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The Shakespeare Wars

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from: Stephen Metcalf
to: Ron Rosenbaum

Is an Honest Response to Shakespeare Possible Anymore?

Updated Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006, at 10:41 AM ET

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Ron,

I agree completely: The price of Shakespeare's greatness is that he is too easily obscured by it. And from so many angles, too—from the chuffing of your eighth-grade teacher (ick) to the Bard's sheer cultural ubiquity. How can you hear "To be or not to be," any more than you can see the Mona Lisa? We sometimes forget that behind our habits of stentorian eulogy—Lear is a "foundational text of Western culture," you wrote yesterday!—there are actual plays, built out of the particulars of language. I like the way you move away from literary criticism (though you do often engage it deftly) toward performance, where decisions over language have consequences and so must be made with confidence and fortitude.

For example, I find a strong contrast in your book between Harold Bloom and Sir Peter Hall. Having evolved from a bad-boy academic radical into an ardent middlebrow exponent of the Great Books, Bloom is America's default English professor, I guess. He taught everyone from Stephen Greenblatt to John Guillory, to you and me. (By the time I got to him, he was simply a big ham sandwich, all "Falstaff this, and Falstaff that.") When you raise the specter of old Bloom, you immediately capture him: "What do I think of Bloom?" you write. "How much time do you have?" Ha, yes! His is an expanding gas, and it is contagious! I agree so completely with your assessment of the man, I'll quote it at some length:

Part of me admires Bloom for what—for a long time—was his fairly lonely struggle to assert the existence, the value of "literary value," even literary greatness during a period in which academic orthodoxy disdained the concept as a baseless illusion, a Trojan horse of the hegemony designed to sneak its authoritarian values into the unsuspecting minds of readers like you and me.

On the other hand Bloom's bombastic rhetoric about Shakespeare just rings false to my experience of Shakespeare. Bloom's Shakespeare is less about the language than about Big Ideas, Big Themes, Big Characters, Big Bigness. His characteristic rhetoric of overstatement, overinflation, the way he seems to want to beat us over the head with his bardolatry, to make us love Shakespeare not because of what Shakespeare writes but because of what Bloom bellows about him.

Now let's turn to Hall. He's the director who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959, now an international institution that has long since "embodied Shakespeare." What is so wonderful about your description is how this immensely important cultural institution is founded, in part, on an absence, on a breath, on a pause. Hall was a disciple of a man named William Poel. Poel was an originalist who, at the end of the 19^th century, sought to return Shakespeare performance to its original staging and elocution. Hall took one principle of Poel's originalism particularly to heart: leaving a pause, however slight, at the end of each five-foot, 10-syllable line of iambic pentameter, even when the line—sacré bleu!—is enjambed. (An enjambed poetic line is one whose clause continues on to the subsequent line.) Hall is, as you put it, an "iambic fundamentalist." He thinks that for Shakespeare to emerge from the printed page, the rhythms of the iamb—da DUM da DUM—must be made audible; and that the line must be given its structure with a definite ending, in your words, a PAUSE. Again, your description is so apt, I should quote it:

At the time Hall was called upon to form the company … Shakespearean acting was wavering between the poles of [Laurence] Olivier's staccato expressionism and [John] Gielgud's refined and melodic intellectualism.

But Poel's vision offered something to Hall deeper than these mood swings. The focus on Poel principles, on the "integrity of the line structure," had its own intrinsic esthetic reward to Hall. … "I remember, about 1961 or '62," he told me, "in the old rehearsal room at Stratford, suddenly knowing that I knew, and that I would always know, what the line structure was when I heard a Shakespearean speech … "

Isn't this difference, between Bloom and Hall, a difference between the cultural genetics of England and America? Here in America we understand only Protestant zeal, conversions. In England they understand the importance of something so small as the pause—excuse me, PAUSE. Well, I think so, but would like to hear you talk about that at length.

I'd like to close with a surmise and an observation. The surmise is simply this: that each generation the culture industry gums over Shakespeare with a new set of habits of reading and performing that make him nearly invisible. It hardly matters that Hall inserted a pause, or took one away; what matters is that he changed Shakespeare just enough that a new generation could see and hear the plays again as Shakespeare and not as the self-serving calcifications of an increasingly old guard of critics and directors. What's important lies not in the substance of the change but in the mere fact of it, whatever it might be—whether making it true to Elizabethan England, or Elizabeth, N.J. Making it new nearly always makes it old: When it works, it's always an act of recovery.

The observation is this: I loved your book, and I hope you won't be offended, but the language of importance that people bring to Shakespeare, isn't it always really a language of self-importance? I guess, in the end, I believe that every last ounce of cultural pomp ever brought to bear on those plays is entirely extrinsic to them. To what extent, then, does your host of important personages form a cast of Shakespearean characters themselves? Don't they, in other words, form a human comedy, worthy of the great Will himself?

Steve

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Stephen Metcalf
to: Ron Rosenbaum

Is an Honest Response to Shakespeare Possible Anymore?

Updated Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006, at 10:41 AM ET

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Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s. Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Portrait of Shakespeare on Slate's home page by Martin Droeshout. © Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS. Detail of a portrait of William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout on Slate's home page © Nathan Benn/CORBIS.

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