Customer Reviews

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a volume of gustatory delights -- a book you pick up on impulse and end up devouring with your meals (my copy is spotted with olive oil and specks of latte foam). Rosenbaum has written an autobiography of his obsession with Shakespeare, triggered by a conversion experience when he saw a 1970 Peter Brooks production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. One hears a bit too often about his precious handful of epiphanies, and Rosenbaum (like Harold Bloom, whom he castigates) can easily be faulted for his enthusiasm, but there's no doubt that he brings a host of seemingly desiccated academic controversies to life. Until last week I had no idea there were two versions of Lear or three versions of Hamlet, or that I could be made to care about Shakespeare's original spelling enough to order every play I could find edited by John Andrews.

In fact, reading Rosenbaum turned out to be an expensive experience. Thanks to his infectious interest and spirited recommendations (I'm tempted to say the book is worth having for its Bibliographic Notes), I've purchased Stephen Booth's old edition of the Sonnets, Ann Thompson's new edition of Hamlet, and Russ McDonald's Shakespeare and the Arts of Language -- and that was only the beginning of a ruinous week on Amazon. Rosenbaum also makes a strong case for republishing out-of-print classics such as Empson's Milton's God and Booth's Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets; I hope someone's listening.

So I award Shakespeare Wars five stars for enthusiasm -- not only its author's but that which it excites in readers like me, who generally skip those bulky Arden introductions. (Now I'll read them with gratitude.) It didn't hurt, either, that Rosenbaum champions prejudices I share: that academics besotted with Theory are like color-blind art critics; that Shylock should not be sanitized; and that Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet is spectacular, in no small part because of Harold Perrineau's Mercutio. And it's in reference to Mercutio that Rosenbaum makes one of his many excellent equations: "Mercutio as Marlowe." That's the kind of connection that sends a spark racing across the imagination and leaves its readers smiling.

Ron Rosenbaum's enthusiasm for Shakespeare as well as his erudition and bottomless curiosity comes across on nearly every page of this very stimulating account of the "state of the art" in Shakespeare studies. It's not at all pedantic, extremely readable and covers everything from various opinions about Shakespeare's handwriting to the question of whether or not he revised his texts. Rosenbaum doesn't just read the criticism, he interviews and probes the scholars holding opposite viewpoints and conveys a sense of the excitment of scholarly discovery. It's accessible to non-specialists, and some chapters are more engaging than others (naturally) but overall it is a an unusually good book on what would seem to be a somewhat estoteric topic, but really isn't.

In studying and teaching the Bard, I always wonder if I am over-praising or under-estimating Shakespeare's achievement. "Is it him or is it we who are not making sense?" (524) Rosenbaum replies we are at fault. But this is a "felix culpa," a happy fault. He energetically plows through dozens of topics revolving around reactions of critics and directors of Shakespeare. This is not a biography; Rosenbaum has choice words for Stephen Greenblatt's recent "Will in the World." Rosenbaum's dogged pace shows his journalistic knack for standing outside the "public fiascos, palace coups" of his book's subtitle, the better to examine "clashing scholars." Digging in, he holds his ground against formidable experts.

He's able to summarize Stephen Bloom's rhetorical application of antanaclasis in Sonnet 40: "like pulsating alliteration, evokes a sense of insecurity, of flux, of motion..." (471) This whole book, in fact, is Rosenbaum's effort to come to grips with a day as a grad student at Yale when he first realized this disassociation, this suspension between meanings, this either-and-or-plus-more capability that he argues Shakespeare, more than any other writer ever, at his best conveys to us. Still, this "exegetical despair" at never having enough time to get to the bottom of Shakespeare's "floating signifiers" persists.

In fact, Rosenbaum's status as a drop-out from an Ivy League doctoral program in English enables him to return to textual studies, critical debates, academic cogitation, and performance anxieties with aplomb-- and perhaps a wish to settle scores with fusty scholars and fussy thespians.
I found myself certainly eager to return to my student seminar on Lear, to pick up for the first time since college Antony & Cleopatra, or to re-discover the overlooked Troilus & Cressida. But, admittedly, the amount of detail, the intricacy of the arguments, and the rapidity with which parts of this study move too quickly all present any prospective reader of "The Shakespeare Wars" (not the best title, either) with reason to reflect. This book took me over two weeks on and off, and it demands-- as is only fair given its subject-- close attention and unwavering recall.

Often Rosenbaum sets up a point that he may not return to for hundreds of pages; he takes up as an aside concerns that far ago at a later stage in his quest to uncover Shakespeare's spell. He expects more than that elusive "generally educated reader" for you need to have read the plays he talks about. No plot summaries here; he takes what is odd for a mass-market account of the drama in that he writes at a level thankfully more accessible than the usual critic (which isn't hard these days, admittedly) but nonetheless a tone that implies on every page you need to have done as nearly an intensive scrutiny of the plays as he has had the stamina, the intellect, and the passion to pursue over thirty-five years.

The high points for me were his treatment of Shylock as performed too genteely by actors today afraid to admit that Shakespeare may have been one of his time and not above it in some universalist humanism in presenting a Jewish villain. Rosenbaum confronts Steven Berkoff and Henry Goodman, both British Jewish actors who in Rosenbaum's estimation have with varying degrees of success tried to make this play and its main character still worthy of a post-1945 performance of a drama more controversial now perhaps than it presumably in Shakespeare's London. Rosenbaum's own determination to argue for the play's antisemitism as its central and essential core despite "universalist" efforts to soften its edge make for stimulating reading.

He follows with a suitable interlude showing that Shakespeare on film for us can outshine its theatrical productions today-- by virtue of close-ups, subtle vocal expression, voiceover of soliloquys, and crafting of scenes without the stage's necessity to thunder out and soldier on for hours more. He recommends Welles' Falstaff, Burton's Hamlet, Olivier's Richard III, and Brook's Lear above all else. To his credit, he gives fair space to Harold Perrineau's stunning Mercutio in Luhrmann's Romeo; on the other hand he barely mentions Taymor's Titus, Parker's Othello, Branagh's Hamlet & Henry or Almeyredra's Hamlet although he seems to like much in them at their best. Not to mention his lack of explanation of what's good and bad in the 1980s BBC TV series that filmed for the first time the entire set of plays. Much more is needed than what his film chapter gives.

Too often, Rosenbaum mentions asides that to me proved more appealing than his main examples. I never figured out what adds up from Brook's "Secret Play" concept or the cumulative effect on stage of Cic Berry's vocal experiments in rehearsals. The Socinian heresy may have much to suggest about Merchant and Empson in "Milton's God" had much to provide about the Doctrine of Christian Satisfaction, but Rosenbaum raises such points only to then rush past them in his determination to transcribe yet another interview with an actor or director. These conversations are often enlightening, but there lurks an understandable if still awkward tendency of the journalist to put himself too forward as the antagonist, the devil's advocate, the naysayer.

There are places, as with his demolishment of Harold Bloom's ridiculous claims for Falstaff as the epitome of Shakespeare's "invention of the human" as we have inherited his conceptual paradigm, where he seems to have that personal agenda come out too much. Revenge for those Yale sherry parties when he witnessed his classmates fawning over Bloom is understandable. But it does undermine the intellectual rigor of his critique of that orotund mandarin.

Unfortunately, this hefty and handsomely designed book lacks any way to track down quotations from his sources. Bibliographic endnotes are engrossing, but the lack of specific citations for hundreds of quotes is disappointing in a book that tries to connect a wider audience to insider debates. Despite an imperfect result, this is one of the rare books that bridges the gap between the ranks of (in the phrase of one of them, Linda Charnes) "yuppie guerrilla academics" and the rest of us. Rosenbaum, for all this book's unevenness and exhausting mass of half-digested material, cares about getting us to share his enthusiasm. Pleasure-- how rarely do we find this concept at the heart of a critic's search for aesthetic wonder? Grace, infinitude, love, sea change, the abyss, forgiveness, transport outside of ourselves: Rosenbaum seeks the source of his "reader reception" by hunting down everyone he can who may guide him to the elusive source of Shakespeare's power and control over him-- and, he urges, if we wish to follow him, Shakespeare's trail blazed for us.

I don't understand, apropos, why Rosenbaum agrees with an assertion that we are the last generation who will be able to comprehend Shakespeare's language before it becomes as antiquated and inaccessible as is Chaucer's Middle English to non-specialists. He raises this point, typically, but never elaborates on it. He raves about Kevin Kline's Falstaff but skims over how Kline's acting in part 2 of Henry IV alters from part 1: a topic that previously Rosenbaum insists upon for many detailed pages. Too often, Rosenbaum seems so excited about his adventure that he forgets we have a hard time keeping up with his dash.

He's no Bardolator. Rather, he wishes us to uncover the intensity of what we read and witness as "the language of thought" as it emerges onto paper or into the spotlights. He argues for what matters in Shakespeare as an aesthetic achievement-- in fact one more apparent to those of us outside today's academy. We may be mocked by those claiming "the institutionalist debunking of the bourgeois subject" from ivory towers to speak rather for the oppressed. I teach some of these less- privileged, literarily-challenged students every day, far from the Ivy League. I'd ask Charnes: how should I teach them Shakespeare? How explain his appeal to the person next to me on the bus? Getting "ordinary folks" to understand a bit of Shakespeare's art brings the original aim of the playwright home. As one critic mentions, anyone can experience the complex reactions Rosenbaum or critics or directors know. The only difference is that the professionals know how to articulate it, and can re-experience it with increasingly adept awareness. What Wordsworth labelled as simultaneous dissassociation and association: this quality marks Shakespeare's inexhaustible, endlessly renewable "moral complexity" as well as artistic achievement.

The inexhaustability of good art may sound old-fashioned, but Rosenbaum near the opening of his book shows how Shakespeare rewards our investment-- with compound interest. For many people today, accustomed to obvious presentation of vapid messages, Shakespeare may nudge them out of their shell. They are often scared of him. Rosenbaum likewise demystifies Shakespeare for a wider audience. He understands the academic arguments and translates their findings to those of us whom scholarly articles and learned books may rarely reach: the common reader.

First the downside. The way the author writes. In incomplete sentences. Frequently. Like the journalist he is.

Putting that irritating habit aside, the author gives an inside look at the disagreements among Shakespearean scholars, and those agreements are many and varied. He includes enough introduction and background information that average readers, like me, can understand the issue and hand. The author, who is both a journalist and a literature scholar, writes an interesting series of stories. Through interviews with some of the world's top Shakespearean researchers, he sifts through all the dross and provides a definite opinion on most topics. He writes about topics that much of the public will be familiar with, and he writes about many that I've never heard of.

Best of all, this book has spurred me to read a few of Shakespeare's plays, watch films of some of the plays, and read his sonnets.

With so many excellent books about Shakespeare, where do you start...with Harold Bloom or Ron Rosenbaum? What book would you give to the teenager who is afraid of the Bard. I would select this book, not because it contains the best analysis of the plays, but because it imparts an infectious enthusiasm that is irrepressible. Over and over again, the author talks about how HE reacts to a performance or a line or a film of the Bard...and that is good. He starts with his overwhelming experience of seeing (Peter Brook's) Midsummer Night's Dream in Britain, an experience perhaps similar to the ecstasy of St. Theresa in brushing close to God. (I never saw that performance but I was impressed with Max Reinhardt's black and white film of the DREAM produced in 1935)

Let's take an example of how he approaches Shakespeare. He rails against the recent attempts to soften Shylock and the anti-semitism of the Merchant of Venice. In response, I believe that Shylock is a deeply complex character and that the recent attempts such as Al Pacino's film performance are valid. The point is not the argument but that the author forces us to think about the issue. Again, that is good. Thus, I wholeheartedly recommend the volume to get excited about the meanings of the plays.

Since I love films so much, there are interesting discussions on the films of Shakespeare's plays and he offers an opinion of the ones he loves best - Olivier as "Othello" or Scofield as "King Lear." My favorite part of the book talks about the "sword" that was passed down from actor to actor - originating in a gift from Lord Byron.
Apparently, the actor who impressed Lord Byron believed this sword should be passed down to the person who the individual thought performed Shakespeare best. So for example, Sir John Gielgud passed it down to Sir Laurence Oliver)

Ron Rosenbaum deliberately avoids discussing the biography of Shakespeare and indeed argues that much of the biographical work is counterproductive. To him what matters are Shakespeare's words, not Shakespeare's bed partners. The argument against the biographies is a point well taken. To quote the author, we don't know much about Homer yet we can still read and appreciate his Illiad and Odyssey just the same. Indeed.

This book is a must have for anyone who is interested in Shakespeare or in literature, or for anyone who enjoys seeing a person talk about an overriding passion. The author's enthusiasm for reading Shakespeare's works is apparent in every line of this marvelous book, and holds a seductive power of its own. Think you'd be bored to tears by scholars' debates over whether King Lear did or didn't say two lines at the end of the play in Shakespeare's original draft? Think again - Ron Rosenbaum makes this and so many other topics into a book I literally could not tear myself away from. His fascinating exploration of Shakespearean textual scholarship and the joys that come from a close reading of the text opened up a whole new world for me. As soon as I finished this book, I picked up Shakespeare's Sonnets, and was amazed at how much I hadn't noticed before.

If Ron Rosenbaum ever reads this review, let me say thank you from the bottom of my heart for this wonderful book and for rekindling my interest in a long-standing but recently dormant love of my own. This book was a transformative experience for me.

This began as one of the most spell-binding books I have read in recent years. The varied battles over how to read, understand, interpret, and bring to life the works of Shakespeare touch on most of the important modern writers, directors, and theorists, and their views of Shakespeare.

Rosenbaum has liveliness, bringing each fight or war up in a way that peels the layers back, in a fashion reminiscent of a good detective or journalist. He discusses how to perform Shakespeare, how to read the works, different great film and stage presentations, in a way that excites the reader... made me want to buy about 50 films, books, and editions.

This book makes you understand that some real and intriguing thought on Shakespeare is happening these past few decades. At a bare minimum, you will definitely go to your shelves and check which edition of Shakespeare's works you were given as a gift some long forgotten Christmas past.

The book drags when the fight at issue is tangential. Some of these "fights" are nit picky, and unenlightening. Rosenbaum goes on about 50 pages too long, stacks the deck when he has an opinion, and there is a let down when the reader realizes that none of the wars are generative -- none work together to create a coherent new school of thought.

Near the end one realizes that even if you read Shakespeare in the original spelling, perform Shakespeare with a tiny pause at the end of each line, stage the play in a bare setting, allow for cinematic rapid scene changes... all of these ideas and more do not add up to transcendent Shakespeare.

I would venture to say that the play is the thing. That the drive and verve of each interpreter works its wonders with Shakespeare to create anew his greatness, and that this explains why theories that are at seeming variance each have worked well.

This book, so mesmerizing for two hundred pages, was quite easy to put down thereafter. In the end, the arguments become precious, and the author begins to assert importance rather than describe why a particular director or production should have meaning for the reader. Yet for two hundred pages it opened up new worlds within Shakespeare that bring him back to life.

Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars is a delightful, engaging, very readable and sensible way to access the last 20 years or so of Shakespeare scholarship and theater. For those who care about Shakespeare, but haven't time to digest all the arcane literature of the academics, it's a spicy Cliff Notes to dozens of scholars and their thousands of pages. For those who haven't the time or money to follow Shakespearean theatre, it's a compendium of the trends in productions, the views of directors, the art of the actors. For those who've shunned or shortchanged the popular biographies or synoptic interpretations, it places the host of these in the larger context of the scholarship and the even larger context of the cultural clash of the western canon vs. political correctness.

I am in my mid-50s, was educated in the liberal arts tradition in the early 70s and have a daughter now in college, who like me, likes Shakespeare. I have frequently conversed (or tried to converse) with her about Shakespeare, indeed about what is passing for a higher education in the arts these days. I say try as I gather my education is now considered obsolete and we fumble toward dialogue through the fog that separates post-modernism from what came before.

Hence I enjoyed most his chapter on Bloom, whose championship of Fallstaff is something of a proxy for the western liberal tradition (and me), in which at least one post-modern and feminist scholar tips her hat to him--or at least takes some well aimed shots at the sterility of her own camp. To quote, " Our institutionalist debunking of the bourgeois subject has calcified us into an elite corps of yuppie guerilla academics." Amen, say I. If Bloom is over the top in contending Shakespeare invented the human, too many post modernists are completely off the radar screen of the literate public. "The world doesn't give a fig for our critiques of humanist ideology."

Those lines made the book more than worth my while.

At fifty-five, of course, I'm getting a little Fallstaffian myself, I like to think in its positive and redemptive ways.

In any case read Rosenbaum as perhaps he may triangulate for you, as he did for me, some new course for the uses of Shakespeare, post post-modernist and possibly even a little bourgeois and humanist. After all, if everything old and white and male is suspect and irrelevant, what's the point of keeping Shakespeare on the program at all?

Absolutely great, stimulating material. Rosenbaum has both thought deeply about Shakespeare and had the contact with leading critics and directors to make this a compelling intellectual journey that anyone with a deep interest in Shakespeare should read. In fact, I know of no similar book, one that so carefully and successfully treads the narrow line between scholarship and journalism.

All that said, the incomplete sentences irritated me increasingly as I got deeper into the book. They make the reader stumble, and they're unnecessary. Interestingly, they don't seem to be a hallmark of this writer's other work, at least judging from his compendium of essays published as The Secret Parts of Fortune. Why here, then? I have no idea, but they detracted seriously from what would otherwise be one of the best books I've read in quite a while.

This book is about what scholarly experts in Shakespeare are debating these days. Why are there variations among the early editions of Shakespeare plays - did the author revise his work, or were some editions prepared from the shaky memory of actors? Which should publishers and directors use? Or the discussion that especially grabbed me: do stimulating new ideas and images pop out if you read Shakespeare in the original unanchored spelling? Disappointingly, none of the issues selected for full-chapter discussions by Ron Rosenbaum was the increasingly pressing question of who actually wrote the plays and sonnets.

Unfortunately, The Shakespeare Wars is also too much about the author, whose personality obtrudes and distracts. Ron Rosenbaum is not an academic himself, but he clearly likes to fly with the eagles - that is, the big names in Shakespeare scholarship. (They're are the real subjects of this book, more than the issues.) He tells how he interviews them, corresponds with them, goes to their conferences in Bermuda, and takes sides with them. He also rightly skewers them for their jargon and their impenetrable prose and for letting post-modern ideology keep them from appreciating the plays on an aesthetic level. And at every turn, he unkindly mocks America's best-known Shakespeare writer, Harold Bloom, a former professor of his at Yale.

Despite its real merits, this is the last book by Ron Rosenbaum that I'll buy. Only an outsized ego could have persuaded editors at Random House to let Rosenbaum litter his book with sentence fragments. It's one thing to try to make one's book more readable by adopting a breezy style, as Rosenbaum does (he could have spared us that, too); it's another to abuse and irritate readers by amputating dependent clauses from sentences and leaving them to twitch by themselves. Time and again I read one of Rosenbaum's "sentences", thought I had missed something, went back to read it again, then realized that a subject or predicate simply wasn't there.