read; Shakespeare fans: maybe, Lear scholars: read-for-god's-sake-read-it). I hope that my recommendations prove useful.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Addition to Shakespeare Criticism, March 11, 2001

By 

Sauropod (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings (Paperback)

This posthumous collection of essays, letters, and unfinished writings by John Berryman is one of the most vivid and interesting works of Shakespearean literary criticism I've read. Berryman's insightful essay on "Shakespeare at Thirty" is alone worth the cover price. The real heart of the book is the author's lectures on Shakespeare's body of work, from the earliest comedies to "Shakespeare's Last Word" ("The Tempest"). While I disagree with some of Berryman's idiosyncratic readings, such as his endorsement of an Oedipal complex for Hamlet and his disparagement of "Much Ado About Nothing," I nevertheless found the book consistently interesting, always readable, and sometimes brilliant. I would rank it among the best general-interest books on Shakespeare in the last fifty years or so. Also recommended: Harold Goddard's two-volume THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Honie-tong'd" Berryman...., March 5, 2003

By 

John Cabral (SF Bay Area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings (Paperback)

John Haffendon has done Shakespeare readers a great service with this compilation of poet John Berryman's writings and musings on Shakespeare, both the man and the dramatist. Included in this compendium are extensive excerpts from a projected biography of the bard; introductory fragments of an authoritative edition of King Lear; conjecture as to the identity of Mr. W.H. ("the onlie begetter" of the sonnets); as well as short essays on a number of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, King John, and Macbeth. As one might expect of a poet of his caliber, Berryman has a keen ear and an insightful intelligence. He calls Dogberry "the supreme and triumphant enemy of the English language"; he sizes up Lady Macbeth as "unscrupulous, but short-winded," "single-natured...[b]ut nihilistic"; sonnet 135, he informs us, "is among the most indecent formal poems in English." Treasures such as these can be found throughout these wonderfully rich essays. Never intended for publication in this form, the book does contain a good deal of repetition: a comment regarding King Lear, for instance, or a supposition about Shakespeare's source reading will be mentioned here, repeated there. This does little, however to mar the surprising cohesiveness of the book; it very nearly reads as a completed volume. Haffendon does reveal a bit more than he should in the more-than-fifty-page introduction, giving away some of the surprises Berryman has in store for us. It might have made a more appropriate afterword. Similarly, "Letters on Lear,"--a bit overly pedantic and tedious--might have fitted better into an appendix, although it does offer a fascinating insight into the workaday efforts and integrity of a scholar like Berryman. The letters also contain at least one laugh-out-loud moment when the poet casually and parenthetically corrects Dr. W. W. Greg: "I am not `Dr.,' by the way." In the closing pages of this fascinating book, Berryman rewards us with a compelling meditation on the King of France's recollections of Bertram's father from All's Well That Ends Well. It is a striking passage, "nearly fifty lines, contributing nothing to the play" and without support in Shakespeare's sources, but nevertheless, asserts Berryman, "the most remarkable tribute in the whole Shakespearean canon." His thoughts on this passage (and others besides), offer the attentive student as much insight into Berryman and his works as into Shakespeare and his plays.