The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups by Ron Rosenbaum Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
Book Review: When the war is real, the book sings. If not, it lags.
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Book Review: If you love Shakespeare....
Summary: 5 Stars
... then buy this book.
That's all I can really say.
Book Review: Carelessness
Summary: 2 Stars
At first, I was annoyed by the lack of citations Rosenbaum gives to Shakespeare's text but now my annoyance goes beyond that. For an example of the kind of carelessness that put me off the book turn to page 269. Here, Rosenbaum, in a discussion of lineation, quotes lines from Richard II, and states that they are from "the unmodernized FOLIO version" of the play but does not say which act and scene they are from. One has to hunt around for them. When I found them on page 353 of Hinman's Facsimile, (Page 31, second column, of the Histories), I saw that Rosenbaum does not quote the text of the Folio accurately. Rosenbaum has a comma after "too" but the 1623 Folio has a colon. He should have:
I should to Plashy too: but time will not permit,
All is uneven, and everything is left at six and seven.
He then gives the same lines as given in the Riverside edition.
I should to Plashy too,
But time will not permit. All is uneven,
And everything is left at six and seven.
He seems to have given these accurately, but again there was no citation of the act and scene where the lines come from.
On the next page, Rosenbaum writes "Not only is it an instance of the jeweled clockwork of Shakespearean verse, not only is it another instance, he [John Andrews] suggests, in which one imagines that Shakespeare may have overseen the printing in order to ensure that the expressive irregularity of the meter was persevered in the lineation...." Since Shakespeare was buried in April 1616 and the Folio was not published until 1623, the Bard must have overseen the printing in Jaggard's printing house from beyond the grave.
Perhaps Rosenbaum meant to write "Quarto" where he wrote "Folio." But even if he meant "Quarto" he still does not quote the First Quarto of Richard II (published in 1597) correctly.
Book Review: "The shock of pleasure"
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Book Review: Fascinating, inspiring... but oh, SO irritating
Summary: 4 Stars
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.