The Shakespeare Wars

 

Any Good Books, July 2025

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

Ron Rosenbaum (2006, Random House Paperback 2008)

        In 1970, Ron Rosenbaum was a young journalist, somewhat by accident. He had intended to get a graduate degree in English Literature from Yale, but was put off by the prevailing academic preference for abstraction, to the point of meaninglessness. He didn’t know much about Shakespeare, or have a theory about how it should be played, but he chanced to visit Stratford on Avon, and see the Peter Brook staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I count it one of the greatest blessings of [my] life to have been there for that moment. I’d never experienced anything of such radiant clarity. To say it was ‘electrifying’ does not capture the effect; it was more like being struck by lightning.”

     William Shakespeare stands head and shoulders above the rest of English literature in the sheer amount that has been written about him and his work, especially in comparison to how little is actually known. (The Bible surpasses him, no doubt, but I can’t think of anything else.) We don’t know, and probably can’t, which edition comes closest to what he actually wrote. We have the canonical first Folio, published in 1623, when Shakespeare had been dead for seven years. There are also two Quarto versions, of which the second, from 1604, is considered the ‘good’ one. In the case of Hamlet, “while the Good Quarto has some 3,700 lines, the Bad Quarto has just 2,200 lines, many of them sounding like bad imitations of Shakespeare.”

     By what evidence, on what grounds, would you decide which Hamlet was the ‘real Hamlet’, the most genuinely Shakespearean? Is the flesh in Hamlet’s soliloquy “too, too ‘sullied’, or ‘solid’?” Or perhaps ‘sallied’? That’s a relatively well-known example, but they go on and on, and choices must be made. The number of man-years devoted to comparative editions is staggering, whether they are printed on facing pages, or enfolded, so that you can choose your own edition as you tiptoe through the variants. In case this isn’t complicated enough, the late-20th century Everyman edition undoes the prevailing modernization of spelling, uncovering more gems in the process.

     All this, before you ever get to what is seen on the stage, or, for that matter, the screen. “Drop everything, race to your video store and pick up a VHS or a DVD of Olivier’s Richard III.” (I shouldn’t joke about that – it’s not his fault I’m reading the book fifteen years late.) What you lose in reducing a play to the small screen, you gain in the closeups, and in the chance to see some of the greats doing great work.

     He’s persuaded by the movement to go back to treating the five-foot iambic line as the essential unit, and pausing between them, always; of course this only works if the pause is treated as the jumping off point for the next line, as though the actor is figuring out what to say next. One thing’s certain: if the actors don’t really understand what they’re saying, the audience won’t either.

     Rosenbaum treats all this as much more than a reporting job; I like a book in which the author is so soaked in his material. I could wish he’d had a more aggressive copy editor, and occasionally I got to his point before he did; no matter, they were generally interesting points in the end. I’m sure I’ll remember this book the next time Olivier’s Richard III gets to Turner Classic Movies.