Dear Steve,
I’m really pleased you were able to take the time to read and think about my book. You’re the kind of reader and writer I’d most want to reach. Your summary is on target, and the main thing I worry about regarding your appended questions is whether I’ll have space to do justice to them.
I don’t think you’re wrong to say that many of the unresolved questions in Shakespeare studies—particularly the biographical—are dwarfed, if not made irrelevant, by the overwhelming magnitude of the work itself. But don’t you feel that there is a kind of dutiful deference to Shakespeare’s “greatness” that, in its rote reverence, does a disservice to the work because it discourages attentiveness to what exactly makes the work great? The magnitude of Shakespearean achievement should encourage us to examine more deeply its sources, its texture, its composition—what makes it “Shakespearean.” I’ve found that examining the variations in the different versions of the plays, for instance—the things textual scholars unfairly disparaged as pedants do—doesn’t “break the spell.” Rather, it allows us to get deeper into it, to experience more fully the thrill and exhilaration of the work—especially the locus of that greatness, the language.
I’ve tried in the book to focus on questions that the most brilliant Shakespeareans—scholars and directors—argue most fiercely about. So, as an example, let’s bring Slate readers who might be unfamiliar with these debates a little deeper into the question you rightly singled out: the problem posed by the two versions of King Lear’s dying words.
Lear is, after all, one of the foundational works of Western culture—one that raises the question of whether there is a moral order to the cosmos; whether suffering is redemptive, as religion would have it; whether madness yields truth; that sort of thing. And one would think that the final words of Lear himself might have some bearing on these questions and Shakespeare’s attitude toward them. But there’s a problem.
From my unscientific sampling of fairly well-educated friends, most were not aware of the fact that there are two different early texts of Lear and that there is a virtual civil war raging among Shakespeare scholars over whether they represent first and second drafts by Shakespeare, his own revisions, “considered second thoughts,” etc.
So, to cut to the chase, here’s King Lear crouching over the apparently dead body of his beloved daughter Cordelia. He’s put a feather in front of her lips to see if there’s any faint hope that the breath of life stirs.
In the 1608 Quarto version, he finds no hope and utters a despairing plea for self-annihilation: “Break heart, I prithee, break.” And with those heartbreaking words, he dies. Pretty bleak.
On the other hand, in the posthumously published 1623 Folio version of Lear, those lines are gone (or, rather, assigned to another character). And Lear now utters what many feel may be the most affecting, powerful “Shakespearean” lines in all of Shakespeare:
Do you see this? Look on her. Look her lips!
Look there, look there.
And then, he dies.
In this version, it seems as if he has a vision of the breath of life stirring on Cordelia’s lips. He has a final, real or imagined, momentary communion with her before he dies. He dies thinking she lives.
To some, this suggests a note of redemption absent from the earlier version. To others, it can suggest an even deeper bleakness: a delusion that betokens the recurrence of his madness at the moment of death, his damaged mind playing a bleak joke on the foolish old man.
The second version of the last words at the very least opens up fascinating, if unanswerable, questions: Did Shakespeare add them to offer a hint of redemption, a suggestion that Lear’s suffering is not without some recompense? Or was it a final twist of the knife? Different final words offer us different Lears, and different Lears offer us different Shakespeares.
That is, if we can be sure it was Shakespeare who added those lines. However Shakespearean they sound, there is no way of knowing whether or not the posthumous edition was touched up by an actor or another writer in his company. And yet those lines have been adopted in just about every single production of Lear you will ever see. No director wants to deny us their beauty and mystery. So, do we redefine “Shakespearean” as “Shakespearean by habitual incorporation” or as the product of a collective theatrical enterprise, presumably imbued with his spirit? And shouldn’t the addition of final words such as these make us reflect further on the question of what we mean when we speak of redemption in Lear?
I don’t have an answer, but I think attentiveness to these textual questions deepens attentiveness to the entire play. And that’s a good thing.
Speaking of not having an answer, I think you’re quite right to see the linkage in the so-called exceptionalist questions about Hitler and Shakespeare. In Explaining Hitler, I explored the debate in regard to Hitler’s evil: Was he on the continuum of other evildoers or off the grid in a realm of “radical evil” all his own? I presented arguments for both sides without feeling confident enough in the answer to choose a side.
And similarly, in The Shakespeare Wars I raise the question of whether Shakespeare’s greatness is on the continuum of other great writers or something beyond.
With regard to Shakespeare, I have what you might call a Weak Exceptionalist position. The Strong Exceptionalist argument (Harold Bloom’s deification for instance) might say that Shakespeare is infinitely “bottomless”—that the reverberations and resonances one can find in Shakespeare are limitless (and implicitly not so in other writers). My Weak Exceptionalist argument is that for me, Shakespeare is “bottomless” so far.
That after having gone through I don’t know how many cycles of reading all the plays, I continue to discover pleasurable and important aspects, linkages, consonances I hadn’t seen before. And it doesn’t seem to me that the work has even begun to hint at diminishing returns. But my limited temporal experience of an ever-deepening body of work doesn’t mean it necessarily will go on forever (as a Strong Exceptionalist would believe).
Christopher Ricks has a usefully concise definition of a great work of art: one that continues to repay attention. I feel that Shakespeare will continue to repay my attention until I die. But, as Stephen Booth, the great scholar of the sonnets to whom I devote a chapter in the book and who deserves greater recognition, puts it, “at some point there must be a limit.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts on Exceptionalist questions in general and Shakespeare in particular. Do you find other writers who continue to repay attention in the same way? Do you see a limit, for instance, on how many times you could read Hamlet without exhausting it?
And since we’ve focused on the ending of Lear, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that controversy. Do you feel the second version is more or less redemptive? How would you define what we talk about when we talk about what is—and isn’t—”Shakespearean”? And, if you have any time or space left, what do you think of the argument I entertain that certain film techniques—such as the close-up—can be (anachronistically) “Shakesperean”?
Best,
Ron
