HOME / the spectator: Scrutinizing culture.

Are Those Shakespeare's "Balls"?Should "A Lover's Complaint" be kicked out of the canon?

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Thursday, June 12, 2008, at 3:15 PM ET

(Continued from page 2)

RSS

Here, I'd disagree with both Duncan-Jones and Bate and say if it's Shakespeare, it's very early Shakespeare or perhaps even Shakespeare learning how to write (or how not to write) poetry by imitating one of his inept poetic forebears. I say this because the "difficulty" of late Shakespeare is its intensely compressed intellectualism. Whereas the "difficulty" of "A Lover's Complaint" is a kind of youthful overstraining at fancy writing. Something he might have written but was embarrassed by.

Should we risk the posthumous "wrath" of Shakespeare, famous for having put a curse in his epitaph for anyone daring to move his bones? Or has he been suffering from four centuries of wrath at having the awful "Complaint" attributed to him? Would he have wanted it burned, like Vladimir Nabokov, if he'd had a chance? Is Jonathan Bate risking the curse or the blessing of the bard?

I don't think there's a way of answering this with certainty. Almost every method of analysis has its drawbacks. Vickers and Duncan-Jones rely on literary history and yet come to different conclusions. (I'm sure Vickers has an answer for each of Duncan-Jones' objections.) Nonetheless, I tend to believe that—at a certain point, having read and reread Shakespeare attentively for a good portion of my life—one can go by the aesthetic equivalent of a gut check. Those cartoonish "balls" did it for me. Unless, of course, the whole thing is parody, but it just feels too leaden for that. (Slate readers who want to conduct their own gut checks can go to the RSC Web site, where the poem is at least preserved in pixels, and decide for themselves.)

It's sad though, isn't it, that so few American critics and academics have cared enough to weigh in? This reluctance may be another depressing consequence of the now-antiquated cult of Postmodern theory, in which actually reading Shakespeare was less important than making him an example of some largely discredited sophistry.

Now to the poem Bate has added to the Shakespearean canon in his RSC edition: "To the Queen." Here, with all due respect, I think his apparent certainty is puzzling.

The poem was found among some old papers, and apparently the work of professor James Shapiro—my fellow RSC advisory board member (with whom I've clashed in the past)—convinced Bate that the unsigned poem was "Shakespearean." Unfortunately, Shapiro has a dubious habit of attributing changes in Shakespeare's texts to Shakespeare himself, when there's no proof the alterations could not have been made by someone in his company. The same could be said of the following mediocre poem, which Bate and Shapiro believe was written by Shakespeare because it can be traced to a date when Shakespeare's company performed before the queen. But while Bate finds it deeply Shakespearean, I don't feel there's any solid reason for denying that it could have been written by some journeyman playwright or actor in Shakespeare's company who may have been influenced by his imagery:

TO THE QUEEN
As the dial hand tells o'er
The same hours it had before,
Still beginning in the ending,
Circular account still lending,
So, most mighty Queen we pray,
Like the dial day by day
You may lead the season on,
Making new when old are gone
That the babe which is now young
And hath no use of tongue
Many a Shrovetide here may bow
To the empress I do now,
That these children of these lords
Sitting at your council boards,
May be grave and aged seen
Of her that was their fathers' queen.
Once I wish this wish again,
Heaven subscribe it with Amen.

I don't know; the poem doesn't have the jagged badness of bad Shakespeare, nor does it have the hint of transcendence of good Shakespeare. The clock ticks, the seasons turn, time goes by. Shakespeare was not the only poet of his time to consider time as a theme.

Shapiro probably won't have to apologize for misleading Bate and the rest of us the way the "Elegy" promoter had to recant his original overreaching, because there seems to be no dispositive evidence one way or another. But that very fact argues against its unequivocal inclusion.

I just don't feel there is enough internal or external evidence of Shakespearean authorship to warrant taking the radical step of adding an unsigned poem to the Shakespearean canon, especially while removing a poem that was bound in to the quarto titled "Shakespeare's Sonnets" 400 years ago.

I think "To the Queen" will share the fate of another now-widely regarded misattribution (by Gary Taylor) of a very bad doggerel verse that begins "Shall I die?/ Shall I fly?" once included in the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, now a poetic pariah.

I feel more conflicted about Bate's "Complaint" decision. On the one hand, should others follow his lead, the poem risks being cast into the "iniquity of oblivion" (Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, from "Hydrotaphia"). On the other hand, it was pretty close to oblivion, anyway. When was the last time you had a spirited discussion about "The Lover's Complaint"?

And yet now, I hope Bate's decision to evict the poem from his RSC edition may enshrine it more deeply in other editions, or at least make it a subject for debate and give it the kind of notoriety, if not immortality, it wouldn't otherwise have. Perhaps Bate's decision will get people to read what may be the single least-read work attributed to Shakespeare, and consider again what we mean when we say something is—or isn't—"Shakespearean."

Page: 1 | 2 | 3SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

COMMENTS

Comments from the Fray

The answer is we will never know, in the same way that we will never know for certain which bits of Hamlet are by Shakespeare and which bits are actors' interpolations, or which bits of the Henry VI trilogy are by Shakespeare and which by another author.

In any case, we are too picky when we need to be so particular about the very words of an author. Most modern prose works are heavily edited by the editorial staff at publishing houses, are they the 'real words' of the author? (Even poetry is increasingly being rewritten for poets by poetry editors)…

A Lover's Complaint'appeared as a pendent to the Sonnets of Shakespeare in the 1609 publication. It is not an obviously incompetent poem, and seems in places to be a deliberate parody of bad love poetry, and more importantly it provides a foil to the Poet/Young Man/Dark Lady triangle of the Sonnets, with a much more common faithful woman/faithless man duo, almost as though the Sonnets are being normalised with a conventional pendent…

--calyptorhynchus

(To reply, click here)

Duncan-Jones's objection cited in this piece--which Rosenbaum waves away--is actually a powerful one: if you can't trust the authorship of L[overs's] C[omplaint] then you can't trust that of the sonnets either. Too much of Vickers' case rests on the notion that Thorpe is a notoriously underhanded publisher, but his career is actually fairly normal. The recent disintegration of LC seems like blowback from the battles over Shall I Die? and The Funeral Elegy. The arguments against their Shakespearean origins began by claiming that they don't sound like Shakespeare; once all the linguistic evidence came in, this proved prescient. But now we seem to be reliving the Shakespearean attribution wars of the later 19th/early 20th century, where everything that doesn't "sound like" Shakespeare is claimed to be the hand of another author. LC may not be his best work (although it's a much better poem than the likes of Rosenbaum suggest, particularly as a coda to the sonnets), but there's no evidence at all that someone other than Shakespeare wrote it.

--thefxc

(To reply, click here)

[Reply to post above]

"Duncan-Jones's objection cited in this piece--which Rosenbaum waves away--is actually a powerful one…"

This isn't that powerful an objection. Many corpuses of documents originate from a single "publisher" but are routinely (and basically uncontroversially) divvied up by scholars as authentic or inauthentic on language grounds. The works of Plato and the epistles of St. Paul come quickly to mind; the Book of Isaiah is normally seen as the work of two different authors though there is no warrant for this from its "publisher"; for a Renaissance author, Samuel Kirkman published two plays he claimed to be by John Webster, though mainstream scholarship only swallows one of these attributions. The issue with Lover's Complaint has always been that while scholars have generally found the sonnets consistent in style with other Shakespearean works, Lover's Complaint is not so clear a witness for itself. There are competent people who come down on both ends of the question.

--eupolis

(To reply, or to read the continuing argument click here)

(6/15)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES